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Comment author: Risto_Saarelma 21 August 2012 11:15:29AM 10 points [-]

Discussion forum growth is not quite the same as general website growth. Having forums grow a lot while maintaining the culture that drew the initial contributors there is still something of an unsolved problem, and fast enough growth can kill forum cultures dead through the eternal September effect. It basically happens at the level of comment-response pairs. Things are good as long as most interactions have at least one side familiar with existing site culture, but once you start getting outside users talking with other outside users in volume, there's not much left maintaining the older culture. And if the outside users come from The Internet In General, the new forum culture is going to end up looking like The Internet In General.

Active and clueful moderation can help, but that requires moderators who can spend a lot of time daily doing active and clueful moderation.

Some forums make things work a bit better by managing to make their content interesting enough that people are willing to pay $5 or $10 for making a new account, and then asking that. Drive-by trolling and spam becomes harder, but regular users with various issues can still make lots of work for active and clueful moderators.

There are plenty of general website growth experts, but who are the long-term forum growth experts? Matt Haughey of MetaFilter maybe? Paul Graham has been running Hacker News for a while, but I don't think he's exactly doing it full-time.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 21 August 2012 10:04:56PM 17 points [-]

Things are good as long as most interactions have at least one side familiar with existing site culture, but once you start getting outside users talking with other outside users in volume, there's not much left maintaining the older culture.

Worse yet, the new users may comply with the culture in form but not in spirit. In the concrete case of LW, this means new users who are polite and non-confrontational, familiar with the common topics and the material covered in the classic OB/LW articles, making appeals to all the right principles of epistemology and logic, etc., etc., but who nevertheless lack the ability and commitment for truly unbiased and open-minded discussion at the level that used to be the standard. I think this is indeed what has been happening, and I don't see any way an open-access forum could prevent this course of events from taking place eventually.

(It's hard to make a point like this without sounding arrogant and conceited, so I should add that in retrospect, I believe that when I joined LW, at the time it probably caused a net lowering of its standards, which were higher back then.)

Comment author: [deleted] 21 August 2012 09:05:05AM *  13 points [-]

I think this is what being on one side of a tribal conflict looks like from the inside. My experiences have been similar, with many of my posts getting instantly down voted to -3 to -4, then slowly recovering karma later. As you probably recall from our recent conversations with me we have differing opinions on some politically charged subjects.

It doesn't bother me all that much. If my comments were actually getting buried, I'd be worried that we had a bury brigade going on — but they're not. My current hypotheses are either ⓪ I'm just not very good at commenting, ① I have a stalker, ② the idea that social conservatism is "contrarian" really gets some folks excited, or ③ social conservatives think it's worthwhile to downvote comments that disagree with them. If it's the latter, well,

I don't think you a bad poster and you seem to have a high karma score so we can mostly throw out ⓪. I recall often up voting posts by you, even the ones I disagree with and only recall downvoting a recent one where you seemed to be plain wrong in the context of the discussed article. In that case I also made a comment explaining why I thought it wrong. The contrarian explanation as I will elaborate later may have some truth to it. Explanation ③ seem far fetched considering social conservatives are such a tiny minority of the readership and can be discounted as an explanation for what you say you experience. Of these explanations I think ① is the most likely. I think any of us talking about politics regardless of our positions probably eventually catch the attention of someone who feels like throwing a hissy fit. Right leaning posters have complained of people going through their comment history and down voting every post they've ever made. I've experienced such karmassasiantions in the past too.

Now having said this there have been signs of escalating tensions. Posters have been saying they feel more and more unwelcome and I can totally see why since there are more and more posts that signal "liberal" tribal affiliations. Some like the article criticized by the links I gave are pretty blatant about this. Even some old time well respected posters like Yvain have recently been called out on not being bothered to avoid dog-whistling affiliations.

Now obviously you have some right wing digs like that in recent articles and they may be escalating too, but they are of a more alt-right not conservative nature. And yes any kind of alternative right sentiment, be it Moldbugian Neoreaction or consistent Paleoconservatism is basically being an intellectual hipster. This brings us back to ③ and I think also explains why left leaning users like Multiheaded fear they are losing the battle of ideas.

But it's like I said before - it might be the wisest and most truth-seeking 3% (Vladimir_M alone has more life experience and practical wisdom than many other folks here combined, I'd say), the rest of us might be lagging behind in the race of ideas! I wouldn't have gotten so worked up if I didn't fear that might be the case.

If due to such superior intellectual fire power LessWrong ever got even 10% of conservative readership (still a tiny minority), the metacontrarians would probably cycle back to an exotic form of liberalism. And if that exotic form reached 10%, I'm betting some kind of libertarianism would be back in vogue... I need to again emphasise for the reader who didn't follow the link that where something lands on the metacontrarian ladder does not tell us its truth value.

Now this kind of cycling is I think mostly self-corrective, since it is an intellectual fashion. The real problem in my mind is how political identification can create and escalate conflict between these somewhat shifting fads.

I suppose all I can do is mention that I don't downvote interesting comments that I reply to, and ask them to extend the same courtesy.

This. Posters should be encouraged to avoid down voting just political comments they disagree with. Also I think putting more emphasis on keeping your identify small or even apolitical might do us good.

Failing all this I think we really should consider if the overly-strictly interpreted no mindkillers rule that was prevalent as little as a few months ago that much reduced political discourse was a good thing that should be restored.

EDIT: OH GHODS, PEOPLE, STOP UPVOTING THIS. YOU'RE CREEPING ME THE FUCK OUT.

Don't be freaked out. People politely complaining about being down voted seem to always get up voted on LessWrong. :)

In response to comment by [deleted] on [Link] Social interventions gone wrong
Comment author: Vladimir_M 21 August 2012 09:15:56PM *  22 points [-]

Failing all this I think we really should consider if the overly-strictly interpreted no mindkillers rule that was prevalent as little as a few months ago that much reduced political discourse wasn't a good thing that should be restored.

I used to be excited about the idea of harnessing the high intellectual ability and strong norms of politeness on LW to reach accurate insight about various issues that are otherwise hard to discuss rationally. However, more recently I've become deeply pessimistic about the possibility of having a discussion forum that wouldn't be either severely biased and mind-killed or strictly confined to technical topics in math and hard sciences.

It looks like even if a forum approaches this happy state of affairs, the way old Overcoming Bias and early LessWrong arguably did for some time, this can happen only as a brief and transient phenomenon. (In fact, it isn't hard to identify the forces that inevitably make this situation unstable.) So, while OB ceased to be much of a discussion forum long ago, LW is currently in the final stages of turning into a forum that still has unusual smarts and politeness, but where on any mention of controversial issues, battle lines are immediately drawn and genuine discussion ceases, just like elsewhere. (Even if the outcome may still look very calm and polite by the usual internet standards.)

The trouble is, the only way a "no-mindkillers" rule can improve things is if it's done in an extreme form and with ruthless severity, by reducing the permissible range of topics to strictly technical questions in some areas of math and hard science and consistently banning everything else. The worst possible outcome is to institute a partial "no-mindkillers" rule, which would work under a pretense that rational and unbiased discussion of a broad range of topics outside of math and hard sciences is possible without bringing up any controversial and charged issues, and without giving serious consideration to disreputable and low-status views. This would lead to an entrenched standard of cargo-cult "rationality" that incorporates all the biases, delusions, and taboos of the respectable opinion wholesale, under a pretense of a neutral, pragmatic, and unbiased restriction of irrelevant and distracting controversial topics.

Thus, it seems to me like the only realistic possibilities at this point are: (1) increasing ideological confrontations and mind-killing, (2) enforcement of the above-described cargo-cult rationality standards, and (3) reduction of discussion topics to strictly technical questions, backed by far stricter, MathOverflow-type standards. Neither of these looks like a fulfilment of LW's mission statement, but (2) seems to me like the worst failure scenario from its point of view.

Comment author: fubarobfusco 20 August 2012 11:10:50PM *  9 points [-]

I've been noticing a lot of my comments get rapidly downvoted once shortly after I post them lately, especially (but not exclusively) in threads where I post libertarian-progressive-ish rebuttals to social-conservative positions.

I'd like to think that it's just someone who doesn't approve of political discussion on LW — but the socially conservative interlocutors don't seem to be getting the same treatment. (With the exception of the ever-popular sam0345, whose low comment scores I expect have more to do with his hostile attitude than the fact that he posts about politics.)

So there does seem to be some Blue/Green unpleasantness going on here. Comments advocating "race realism", sexual shame, or other socially conservative positions tend to float around +3 or +4, while responses disagreeing with them — even with citations to academic work and evidence on the subject — tend to float around -1 to +1.

It doesn't bother me all that much. If my comments were actually getting buried, I'd be worried that we had a bury brigade going on — but they're not. My current hypotheses are either ⓪ I'm just not very good at commenting, ① I have a stalker, ② the idea that social conservatism is "contrarian" really gets some folks excited, or ③ social conservatives think it's worthwhile to downvote comments that disagree with them. If it's the latter, well, I suppose all I can do is mention that I don't downvote interesting comments that I reply to, and ask them to extend the same courtesy.

(I don't mind if this comment gets downvoted, by the way. I feel uncomfortable with discussions of the voting system, as they can become a meta rathole.)

EDIT: OH GHODS, PEOPLE, STOP UPVOTING THIS. YOU'RE CREEPING ME THE FUCK OUT.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 21 August 2012 04:06:31AM 6 points [-]

If I remember correctly, you replied to several of my comments on fairly controversial topics recently, but for the record, I didn't downvote any of them. I downvote direct replies to my comments only if I believe that someone is arguing in bad faith, or when I'm annoyed with some exceptionally bad failure of basic logic or good manners.

Comment author: fubarobfusco 20 August 2012 05:23:18PM 2 points [-]

we still have no way of knowing its total long-run effect

Well, it's not like we have no evidence either way. We have weak evidence for a positive effect.

For one, it may happen that it lowers the cost of having children for poor unmarried women [...] so that in the new long-term equilibrium, more children are born to such women

It may also happen that people in dangerous and impoverished situations pursue early and fecund reproductive strategies: if you can't count on each child surviving and prospering, then you have more kids (and start earlier) to increase the chance of some child surviving and prospering. In this case, lowering the risks to children and mothers would result in fewer children.

I find it exceedingly unlikely that increasing "stigma and fear" will reduce such behavior. For instance, out-of-wedlock births, teen pregnancy, divorce, etc. are all higher in more socially conservative societies — including when we compare the U.S. vs. Western Europe, or "red states" vs. "blue states" within the U.S. ...

Comment author: Vladimir_M 21 August 2012 03:45:36AM *  6 points [-]

It seems like you're losing focus of my point. I am merely trying to demonstrate that it's wrong to consider studies of this sort as solid and conclusive evidence about the overall effects of the social interventions under consideration. I mentioned this scenario only as one plausible way in which one of these studies could be grossly inadequate, not as something I'm trying to prove to be the case.

Comment author: Multiheaded 20 August 2012 11:23:55PM *  0 points [-]

But somehow I can guess that you do trust the negative results shown... right?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 21 August 2012 03:20:43AM 4 points [-]

I'm not sure what exactly you're trying to imply with this comment. You have complained that I was reading your comments too uncharitably in the past, so I'm trying to interpret it as something other than a taunt, but without success.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 20 August 2012 03:46:59PM 10 points [-]

As it usually happens in the social "sciences," it's very naive to believe that in any of these cases we have anything like solid evidence about the total effect of the programs in question. Even ignoring the intractable problems with disentangling all the countless non-obvious confounding variables, there is still the problem of unintended consequences -- which may be unaccounted for even if the study seemingly asks all the relevant questions, and which may manifest themselves only in the longer run.

Take for example this nurse-family partnership program. Even if the study has correctly proven that these positive outcomes have occurred in the families covered by the intervention, and that they are in fact a consequence of the intervention -- a big if -- we still have no way of knowing its total long-run effect. For one, it may happen that it lowers the cost of having children for poor unmarried women, both by providing assistance and by lowering the stigma and fear of such an outcome, so that in the new long-term equilibrium, more children are born to such women, especially the least responsible, resourceful, and competent ones, eventually increasing the total measure of child poverty, neglect, abuse, etc. Of course, this may or may not be the case, but there's no way to know it based on these studies that purport to give a definitive evaluation of the program's success.

Comment author: [deleted] 19 August 2012 12:45:09AM 0 points [-]

As an aside: To what degree do you agree with Haidt's analysis of religion and tradition in relation to human psychology in that interview?

I would very much like to know. Feel free to PM me a one-sentence answer instead of posting, if you wish.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 19 August 2012 01:55:50AM *  5 points [-]

Clearly it's a very complex topic, but generally speaking, I do believe that Haidt's recent work is more or less on the right track in this regard.

That said, much of his insight is not very original, and can be found in the work of other, often much older thinkers, some of whom Haidt cites. Haidt's significance is mainly that he's trying to pull off a "Nixon in China," i.e. to leverage his own liberal beliefs and credentials to formulate these insights in a way that's palatable to liberals, who would be instantly repulsed and incensed by the other authors who have presented them previously. (I'm not very optimistic about his chances, though, especially since he has to dance around some third-rail issues that might destroy his reputation instantly. Similar can be said for other modern authors who delve into social theory based on evolutionary insight, like e.g. Geoffrey Miller.)

Also, I think there are many other crucial pieces of the puzzle that Haidt is still missing completely, so he still strikes me as very naive on some issues. (For example, I don't know if he's familiar with the concept of Schelling points, but he definitely fails to recognize them on some issues where they are crucial. He also apparently fails to grasp what virtue ethics is about.)

Comment author: CarlShulman 18 August 2012 04:54:11AM 3 points [-]

Even within the pure feedback-egoist framework (really?) do you think people haven't had that post in mind in later discussions with you?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 19 August 2012 12:29:26AM *  1 point [-]

It's hard to tell, but if they have been influenced by that post, then considering the lack of adequate reception of the post in the first place, this probably didn't improve their understanding of my comments, and has perhaps even worsened it.

Also, I don't claim to be anywhere near the ideal of optimizing for feedback in practice. After all, "When vanity is not prompting us, we have little to say." But I would certainly change my posting patterns if I were convinced that it would improve feedback.

I also don't think that low returns from top-level posts are a general rule -- it's probably mainly due to my lack of writing skills (particularly in English) that results in more readable and cogent writing when I'm confined to the shorter space and pre-established context of a comment.

(Although, on the other hand, one general problem is the lack of any clear and agreed-upon policy for what is on-topic for LW, which makes me, and I suspect also many other people, reluctant to start discussions about some topics, but ready to follow up when others have already opened them and found a positive reception.)

Comment author: Unnamed 18 August 2012 06:56:13AM 2 points [-]

I would taboo the word "autonomy" in this context, or at least give a clear definition, because there are at least 2 different things that it could refer to.

In Haidt's six foundations theory, the closest thing to "autonomy" as it is being used in this discussion is probably the liberty/oppression foundation (the 6th foundation to be added):

Liberty/oppression: This foundation is about the feelings of reactance and resentment people feel toward those who dominate them and restrict their liberty. Its intuitions are often in tension with those of the authority foundation. The hatred of bullies and dominators motivates people to come together, in solidarity, to oppose or take down the oppressor.

The liberty/oppression foundation is somewhat underdeveloped in Haidt's book, and discussed separately from the other foundations in a way that's organized a bit strangely, probably because the book was already in progress when he decided to count liberty/oppression as a sixth foundation. Haidt does not seem to have any published papers yet on the liberty/oppression foundation, but he does have one under review which focuses on libertarians.

In Richard Shweder's three-area theory, which was the original basis for Haidt's theory, "autonomy" has a different meaning. It is one of the three ethics - "autonomy" is the blanket label given to the individualistic/liberal approach to morality which involves harm, rights, and justice. The ethic of autonomy is contrasted with the ethic of community (ingroup and hierarchy) and the ethic of divinity (purity and sacredness). In one of Haidt's earlier papers, which used Shweder's system, experimental participants were given this definition of autonomy:

The ethics of Autonomy Individual freedom/rights violations. In these cases an action is wrong because it directly hurts another person, or infringes upon his/her rights or freedoms as an individual. To decide if an action is wrong, you think about things like harm, rights, justice, freedom, fairness, individualism, and the importance of individual choice and liberty.

If you look at that definition and think "but that's all of morality, mushed together in one big category" then congratulations, you're WEIRD. In Shweder's approach, being obsessed with autonomy is precisely what is distinctive about liberals. The utilitarian, who applies cost-benefit analysis to everything and is willing to make any tradeoff, is just one member of the autonomy-obsessed family of moral perspectives. People who rigidly apply concepts of rights, liberty, or justice are part of that same family. The grand Kant-Bentham debate is just a factional squabble which is happening in one corner of the moral triangle.

Haidt's six-foundation approach can be considered a refinement of this view, which keeps Divinity, splits Community in two (ingroup & hierarchy), and divides Autonomy in three (harm, fairness, and liberty). Although there are some complications (fairness is somewhat Community-tinged, and liberty might be too).

Comment author: Vladimir_M 18 August 2012 11:54:52PM 1 point [-]

Most of the points relevant to your comment are covered in this reply to Tyrrell McAllister, so to avoid redundancy, please follow up on that comment if you think it's not an adequate answer.

Comment author: Tyrrell_McAllister 18 August 2012 05:04:30AM 2 points [-]

Now, as you probably guess, I would hypothesize that he avoids autonomy-centered topics because they tend to contradict his theory of liberals as low on sacredness.

How do you reduce autonomy to sacredness? I think of sacredness as something that inheres in some single object of veneration towards which a group of people can genuflect, such as a family shrine, a flag, a saint, or (for the left) "the environment". I would also extend the notion of a "single object" to slightly more abstract things, such as a single holy text (which might exist in multiple copies) or a single ritual way of eating (which might be enacted on multiple occasions).

In other words, sacredness should have some close connection to group cohesion. While I haven't read any of Haidt's books, I've listened to a couple of interviews with him, and he seemed to be very interested in the "groupish" qualities of the values in his system. In his BloggingHeads.tv interview, he even seemed to go so far as to suggest that group selection explained how some of these values evolved.

Autonomy doesn't seem like it would fit into such a notion of sacredness. "Individual autonomy" is a "single thing" at only a very abstract level. Every individual has his or her own autonomy. Unlike a shrine or a holy text, there is no one autonomy that we all can worship at once.

In principle, we could all gather together as a community to worship the one idea that we are each autonomous — the Platonic form of autonomy, if you will. But I don't get the sense that most people have a sufficiently concrete notion of the general idea of autonomy to be able to hold it sacred. For example, they would lack the confidence that everyone else is thinking of precisely the same idea of autonomy. Something can't serve as an object of community worship if the community members aren't sure that they're all worshiping the same thing.

People might have a sufficiently concrete conception of "my autonomy" or "your autonomy" or "her autonomy". These are things that we can easily latch onto as values. But then we're talking about a bunch of different "autonomies", which lack the unity that a sacred object seems to require.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 18 August 2012 11:39:37PM *  10 points [-]

How do you reduce autonomy to sacredness? I think of sacredness as something that inheres in some single object of veneration towards which a group of people can genuflect, such as a family shrine, a flag, a saint, or (for the left) "the environment". I would also extend the notion of a "single object" to slightly more abstract things, such as a single holy text (which might exist in multiple copies) or a single ritual way of eating (which might be enacted on multiple occasions).

One way in which sacredness commonly manifests itself is through sacred boundaries that serve as strong Schelling points. In fact, I am convinced that any large-scale human social organization depends to a significant degree on Schelling points whose power and stability rests on the fact that the thought of their violation arouses strong moral intuitions of sacrilege. (Even though this might be non-obvious from their stated rationale.)

Take for example the ancient Roman pomerium, the boundary of the city of Rome that was explicitly held as sacred. In particular, bearing arms within the pomerium was considered as sacrilege, and this norm was taken very seriously during the Republican period. Of course, a norm like this can easily be given a practical rationale (preventing coups, assassinations, etc.), and it seems plausible that it indeed had a practical effect of this sort, contributing to the long-standing stability and competitive success of the republican institutions. However, it was in fact the sacredness aspect that gave the norm its power, since a consequentialist rationale for any norm can always be rationalized away, thus making it a weak Schelling point, easily pushed down a slippery slope. And indeed, when the reverence for this traditional norm of sacredness started fading in the late Republic (along with many others), it was a good sign that the Republic had indeed gone to the dogs, and soon the state was torn by constant civil wars between competing generals who had no problem finding justifications and support for their plans to conquer Rome and seize power by armed force.

Similarly, intuitions of sacrilege can be associated with non-physical boundaries. Take for example the modern norms against euthanasia, even in cases where it's voluntary and in fact strongly desired by the patient, and the alternative is nothing but a prolonged suffering. People are horrified by the thought of euthanasia because it violates the perceived sacredness of human life. And again, one can make a cogent Schelling point/slippery slope argument in favor of such norms, but this is not what gives them their power.

Now, it seems quite plausible to me that this is in fact a common state of affairs for all sorts of norms that deal with the prohibition of crossing certain boundaries. Not all such norms are based on sacredness intuitions, of course -- they can also rest on a basis of fairness, harm, liberty, or some mix of those -- but in that case, their violation causes different and lesser kinds of outrage, and it's also easy to convince people to make exceptions based on concerns for fairness, harm, or liberty. For example, the norms about private property rights seem to be typically in this category: their violation causes nothing similar to the visceral feelings of sacrilege, and it's easy to convince people that some violations and curtailing of property rights are OK if you can convince them that it reduces harm and increases fairness or liberty.

With this in mind, I think it should be reasonable to ask whether the liberal intuitions of personal (and particularly sexual) autonomy are in fact a sort of pomerium backed by moral intuitions of sacrilege triggered by the perceived violations of this autonomy. (Whether or not we end up agreeing on the answer to this question.)

Comment author: Tyrrell_McAllister 18 August 2012 05:16:07AM 0 points [-]

Using Amazon's "Search Inside the Book" feature, I found some discussion of abortion (along with birth control) on page 209 of Haidt's The Happiness Hypothesis. I wonder if that book is working with an earlier version of his theory, because he talks very explicitly about the importance of autonomy to liberals on those pages.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 18 August 2012 07:48:58AM *  5 points [-]

I haven't read The Happiness Hypothesis, but I've just read these pages on Amazon's preview. It seems to me that this was indeed an earlier phase of Haidt's thought, when he advocated a much more simplistic theory of the moral foundations and was still a partisan liberal. (I'm not just throwing around an ideological label here -- these days Haidt indeed describes himself as a "partisan liberal" in past tense.)

In these cited pages, Haidt gives some clearly biased and unrealistic statements. For example, we are told that "On issue after issue, liberals want to maximize autonomy by removing limits, barriers, and restrictions." But obviously, you only need to ask a libertarian for his opinion about this claim to realize that in fact "removing limits, barriers, and restrictions" applies only to a strictly circumscribed set of issues, and the liberal understanding of autonomy in fact has a more complex basis.

These days Haidt is far above such evident partisan biases, but I think he still hasn't come around to re-examining the issues of liberal autonomy in the light of his more recent insight, while at the same time he realizes at some level that it's incompatible even with his current view of the liberal moral foundations. I don't think he's avoiding these problematic discussions in a calculated way, so I think he simply has some sort of "ugh field" around these questions and thus fails to address them clearly and openly.

Comment author: Tyrrell_McAllister 18 August 2012 04:07:08AM *  0 points [-]

For example, as a notable and glaring omission, the book doesn't address the controversies over abortion at all. (Thus putting Haidt in a very odd position where he purports to have a general theory of moral psychology that explains the contemporary American ideological rifts, but nonchalantly refuses to apply it to the single most ideologically charged moral issue in the U.S. today.)

This blog author critiques an analysis of the abortion controversy that he or she attributes to Haidt. So Haidt evidently applies his theory to abortion somewhere.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 18 August 2012 04:38:51AM *  1 point [-]

Just in case I don't remember correctly, I've just checked The Righteous Mind's index for "abortion." It lists three pages, each of which mentions abortion only in passing as an example of a public moral controversy, without getting into any analysis whatsoever of the issue. To the best of my recollection, there is no such analysis elsewhere in the book either, nor in anything else I've read by Haidt.

As for the blog you link to, I strongly suspect that the author is in fact extrapolating from his (her?) view of what Haidt believes, not relaying an actual argument by Haidt. I might be wrong, but a few minutes of googling didn't turn up any relevant statements by Haidt.

Comment author: CarlShulman 17 August 2012 06:01:05AM 8 points [-]

The post has 63 upvotes and has been repeatedly linked to. Talking about controversial hypotheses in the hypothetical and presenting them by citation/quotation seem like manageable ways to reduce some of those downsides.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 18 August 2012 04:17:11AM 3 points [-]

I'm not complaining about a lack of upvotes and links, but about the lack of responses that leave me with more insight than I started with, and also a general lack of understanding of the nature and relevance of the problems I'm trying to discuss. I'd rather have a comment buried deep in some obscure subthread with zero upvotes, which however occasions a single insightful response, than a top-level post upvoted to +200 and admiringly linked from all over the internet, which however leaves me with no significant advance in insight (and possibly only reinforces my biases with the positive attention).

(Not that I'm always optimizing for feedback, of course -- sometimes I just fall prey to the "someone is wrong on the internet" syndrome. But, for whatever reason, as embarrassing as such episodes may be, they fill me with less dissatisfaction in retrospect than failures of systematic and planned effort.)

Comment author: Tyrrell_McAllister 16 August 2012 06:22:02PM *  0 points [-]

That would indeed be a fully general counterargument, but it's not the sort of argument that I'm making. My theory is not that liberals elevate harm and fairness so much that they should be called "sacred" for them.

Right. And, to be clear, I did not mean to accuse you of that. I did not mean that you were using the fully general counterargument to say that liberals don't care about harm and fairness. I was only considering the possibility that you were using the fully general counterargument to say that concern for sexual autonomy is really about sacredness. You seemed to be alluding to different arguments regarding harm and fairness, which you hesitate to give in full detail.

I haven't read Haidt, so I don't know how he accounts for "concern for autonomy" under his system. Does he reduce it to fairness and harm somehow? Or does it arise incidentally out of diminished concern for authority?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 18 August 2012 03:22:21AM *  2 points [-]

I haven't read Haidt, so I don't know how he accounts for "concern for autonomy" under his system. Does he reduce it to fairness and harm somehow? Or does it arise incidentally out of diminished concern for authority?

I've read Haidt's book, and I'd say he skirts around the topic of autonomy (sexual and otherwise) in liberal thinking, never giving it a satisfactory treatment, and avoiding issues where it would unavoidably come to the fore. For example, as a notable and glaring omission, the book doesn't address the controversies over abortion at all. (Thus putting Haidt in a very odd position where he purports to have a general theory of moral psychology that explains the contemporary American ideological rifts, but nonchalantly refuses to apply it to the single most ideologically charged moral issue in the U.S. today.)

Now, as you probably guess, I would hypothesize that he avoids autonomy-centered topics because they tend to contradict his theory of liberals as low on sacredness. But whether or not one agrees with this view, it seems clear that his treatment of such topics is incomplete and unsatisfactory.

Comment author: CarlShulman 16 August 2012 10:50:44PM *  4 points [-]

Why not make a top-level post or two that you can just link back to occasionally? This would also help to avoid derailing new comment threads, as discussion could take place at said posts.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 17 August 2012 05:24:50AM 0 points [-]

I tried that a while ago, but the results were disappointing enough that in the meantime I've grown somewhat embarrassed by that post. (Disappointing both in terms of the lack of interesting feedback and the ruckus occasioned by some concrete examples that touched on controversial topics, which I avoided with less scrupulousness back then.) For whatever reason, insofar as I get interesting feedback here, it looks like I get more of it per unit of effort when I stick to run-of-the-mill commenting than if I were to invest effort in quality top-level posts. (I don't think this is a general rule for all posters here, though.)

Comment author: CarlShulman 16 August 2012 08:45:22PM 9 points [-]

To me this reads like changing the subject to your favorite topics. But, in fact, you don't want to have a public discussion about them, so this winds up seeming pretty useless.

Perhaps I'm wrong, do you have some line of investigation into institutional incentives or ideology that would, e.g. greatly help Stuart in his effort to parse expert opinion on AI timelines? Or is his problem an exception?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 16 August 2012 10:24:07PM 7 points [-]

You're right, these topics do make me sound like a broken record, and I also didn't take into account the broader context. It's just that I'm really irritated with papers like these.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 16 August 2012 06:57:18PM *  2 points [-]

(retracted, see below)

Comment author: Tyrrell_McAllister 15 August 2012 05:48:36PM 2 points [-]

I have already elaborated on one significant example where the standard liberal positions are heavy on sacredness (the sacralization of individual autonomy in sex-related matters).

If you can reduce autonomy to sacredness in this general sense, I wonder if you're employing a fully general counterargument. If someone says, "My values aren't based on sacredness; they're based on X!", you could always reply, "Well, if X is the basis of your values, then you've elevated X to such a high level of importance that it's basically sacred to you. So, you see, your values turn out to be based on sacredness after all."

Comment author: Vladimir_M 16 August 2012 02:10:00AM *  3 points [-]

That would indeed be a fully general counterargument, but it's not the sort of argument that I'm making. My theory is not that liberals elevate harm and fairness so much that they should be called "sacred" for them. Rather, my theory is that they have their own peculiar moral intuitions of sacredness -- which is evidenced by the fact that if these intuitions are challenged by arguments based on harm or fairness analogous to those they accept in other cases, they react with emotions and rationalizations in a manner typical of people brought into dissonance by an attempt to elicit conflicting moral intuitions.

Of course, my view may be wrong, but I don't think it can be dismissed as a fully general counterargument.

Comment author: Yvain 15 August 2012 05:19:38AM *  11 points [-]

You're right, I shouldn't have used the word "lying". That mistake bothers me when other people do it, and I'm sorry for doing it myself.

But other than that...I'm afraid the whole point of my last post was to ask for examples, that we have different standards of what constitutes an example, and that I'm still not happy. For me, "Liberals have strong norms around equality" is not an example; I'm thinking something more along the lines of "You know how liberals are pro-choice? That's irrational for reasons X and Y and Z."

Laissez-faire in sex leads to all kinds of expensive negative-sum signaling and other games. Why not crack down on those, which would lead to a clear improvement by any utilitarian metric?

Can you give an example of a specific laissez-faire sexual policy that causes expensive negative-sum signaling games, and a practically workable less laissez-faire policy that would solve those negative-sum signaling games?

If it's OK for the government to ban smoking and other activities harmful for public health, why not extend such treatment to sexual activities that have obvious and drastic public health implications?

Can you give an example of a sexual activity that has such obvious and drastic public health implications that it should be banned?

If the alleged vast inequality of wealth is a legitimate complaint against economic laissez-faire, why is it not legitimate to complain about the vast inequality of sexual and romantic opportunities (and of the related social status) under sexual laissez-faire?

It doesn't seem illegitimate to complain about it. What particular policies are you recommending?

Why the automatic hostility towards the idea that under sexual laissez-faire, a huge segment of the population, which lacks sufficient prudence and self-control, will make disastrous and self-destructive choices, so that restrictive traditional sexual norms may amount to a net harm reduction?

You're assuming the conclusion when you say "automatic hostility". If you gave examples of a traditional norm that solved this problem, I would have be able to form more of an opinion on whether that traditional norm was genuinely harm-reducing.

Explicitly, certainly not often. But in many of their observed views and behaviors, I detect strong authority-based intuitions, even though they will invariably be rationalized as something else. The typical way is to present authority as some kind of neutral and objective expertise, even in areas where this makes no sense.

Can you give an example of a liberal intuition which is authority-based but gets rationalized away to something else?

I do think, however, that you underestimate how often such serious bullet-biters can be inconsistent on other issues.

Can you give an example of a serious bullet-biter being inconsistent on other issues?

I hate to sound like a broken record here, it's just that anyone supporting any position at all can say "All my opponents really hold their positions for terrible reasons, and all their seemingly-good arguments are really just rationalizations". In the absence of specific evidence, this is just an assertion, and not an uncommon one.

Even though I have some pretty good guesses what you mean by some of these, I don't want to find myself straw-manning you by accident just because it's easy for me to come up with examples I can refute.

I understand if you don't want to start a brouhaha by posting controversial positions publicly. If you want to private message me an example or two, I'm usually pretty hard to offend, and I promise not to share it without your permission.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 15 August 2012 07:36:45PM 7 points [-]

OK, if you want to delve into a concrete example with all the inflammatory details, PM me your email address. (I find the PM interface on this site very annoying.) If the discussion produces any interesting results, maybe we can publish it later suitably edited.

I'll also post a further reply later today, addressing some of your points that I think can be answered satisfactorily without going into too much controversy.

Comment author: Wei_Dai 15 August 2012 02:02:46AM *  7 points [-]

I think the concrete objection from your comment fails to recognize the relevant concerns I outlined above.

Yes, it's quite possible that you've thought through these issues more thoroughly than I have. But one thing that makes me more skeptical than usual is that you're the only person I know who often makes claims like "I privately have better arguments but I can't share them because they would be too inflammatory". If your arguments and conclusions are actually correct, why haven't other people discovered them independently and either made them public (due to less concern about causing controversy) or made similar claims (about having private arguments)? Do you have an explanation why you seem to be in such an uncommon epistemic position? (For example do you have certain cognitive strengths that make it easier for you to see certain insights?)

If I were you, I would be rather anxious to see if my arguments stand up under independent scrutiny, and would find a place where they can be discussed without causing excessive harm. I asked earlier whether you discuss your ideas in other forums or have plans to make them public eventually. You didn't answer explicitly which I guess means the answers to both are "no"? Can you explain why?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 15 August 2012 04:32:16PM *  8 points [-]

Sorry, I composed the above comment in a rush, and forgot to address the other questions you asked because I focused on the main objection.

Regarding other forums, the problem is that they offer only predictable feedback based on the ideological positions of the owners and participants. Depending on where I go, I can get either outrage and bewilderment or admiring applause, and while this can be fun and vanity-pleasing, it offers no useful feedback. So while I do engage in ideological rants and scuffles for fun from time to time on other forums, I've never bothered with making my writing there systematic and precise enough to be worth your time.

Regarding other thinkers, I actually don't think that much of my thinking is original. In fact, my views on most questions are mostly cobbled together from insights I got from various other authors, with only some additional synthesis and expansion on my part. I don't think I have any unusual epistemic skills except for unusually broad curiosity and the ability to take arguments seriously even if their source and ultimate conclusion are low-status, unpleasant, ideologically hostile to my values and preferences, etc. (Of course, neither of these characteristics is an unalloyed good even from a purely epistemic perspective, and they certainly cause many problems, possibly more than benefits, for me in practical life.)

The problem, however, is that on controversial topics, good insight typically comes from authors whose other beliefs and statements are mistaken and biased in various ways, and whose overall image, demeanor, and affiliation is often problematic. And while people are generally apt to misinterpret agreement on a particular point as a full endorsement of someone, and to attack a particular argument based on the author's mistakes and biases on other questions, I think LW has some particularly bad problems in this regard. This is because on LW, people tend to assign a supposed general level of "rationality" to individuals and dismiss them if sufficient red flags of supposedly general irrationality are raised.

Whereas in reality, on controversial and ideologically charged questions, there is much less consistency within individuals, and people whose rationality is sterling as judged by the LW public opinion (often not without good reason) typically have at least some horribly naive and biased views, while much good insight comes from people whom LW would judge (also often with good reason) as overall hugely biased and irrational. (The only people who maintain high standards across the board are those who limit themselves to technical questions and venture into controversial non-technical topics only rarely and cautiously, if at all.) So that on many questions, saying "I think X has good insight on topic Y" would be just a way to discredit myself. (When I think it isn't, I do provide references with the appropriate caveats.)

Comment author: Wei_Dai 14 August 2012 11:39:36PM *  15 points [-]

So, while I can readily point out concrete examples of the sort you're asking, unfortunately in many of them, crossing the inferential distances would be an uphill battle, or there would be immediate unpleasantness that I'd rather avoid. Therefore I'll limit myself to a few more vague and general points:

I've often seen you say this kind of thing in your comments. Do you participate in another forum where you do describe the details? Or alternatively, are you preparing us to eventually be ready to hear the details by giving these vague and general points?

I think there is a good chance that many of your ideas are wrong and you are probably more confident about them than you should be. (Nothing personal, I just think most new ideas are wrong and their proponents overconfident.) I could argue against the vague and general points that you offer, but it feels pointless since presumably you have stronger arguments that you're not sharing so I have no way of convincing you or bystanders that you are wrong, nor is it likely that you can convince me that you are right (without sharing those details). I imagine other potential critics probably feel the same and also stay silent as a result. In the meantime, readers may see your comments stand uncriticized and form an incorrect idea of what other LWers think of your views (i.e., that we're less skeptical of them than we actually are).

I thought I'd draw your attention to this issue in case it hadn't occurred to you already. Perhaps it might spur you to form or speed up a plan to make public your detailed ideas and arguments?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 15 August 2012 01:11:42AM *  5 points [-]

I agree that this is a valid concern, but I don't think your evaluation of the situation is entirely fair. Namely, I almost never open any controversial and inflammatory topics on this forum. (And I definitely haven't done so in a very long time, nor do I intend to do it in the future.) I make comments on such topics only when I see that others have already opened them and I believe that what has been written is seriously flawed. (In fact, usually I don't react even then.)

Therefore, while I certainly accept that my incomplete arguments may cause the problems you describe, you must take into account that the alternative is a situation where other people's arguments stand unchallenged even though they are, in my opinion, seriously flawed. In such situations, leaving them unanswered would create a problem similar to the one you point out with regards to my comments, i.e. a misleading impression that there is a more agreement with them that there actually is. (This even aside from the problem that, if I am correct, it would mean wrong arguments standing unchallenged.)

In these situations, I take my arguments as far as I believe I can take them without causing so much controversy that the discourse breaks down. This is a sort of situation where there is no good outcome, and I believe that often the least bad option is to make it known that there is some disagreement and voice it as far as it can be done. (In the sense that this outcome, whatever its problems, still makes the best out of the unfavorable trade-offs that unavoidably appear whenever some controversial and inflammatory topic is opened.)

Of course, there are many ways in which I could be wrong. Maybe the arguments I see as flawed are in fact usually correct and I'm just creating confusion and misleading people by parading my mistaken contrary beliefs this way. Maybe these topics are so unimportant that it's always better to ignore them than to raise any amount of fuss. Maybe my comments, however careful and diplomatic I try to make them, still serve as a catalyst for too much bad discourse by other posters. Relevant to your comment, maybe the confusion and misleading impressions left by my comments end up worse than the alternative outcome in case I stay silent. I recognize all these possibilities, but nevertheless, I think the concrete objection from your comment fails to recognize the relevant concerns I outlined above.

Comment author: wedrifid 14 August 2012 11:00:04AM *  5 points [-]

Why the automatic hostility towards the idea that under sexual laissez-faire, a huge segment of the population, which lacks sufficient prudence and self-control, will make disastrous and self-destructive choices, so that restrictive traditional sexual norms may amount to a net harm reduction? Especially since liberals make analogous arguments in favor of paternalistic regulation of practically everything else.

I don't know about automatic (and I am not presenting my own position) but it is certainly legitimate for a person to be hostile to being coerced into a worse situation because someone else believes (even correctly) that other people will benefit from said coercion. Similarly, it is hardly unreasonable for the one person who is being tortured for fifty years to be hostile to his own torture, even if that torture is a net benefit to the population.

If you want to do harm to people (whether paternalistic control or counterfactual torture) you should expect them to fight back if they can. Martyrdom is occasionally noble but it is never obligatory.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 14 August 2012 03:19:23PM 5 points [-]

I don't have any significant disagreement here, except that I'm not sure if you believe that people's ideological views tend to be actually motivated by this kind of self-interest. I certainly don't think this is the case -- to me it seems like a very implausible model of how people think about ideological issues even just from common-sense observation, and it's also disproved by the systematic evidence against the self-interested voter hypothesis.

Comment author: Yvain 14 August 2012 05:19:07AM *  13 points [-]

I think my problem with your responses on this thread so far has been that you've taken various liberal positions, said "Obviously this a sacredness value, liberals say it's about harm but they are lying", and not justified this. Or else "Some people say they are utilitarians, but obviously they are lying and have sacredness and purity and authority values just like everyone else" and not justified that either.

For example, where exactly is this liberal sacredness around sexual autonomy? The place I see liberals really get worked up about this is tolerance of homosexuality, but the standard liberal mantra in this case, that it's okay because it "doesn't harm anyone", seems to me to be entirely correct - it's throwing out a conservative purity-based value in favor of a genuinely harm-based value. Liberals are pretty happy to oppose clear-cut cases of harm in sexual relations like rape or lying about STDs, not to mention that most of them oppose pedophilia and prostitution.

In order to demonstrate that liberal sexual values are sacredness rather than harm based, you'd need to point out some specific sexual practice that was harmless but which liberals still violently opposed (arranged marriage? Do liberals have a strong opinion on this?) or harmful but which liberals supported (maybe no-fault divorce? But this is far from universally-supported among liberals, it's far from clear that it's harmful, and I don't think most liberals who do support it refer to a principle of sexual autonomy or have the fervor that tends to characterize sacred values.)

Overall I think liberal support for sexual autonomy, insofar as it's a useful idea at all, to be mostly based around autonomy values (obviously), harm values (as the liberals themselves say), and maybe an overreaction to really disliking conservative values around things like homosexuality or sexual "prudery". I think you have further to go in demonstrating that there's really a strong foundation of sacredness there, although I understand if you don't want to turn this thread into a debate on sex mores.

I agree that certain liberal values are based on sacredness (diversity and anti-racism) or purity (environmentalism), although I have yet to hear any good argument that liberals explicitly value authority. But two examples, both of which are polluted with confounders (racism really is really harmful), hardly seem like enough to say they are just as interested in these values as conservatives and totally deceiving themselves when they say they aren't.

And I have the same objections to your comments on libertarians and utilitarians. Yeah, only a few percent of the population is either (although it's more in places where people are genuinely interested in philosophical and political issues and likely to think for themselves, and only about 20% of Americans self-identify as "liberal" anyway). But libertarians for example seem ruthlessly consistent in opposing government intervention into any area (except maybe defense and policing), and I have a higher opinion of utilitarians than you do. Once Peter Singer says he can't really see any problems with infanticide because it doesn't harm anyone, the hypothesis that he still is secretly trying to uphold sacredness values just as much as everyone else becomes pretty hard to support.

Similarly, not every case of hypocrisy is a case of secretly having sacredness or purity values. I don't fail at efficient charity because I secretly believe that inefficient charity is sacred. I fail at efficient charity because utilitarianism is really hard.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 14 August 2012 07:47:12AM *  13 points [-]

I think my problem with your responses on this thread so far has been that you've taken various liberal positions, said "Obviously this a sacredness value, liberals say it's about harm but they are lying", and not justified this.

"Lying" is not the right word, since it suggests conscious deception. The term I have used consistently is rationalization.

In order to demonstrate that liberal sexual values are sacredness rather than harm based, you'd need to point out some specific practice that was harmless but which liberals still violently opposed [...] or harmful but which liberals supported [...]

Arguing against liberal positions on such matters is very difficult because they tend to be backed by a vast arsenal of rationalizations based on purportedly rational considerations of harm or fairness, often coming from prestigious and accredited intellectual institutions where liberals predominate. This is of course in addition to the dense minefield of "boo lights" where an argument, whatever its real merits, will trigger such outrage in a liberal audience that the discourse will be destroyed and the speaker discredited.

So, while I can readily point out concrete examples of the sort you're asking, unfortunately in many of them, crossing the inferential distances would be an uphill battle, or there would be immediate unpleasantness that I'd rather avoid. Therefore I'll limit myself to a few more vague and general points:

  • Laissez-faire in sex leads to all kinds of expensive negative-sum signaling and other games. Why not crack down on those, which would lead to a clear improvement by any utilitarian metric?

  • If it's OK for the government to ban smoking and other activities harmful for public health, why not extend such treatment to sexual activities that have obvious and drastic public health implications?

  • If the alleged vast inequality of wealth is a legitimate complaint against economic laissez-faire, why is it not legitimate to complain about the vast inequality of sexual and romantic opportunities (and of the related social status) under sexual laissez-faire? (The problem is by no means limited to men, of course.)

  • Why the automatic hostility towards the idea that under sexual laissez-faire, a huge segment of the population, which lacks sufficient prudence and self-control, will make disastrous and self-destructive choices, so that restrictive traditional sexual norms may amount to a net harm reduction? Especially since liberals make analogous arguments in favor of paternalistic regulation of practically everything else.

There are many other examples too, but these are the best ones I can think of without either running into enormous inferential distances or sounding too provocative. It really seems to me that liberal norms change suddenly and dramatically towards laissez-faire once sexual matters come under consideration, and I don't see how this could be because their regular considerations of harm and fairness just happen to entail laissez-faire in this particular area and nowhere else.

I agree that certain liberal values are based on sacredness (diversity and anti-racism) or purity (environmentalism), although I have yet to hear any good argument that liberals explicitly value authority.

Explicitly, certainly not often. But in many of their observed views and behaviors, I detect strong authority-based intuitions, even though they will invariably be rationalized as something else. The typical way is to present authority as some kind of neutral and objective expertise, even in areas where this makes no sense.

Once Peter Singer says he can't really see any problems with infanticide because it doesn't harm anyone, the hypothesis that he still is secretly trying to uphold sacredness values just as much as everyone else becomes pretty hard to support.

As I said, I'm not an expert on Singer in particular, and I don't deny the possibility that he might be an outlier in this regard. (Although I do remember reading things from him that seemed to me like a clear case of rationalizing fundamentally non-utilitarian liberal positions.) Also, I agree that someone's serious utilitarian bullet-biting on some issues provides some evidence that he is overall less dedicated to the values of sacredness etc. I do think, however, that you underestimate how often such serious bullet-biters can be inconsistent on other issues.

Comment author: Yvain 14 August 2012 02:08:44AM *  6 points [-]

Fallacy of gray? Arguably no one has completely removed all minor unconscious belief in purity/sanctity/authority based values, but I think endorsing harm/fairness values at least correlates with holding fewer values based on P/S/A, even secretly.

I am also not clear whether you're saying only that mainstream large liberal parties like UK Labor or US Democrats secretly have many P/S/A values, or whether you would say the same is true of people like Peter Singer or the more pragmatic/less ideological strains of libertarian. I think the gradient from the Pope to Nancy Pelosi to Peter Singer is quite clear, even if the last might still have some P/S/A values lurking somewhere.

If you disagree, can you name a few purity, sanctity, or authority based values you expect intelligent liberals or libertarians on LW to endorse?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 14 August 2012 03:54:38AM *  8 points [-]

Fallacy of gray? Arguably no one has completely removed all minor unconscious belief in purity/sanctity/authority based values, but I think endorsing harm/fairness values at least correlates with holding fewer values based on P/S/A, even secretly.

There are two distinct questions here:

  1. Are the standard liberal ideological positions (in the American sense of the word) really as low on the sacredness/authority/in-group values as Haidt would claim?

  2. Are there, generally speaking, significant numbers of people (perhaps weighted by their influence) whose ideological positions are truly low on the sacredness/authority/in-group values? (Whatever their overlap with the standard liberal positions might be.)

I believe that the answer to (1) is decisively no. And here I don't have in mind some minor holdovers, but some of the very central tenets of the ideology of modern liberalism -- which are largely liberal innovations, and not just unexamined baggage from the past. So even if I'm committing fallacies here, they're not fallacies of gray. In this thread and the linked older comments, I have already elaborated on one significant example where the standard liberal positions are heavy on sacredness (the sacralization of individual autonomy in sex-related matters). I could also give examples of liberal authority and in-group values, some of which I've already mentioned in passing. Unfortunately, you can probably see why such topics are, practically by definition, inordinately likely to inflame passions and destroy the discourse.

As for (2), clearly, if you look for outliers hard enough, you'll find them, and there is some variability even among people closer to the mainstream. But I think that you are greatly underestimating how much of the entire utilitarianism shtick in the contemporary ideological debates is just a convenient framework for rationalizations of views and intuitions held for completely different reasons. (And it's not very different for egalitarian and other arguments that leverage the fairness intuitions.)

Even when it comes to bullet-biters who will be convinced by utilitarian (or egalitarian etc.) arguments to adopt odd and extreme positions on some issues, it's a mistake to conclude from this that they have done an equally consistent scrutiny of all their beliefs, or even the majority of them. I think this is a good description of someone like Singer (with the caveat that I haven't read anything close to a large and representative sample of his work, so that my view of his particular case might be biased).

Comment author: novalis 13 August 2012 04:47:31AM 0 points [-]

I think you and I must know very different liberals.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 13 August 2012 05:08:32AM 3 points [-]

Looking back at my comment, I did perhaps use a very broad brush at certain points, which is unfortunately hard to avoid if one wishes to keep one's comments at reasonable length. However, I'd still be curious to hear where exactly you think my description diverges from reality.

Comment author: Prismattic 13 August 2012 03:58:48AM 1 point [-]

I think you are seriously underestimating how negative US sentiment toward random vehicle stops is. This is quite distinct from being stopped for a traffic violation.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 13 August 2012 05:07:16AM *  5 points [-]

Well, yes, but that's basically a rationalization for the glaring inconsistency, which in fact exists as a sheer historical accident. Americans would be bothered by explicitly random traffic stops. But in reality, cops have the de facto authority to pull over whomever they want, and you have no right to defy them even if they decide to do it purely on a whim.

Note that it's irrelevant for my point that you can get tickets and charges suppressed later if you somehow manage to convince the judge that you were pulled over without reasonable suspicion. I'm focusing purely on the interaction between you and the cop on the spot.

Comment author: novalis 13 August 2012 12:45:35AM 1 point [-]

(Let's leave aside, for now, the less thoughtful liberals and conservatives, since what they think isn't interesting).

I don't understand why you put autonomy in the category of sacredness. Haidt considers liberty an independent foundation, and I don't think it requires rationalization to consider nonconsensual sex to be a case of harm!

Comment author: Vladimir_M 13 August 2012 02:15:21AM *  24 points [-]

The thing is, what determines when autonomy is absolute and inviolable, and when it should be weighed against other concerns?

When it comes to interventions in human affairs by the state and other institutions, modern liberals pride themselves on their supposed adherence to (what they see as) rational and scientific cost-benefit analysis and common-sense notions of equality and fairness. They typically assert that their opponents are being irrational, or acting out of selfish interest, when they insist that some other principle takes precedence, like for example when conservatives insist on respecting tradition and custom, or when libertarians insist on inviolable property rights. In particular, liberals certainly see it as irrational when libertarians oppose their favored measures on the grounds of individual liberty and autonomy.

However, there are issues on which liberals themselves draw absolutist lines and lose all interest for cost-benefit analysis, as well as for concerns about equality and fairness that are perfectly analogous to those they care about greatly in other cases. Sex is the principal example. Liberals argue in favor of comprehensive intervention and regulation in nearly all areas of human life, but in contrast, people's sexual behavior is supposed to be a subject of complete laissez-faire. This despite the fact that many arguments that liberals normally use against the evils of laissez-faire and in favor of economic intervention, wealth redistribution, and paternalistic regulation, would apply with equal (or even greater) force to sex as well. Yet an attempt to argue in favor of more restrictive sexual norms on any of these grounds will be met with immediate hostility by liberals -- often so fierce that you'll be immediately dismissed as obviously crazy or malicious.

I don't think it's possible for liberals to salvage the situation by claiming that sexual laissez-faire is somehow entailed by the same considerations that, according to them, mandate complex and comprehensive regulation of almost everything else. This would be vanishingly improbable even a priori, and a casual look at the arguments in question definitely shows a glaring inconsistency here. The only plausible explanation I see here is that, just like everyone else in the human history, liberals base their sexual norms on a sacredness foundation -- except that for them, this foundation has the peculiar form of sacralizing individual autonomy, thus making a violation of this autonomy a sacrilege that no other considerations can justify.

Ironically, the sexual norms based on sacralized individual autonomy end up working very badly in practice, so that we end up with the present rather bizarre situation where we see an unprecedented amount of hand-wringing about all sorts of sex-related problems, and at the same time proud insistence that we have reached unprecedented heights of freedom, enlightenment, and moral superiority in sex-related matters. (And also a complete impossibility of discussing these topics in an open and honest manner, as witnessed by the fact that they reliably destroy the discourse even in a forum like LW.)

Comment author: novalis 12 August 2012 10:21:33PM 0 points [-]

Even if it were possible to formulate these norms based on "rational" considerations of harm and fairness in a way that wouldn't be just a convenient rationalization for deeper intuitions -- and I don't think anything like that is possible -- such norms would probably be unworkable in practice with realistic humans.

But isn't that precisely what the west has done (not completely, of course), and what the polyamorous community has done to a much greater degree?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 12 August 2012 10:44:29PM *  10 points [-]

On the contrary -- it seems to me that the modern Western societies are, by all historical standards, exceptionally obsessed with sacredness norms on sex-related issues. See my old comment I linked earlier, in which I elaborate on some particularly striking manifestations of this.

(Also, among the most amusing posts on Overcoming Bias are those where Robin Hanson elicits outrage from the respectable progressive folk by putting some sex-related issue under dispassionate scrutiny and thereby violating their sacredness intuitions.)

As for the polyamorists, I don't have any direct insight into the inner workings of these communities except for a few occasional glimpses offered by LW posts and comments. But unless they are composed of extremely unusual self-selected outliers (which might be the case given their very small size), I would suspect that they are again just rationalizing a somewhat different (and possibly even more extreme) set of sacredness norms.

Comment author: novalis 12 August 2012 09:04:01PM 0 points [-]

I certainly agree with the descriptive claim that people often rationalize, and that western liberals often do have their own ideas of sacredness.

But I think it's probably wrong to say that all discussion of morality is rationalization. If that were true, nobody would ever be swayed by a moral argument. In fact, people do change their views -- and they frequently do so when it is pointed out that their stated views don't match their actions.

I'm also not convinced that purity is as instrumentally necessary as you say;

Can you think of any functioning human society without strong norms of sacredness/purity when it comes to, say, sex or food?

I suspect that this will come down to a question of what is sacred. For instance, the French definitely have a very strong food culture, but I suspect that they mostly would not regard violations of that as immoral. And, of course, the particulars of which sexual arrangements are considered sacred has varied widely across human cultures. If the sacred in food and sex evolved to combat parasites, then it is at this point, in Western societies, an onion in the varnish.

Like many other cases where changes in technology have cause unprecedented social arrangements (agriculture allowing cities, for instance), purity norms in sex and food may weaken or disappear.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 12 August 2012 10:03:38PM *  9 points [-]

But I think it's probably wrong to say that all discussion of morality is rationalization. If that were true, nobody would ever be swayed by a moral argument. In fact, people do change their views -- and they frequently do so when it is pointed out that their stated views don't match their actions.

This is a non sequitur. An argument may change people's moral beliefs and intuitions by changing the underlying tacit basis for their rationalizations, whereupon they get displaced by new ones. The most frequent way this happens is when people realize that a realignment of their moral intuitions is in their interest because it offers some gain in power, wealth, or (most commonly) status, or perhaps it will help avoid some trouble.

Moreover, pointing out that people's stated views don't match their actions is almost never an effective way to change their views. Usually it's effective only in provoking hostility and making their rationalization mechanisms work somewhat harder than usual.

If the sacred in food and sex evolved to combat parasites, then it is at this point, in Western societies, an onion in the varnish.

They have never been just about parasites, especially when it comes to the norms about sex (and the whole enormous cluster of related issues about reproduction, family, etc.). Strong norms about these matters must exist in order for any human society to function and perpetuate itself, and it seems to me that humans are hardwired to use the sacredness foundation as the fundamental basis for their moral intuitions about many of them. Even if it were possible to formulate these norms based on "rational" considerations of harm and fairness in a way that wouldn't be just a convenient rationalization for deeper intuitions -- and I don't think anything like that is possible -- such norms would probably be unworkable in practice with realistic humans.

(I could conceive more easily of a hypothetical society in which food-related norms would be free of purity/sacredness. But it still looks implausible that people wouldn't keep inventing new ones like they presently do, even if it requires ever more creative rationalizations. Plus, it seems to me that such norms can be practically useful in a variety of ways.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 August 2012 07:24:04PM 11 points [-]

And, of course, violence against women is endemic. Haidt reports that he "dined with men whose wives silently served us and then retreated to the kitchen." What does he suppose would have happened if one day one of those women refused to serve, or even, after serving, sat down at the table to join the discussion?

What would happen in a western country if someone say refused to pay their taxes? My point is that the implicit threat of violence underlies all societies so, yes, you can make any society look bad by selectively pointing this out.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 12 August 2012 08:25:58PM *  17 points [-]

Or to take an even more poignant example, what will happen if you refuse to be humble and obedient when you get pulled over by a cop? Historically, in many places and times, this example would have had similarly great emotional power as those employed by the author of the original post.

(In fact, I find it fascinating that present-day Americans would see it as a creepy totalitarian idea if you proposed that cops should be authorized to stop and detain pedestrians for random paper checks, even though the same thing is considered a normal and unremarkable fact of life for drivers. This example demonstrates especially clearly how random and incoherent human intuitions are when it comes to feelings of outrage at a perceived lack of freedom or equality.)

Comment author: Lightwave 12 August 2012 08:41:49AM 7 points [-]

I would actually go further and say that they are necessary for any sort of organized human society.

While they are likely necessary for organized human society, I think the argument is that their purpose is purely instrumental. It's sort of like how in the prisoner's dilemma, the concept of 'trust' ('tit for tat with forgiveness' variants) is an instrumentally useful strategy for winning points in a group of a certain kind of agents. Even if humans have loyalty, authority and sanctity built-in, they can still recognize their instrumental role and can only instrumentally optimize for those.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 12 August 2012 07:18:50PM 5 points [-]

Even if humans have loyalty, authority and sanctity built-in, they can still recognize their instrumental role and can only instrumentally optimize for those.

The trouble is, absent certain unusually favorable circumstances, attempts at such optimization run into insurmountable practical problems. For start, such analysis would be tremendously difficult even for a superhumanly unbiased intellect. And then there is the even worse problem that realistic humans will be under an almost irresistible temptation to bias their analysis in favor of their own particular authority, sanctity, and in-group norms.

Comment author: novalis 12 August 2012 04:48:06PM 1 point [-]

What is the difference between an ideology and morality?

The questions Haidt ask are about what we judge to be moral. I simply don't judge disrespect for authority (for instance) as immoral in itself.

I'm also not convinced that purity is as instrumentally necessary as you say; and judging by that article, neither is Haidt. And loyalty can, at least in many cases, be replaced with the algorithm for which it is is a heuristic: reciprocal altruism.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 12 August 2012 06:59:54PM *  7 points [-]

The questions Haidt ask are about what we judge to be moral. I simply don't judge disrespect for authority (for instance) as immoral in itself.

I am not going to analyze you in particular, but what I write certainly applies to typical people who adhere to modern ideologies that claim to be concerned exclusively with harm and fairness.

These people would presumably insist that they "don't judge disrespect for authority... as immoral in itself." But what people say are rationalizations, not the real motivations for their beliefs and actions. To employ Haidt's rider-elephant metaphor, you see the rider insisting loudly that disrespect for authority is not immoral by itself, while the elephant is charging to stomp you to death, infuriated by your disrespect. Whereupon the rider, if pressed to explain what happened, invents a rationalization about how your real sin is in fact something in terms of harm (and maybe fairness), or maybe how you're simply being delusional or disingenuous. It's similar for sacredness and loyalty, of course.

I'm also not convinced that purity is as instrumentally necessary as you say;

Can you think of any functioning human society without strong norms of sacredness/purity when it comes to, say, sex or food?

(Of course, with regards to the present-day Western societies, this applies to the entire contemporary ideological spectrum. In fact, people who supposedly have a "rational" harm/fairness-based approach to these matters are, in my opinion, characterized by particularly intense fervor driven by their sacredness/purity-based norms.)

What is the difference between an ideology and morality?

Their overlap is only partial. Ideologies normally also include non-moral beliefs (although moral motivations usually lurk not very far underneath). In turn, some moral judgments are human universals, and others may be a matter of such strong consensus within a particular culture that calling them ideological would stretch the term beyond the normal variation in its meaning.

Comment author: fubarobfusco 10 August 2012 09:26:08PM 2 points [-]

This was not about low representation being an argument for discrimination, this was about people in a field out and out admitting in huge numbers that they would blatantly discriminate against people hurting their careers because of political affiliation!

If you want to get a job providing safety equipment for workplaces, you should probably not proclaim that you believe that workplaces are too safe. If you want to get a job as a doctor, you should probably not announce yourself as a believer in Christian Science and faith-healing. If you want to get a job as a Friendly AI researcher, you should probably not declare that you believe any AI that has been blessed by the Pope is assuredly friendly.

The common use of "conservatism" today proudly includes positions that are anti-science; as such, it is unsurprising that scientists might consider affiliation with that label to be evidence of incompetence, unseriousness, or opposition to their field. I do not see a need to introduce the hypothesis of "political bias leftward" when it is quite possible that t he scientists doing this so-called "bias" are merely taking the claimed beliefs of conservatives seriously.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 12 August 2012 07:18:39AM *  3 points [-]

If you want to get a job providing safety equipment for workplaces, you should probably not proclaim that you believe that workplaces are too safe.

It looks like here you have inadvertently provided a good argument for the opposite of what you wanted. Namely, what you write applies even if your belief that workplaces are too safe is correct. (Workplaces can certainly be too safe by any reasonable metric, at least in principle. Imagine if office workers were forced to wear helmets and knee pads just in case they might trip over while walking between the cubes. Then imagine a thriving industry of office helmets, an ever expanding bureaucracy for regulating and inspecting them -- and august academic experts getting grants to study them and issue recommendations for their use.)

If your stated beliefs are misaligned with the institutional incentives in the business or bureaucracy in which you work, it will indeed be very bad for your career. And what reason do you have to believe that the institutional incentives in the contemporary academia are aligned with the truth on all (or even on most) ideologically charged matters?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 12 August 2012 06:53:44AM *  22 points [-]

It is, however, missing a piece: why are there people who don't share all five foundations?

You are right that Haidt is missing that piece, although judging by his recent writings, he might be slowly converging towards the answer. Namely, the answer is that, contrary to Haidt's model of contemporary ideologies, there are in fact no such people.

What does exist are people whose ideology says that harm and (maybe) fairness are the only rational and reasonable moral foundations, while the other ones are only due to ignorance, stupidity, backwardness, malice, etc. Nevertheless, these same people have their own strong norms of sacredness, purity, authority, and in-group loyalty, for which they however invent ideologically motivated rationalizations in terms of harm and fairness. These rationalizations are usually very flimsy, and often they amount to little more than an instinctive emotional urge to dismiss anyone who asks unpleasant questions as crazy or malicious. Yet, given the high status and institutional dominance of such ideologies, their adherents generally do manage to create a public image of themselves as concerned only with the "rational" foundations (and thus superior intellectually and morally to their ideological opponents).

As for the claim that "you need loyalty, authority and sanctity to run a decent society," I would actually go further and say that they are necessary for any sort of organized human society. In fact, the claim can be stated even more strongly: since humans are social beings who can live and reproduce only within organized societies, these things simply will exist wherever there are humans. Therefore, if you are concerned with harm, the only reasonable question you can ask is about the practical consequences of the (necessarily multi-foundational) social norms in different societies on whatever metric you use to evaluate harm. And here you will find that, even in terms of a purely utilitarian metric, an accurate analysis of the social role of the norms based on these "irrational" foundations will give you very different answers from those given by the pseudo-rational ideologies that claim to reject these foundations.

Comment author: MichaelVassar 05 August 2012 05:55:15PM 13 points [-]

I really like this post. Could you make the link go both ways?
That said, I think you are overstating your case.
Also, if you figure out what local social norms are and that the stories are BS, you can accomodate the norms and ignore the stories internally. You can also optimize separate internal stories and external ones, or alternatively, drop out of the official story entirely and just be some guy who hangs around and is fun to talk to and mysteriously seems to always have enough money for his needs (the secret being largely that one's needs turn out to be very cheap to fulfill, even extravagantly, if optimized for directly, and money is likewise easy to get if optimized for directly). If you aren't dependent on others, don't compete, dont make demands, and are helpful and pleasant, you can get away with not conforming.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 11 August 2012 12:15:45AM 3 points [-]

Could you make the link go both ways?

Sure.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 05 August 2012 08:15:38AM *  34 points [-]

Basically, the problem is that K&T-style insights about cognitive biases -- and, by extension, the whole OB/LW folklore that has arisen around them -- are useless for pretty much any question of practical importance. This is true both with regards to personal success and accomplishment (a.k.a. "instrumental rationality") and pure intellectual curiosity (a.k.a. "epistemic rationality").

From the point of view of a human being, the really important questions are worlds apart from anything touched by these neat academic categorizations of biases. Whom should I trust? What rules are safe to break? What rules am I in fact expected to break? When do social institutions work as advertised, and when is there in fact conniving and off-the-record tacit understanding that I'm unaware of? What do other people really think about me? For pretty much anything that really matters, the important biases are those that you have about questions of this sort -- and knowing about the artificial lab scenarios where anchoring, conjunction fallacies, etc. are observable won't give you any advantage there.

Note that this applies to your biases about abstract intellectual topics just as much as to your practical life. Whatever you know about any such topic, you know largely ad verecundiam from the intellectual authorities you trust, so that chances are you have inherited their biases wholesale. (An exception here is material that stands purely on rigorous internal logical evidence, like mathematical proofs, but there isn't much you can do with that beyond pure math.) And to answer the question of what biases might be distorting the output of the official intellectual authorities in the system you live under, you need to ask hard questions about human nature and behavior akin to the above listed ones, and accurately detect biases far more complex and difficult than anything within the reach of the simplistic behavioral economics.

Of course, the problem you ultimately run into is that such analysis, if done consistently and accurately, will produce results that clash with the social norms you live under. Which leads to the observation that some well-calibrated instinctive bias towards conformity is usually good for you.

In response to "Epiphany addiction"
Comment author: MichaelVassar 04 August 2012 02:42:00PM 5 points [-]

Nothing works if people don't actually change their behavior, so the place to start, IMHO, is looking into who actually changes their behavior after encountering new information. Figuring out what causes that would take you very far. My vague impression is that it's closely related to distrust of authority. If one trusts authority, any change takes you farther away from a trusted safe state and thus carries a large hidden cost.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 05 August 2012 07:24:09AM *  15 points [-]

My vague impression is that it's closely related to distrust of authority. If one trusts authority, any change takes you farther away from a trusted safe state and thus carries a large hidden cost.

On the other hand, unless you have the enormously rare constellation of talent and circumstances to give you a realistic chance to rise to the very top, too little trust in authority leads to a state of frightened paralysis or downright self-destruction. What you need for success is the instinct to recognize when you should obey the powers-that-be with your heart and your mind, and when to ignore, defy, or subvert them.

The ability to conform to the official norms and trust the official dogma with full honesty when it's optimal to do so is just as important as the ability to ignore, defy, and subvert them in other cases. Otherwise your distrust of authority will lead you either to cower in fear of it or to provoke its wrath and be destroyed. A well-calibrated unconscious strategic instinct to switch between conformity and non-conformity is, in my opinion, one of the main things that sets apart greatly successful people from others.

Comment author: kilobug 28 July 2012 05:51:30PM 5 points [-]

I understand this point of view, but it doesn't feel to really watch the situation we are in right now.

We are more like with current medicine : we don't yet how to build a purely synthetic body that will not age, be sick, tired, ... and the best we have is the Azathoth-built biological frame, but yet we can do lots to improve that biological frame (like vaccines) or fix its flaws (glasses, painkillers, pacemaker).

Looking at the world, we can see that even if not perfect, there are many cases of things which are done "outside of the market" but does works, from CERN to Appolo project, EDF/SNCF as I said in my original comment, European-style universal healthcare, ... it feels to me that being libertarian in this context is more like akin to refusing vaccines and keeping Azathoth alone.

And it also strikes me as odd that while here at LW we are so enthusiast in mind upload and the like (to fix what Azathoth did imperfectly in our bodies) the common LW opinion is much more to keep Azathoth for the economy than to try to think and test alternatives.

Blood transfusions often failed before we knew about blood groups, but the rational reaction was to consider that sometimes they succeed, and try to tell when they fail and when they succeed, so you can use them, not giving up.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 28 July 2012 06:40:38PM *  16 points [-]

Looking at the world, we can see that even if not perfect, there are many cases of things which are done "outside of the market" but does works, from CERN to Appolo project, EDF/SNCF as I said in my original comment, European-style universal healthcare, ... it feels to me that being libertarian in this context is more like akin to refusing vaccines and keeping Azathoth alone.

When you mentioned economic "engineering," the first thing that occurred to me were various schools of macroeconomics and their proposed measures for economic planning via monetary, fiscal, trade, and other policies. Speaking as someone who has spent considerable effort trying to make sense of this supposed "science," I really don't see anything there but pseudoscience driven by ideology, hubris, political expediency, and rent-seeking.

What you mention here, however, is in the domain of those much older kinds of interventions that I spoke of: public infrastructure spending, wealth redistribution, and patronage of arts and sciences. Unlike the modern macroeconomic "science," you could have an interesting discussion about those even with an ancient Roman statesman. I am definitely not opposed to them in principle, and I think they should be judged on a case-by-case basis.

However, I believe you are far too optimistic in evaluating the outcomes of the contemporary such policies. For example, if properly done, government patronage of science can work wonders, but if not, it can give rise to a diabolical system of perverse incentives that will thoroughly corrupt the entire field of science in question -- and in a way that will still make it look fully legitimate to the general public, and make the critics who understand the terrible truth seem like laughable crackpots. Similar things can be argued about other government enterprises too, with corruption and disastrous bungling often rampant under a veneer of perfect respectability and (often sincerely deluded) pretense of success. And while we clearly won't agree about the extent this is happening, given the confident off-hand style of your examples, I definitely think you're badly underestimating this extent.

Comment author: olalonde 28 July 2012 06:54:44AM 14 points [-]

I believe government should be much more localized and I like the idea of charter cities. Competition among governments is good for citizens just as competition among businesses is good for consumers. Of course, for competition to really work out, immigration should not be regulated.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charter_city

Comment author: Vladimir_M 28 July 2012 05:33:49PM 12 points [-]

Of course, for competition to really work out, immigration should not be regulated.

How does this follow? Unless I'm having a severe case of reading misapprehension, this is equivalent to arguing that there should be a market in housing because competition between landlords will result in good housing with reasonable rents -- and then adding, as if it were obvious, that for competition to work out, landlords should not have any rules for screening potential tenants.

Comment author: kilobug 28 July 2012 08:02:51AM 20 points [-]

I always wondered why the Less Wrong community was so "libertarian" (US-style, ie, pro-free market).

It seems at odds to me with LW views on other topics. Free market is akin to evolution : it's at optimisation process which, given enough time and space, will end up finding local maxima, but it's a blind, uncaring force that doesn't care about the sufferings it produces, that has no long-term vision. It's Azathoth. The same way that good engineering is more efficient than evolution (show me a bird flying as fast as a plane), wouldn't a good partially planned economy be better than free market ?

Or if you look at it from a CS view, especially with the SIAI view on AI (which is not shared by all Less Wrongers, but by most) : we use Azathoth-like solutions (neural network, genetic algorithms, ...) when we don't have a classical engineering solution. Shouldn't we do the same in economy ? Try to have more "engineered" solution when we can do so, and resort to the "free market" as a suboptimal but working default when we don't have an engineered solution ? If you look at EDF or SNCF (french electricity and railroads), it seems there are domains in which the "engineered solution" works well.

It would seem more coherent with the rest of the LW view to support things like Cybersyn rather than Azathoth.

Also (but my comment is already too long so I won't elaborate that one), a rational view on human psychology and cognitive biases should tell us that Homo Economicus just doesn't exist, and things like "consent" and "free will" are always a bit fuzzy, humans are prone to error and manipulation, so we should have safeguards to ensure the errors done by individual don't completely ruin their (or others) life, which argue for a strong social safety net.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 28 July 2012 03:44:35PM *  17 points [-]

I'm not a principled libertarian who will defend the "free market" consistently (in fact, I think the very notion is rather incoherent), but the sort of "engineering" you're talking about runs into two problems:

  1. We still lack the epistemological means to obtain the expertise necessary for such engineering, except for some basic simple insights that were already known to governments of civilized countries centuries ago. Insofar as any economic engineering interventions have been successful historically, they have been based on this ancient common-sense knowledge. Practically all the other stuff dreamed up by economists during the last hundred (or maybe even two hundred) years is a frightful abomination of cargo-cult science, anti-epistemology, and rationalizations for ideology and rent-seeking. (This also goes for the bulk of "social science" in general.)

  2. Even insofar as such expertise can be obtained, there is still the problem that the intervention must be executed by a realistic government, whose agents have their own venal interests and ideological aims (and delusions). And given the above-described state of the economic "science," even the most delusional ideology and the most blatant venal interest can be given a perfectly respectable veneer of "scientific" economics, if only some high-status and appropriately credentialed economists will vouch for it. So even insofar as we have some sound insights about the possible interventions, they are unlikely to be recognized as such unless there's a lucky alignment of interests and incentives. (But that is extremely unlikely in contemporary political systems.)

So, basically, you can see my view as roughly equivalent to someone who is sick but lives in a society where the only physicians available are crazed charlatans and superstitious witch-doctors (and where, in addition, institutionalized incentives are strongly against anything resembling valid medicine). Passively hoping for mercy from Azathoth (i.e. that your immune system will win out on its own) may well be the most rational strategy in this situation.

Comment author: gwern 22 July 2012 07:38:30PM 2 points [-]

The problem with this argument is that in the modern liberal order (and again ignoring some marginal exceptions), the state has a monopoly of violence, including violence that may be necessary to enforce a contract. Therefore, the state not only refuses to apply violence to enforce your claim based on such a contract, but will also intervene violently to stop you if you try to enforce it with private force. It is a criminal offence to breach the peace even in the course of privately enforcing a valid contractual claim, let alone one that is legally declared void.

Germany reportedly enforces illegal contracts.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 23 July 2012 01:13:13AM *  5 points [-]

"Illegal contracts" is a misleading term here. These are not contracts that are illegal because they stipulate some action that is ipso facto criminal (like e.g. an illegal drug sale contract) or because they stipulate a transfer of rights that is inherently unenforceable in the existing law (like e.g. an indentured servitude contract). Rather, the issue is about perfectly normal and ordinary transactions that just happen to run afoul of the law in some relatively minor way, as in the given examples of ordering a meal in a restaurant that stays open beyond its licensed hours, or hiring a gardener who doesn't report this income for his taxes.

The relevant questions here are how severe such violations have to be to void the contract altogether, and how eager the government will be to prosecute the violators if this information comes out when a breach of contract is adjudicated in court. Obviously, in any legal system, both issues are a matter of degree, and clearly different countries will have different systems, with Germany apparently being unusually lenient on both counts. With this in mind, I fail to see any relevance of this fact for my above cited argument.

Comment author: RichardKennaway 05 July 2012 07:59:30PM *  2 points [-]

I really don't see any principled difference between eliminating people's freedom to take up obligations that can't be evaded with a comfortable bankruptcy and any other paternalistic regulation.

I do. What is a contractual obligation? It is not a magic spell that creates a reality that it would require some positive action to depart from. It describes a promised reality that takes positive actions to attain. If the parties to a contract disagree over its attainment, then in the first place they must try to resolve the matter themselves. If they fail to agree, and neither party can impose a solution by force, then nothing further can happen, without some third party entering on the matter.

That third party might be the wisdom of the tribal elders, or a magistrate who on local matters combines in one person the power to make, judge, and enforce the law, or a Western-style framework of laws and courts, or many other possible institutions. But in all cases, the dispute is resolved by that institution using its resources to impose a verdict. (I include in that the case where the institution does not enforce it directly, but by proclaiming a verdict that gives one party a right to use force against the other which it would not otherwise have had.)

If the institution looks at the terms of the contract and declines to have anything to do with the matter (as was once the case in England regarding gambling debts -- unenforceable at law), that is not a limitation on anyone's freedom to enter into such a contract. They can still write that contract. They merely do not have a claim on anyone else's assistance in enforcing it against the will of the other party. I think this is entirely in accordance with libertarian principles. Nobody is being coerced when the state declines to coerce someone on your behalf just because they have broken a promise to you. And it is surely the opposite of paternalism for the state to limit its involvement.

I am also sure that if Robin Hanson has not yet argued for making breaking a promise a criminal act, he will.

What are these libertarian principles, anyway? You refer to them but distance yourself from them, suggesting that you are arguing a point of view you do not hold, a situation vulnerable to letting a finger nudge the scales. Indeed, what is satire but a bottom-line-driven argument from your opponent's position to an unwelcome conclusion, the cloak of satire giving deniability to refutations of the argument? (ETA: I'm not accusing you of bad faith. It's just that you seem to be saying, "this is what libertarian principles imply", without necessarily subscribing to those principles yourself. It's very easy to go wrong in arguing someone else's point of view for them, especially if in fact you disagree with them.)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 22 July 2012 07:19:26PM *  5 points [-]

If the institution looks at the terms of the contract and declines to have anything to do with the matter […] that is not a limitation on anyone's freedom to enter into such a contract. They can still write that contract. They merely do not have a claim on anyone else's assistance in enforcing it against the will of the other party.

The problem with this argument is that in the modern liberal order (and again ignoring some marginal exceptions), the state has a monopoly of violence, including violence that may be necessary to enforce a contract. Therefore, the state not only refuses to apply violence to enforce your claim based on such a contract, but will also intervene violently to stop you if you try to enforce it with private force. It is a criminal offence to breach the peace even in the course of privately enforcing a valid contractual claim, let alone one that is legally declared void.

So however you turn it, this is a limitation on people's right to enter such contracts, as well as their other rights that depend on this. If the state told you that from now on it would refuse to enforce car-selling contracts to which you are a party, your freedom to own a car would be gone, regardless of whether you'd be allowed to perform the legally void act of signing such a contract. You wouldn't be able to buy a car, since if the seller failed to deliver it, you couldn't use private force to take possession of it. You wouldn't be able to own one, since the previous owner or manufacturer could just steal it back as soon as you turned away from it. And as the most pertinent analogy, you couldn't even sell a car you already have, since the buyer would have no guarantee that you wouldn't fail to deliver it upon payment. (Admittedly, for relatively minor dealings, perhaps even including cars, the situation would be remedied somewhat by private reputational mechanisms.)

All this is by no means idle theorizing, even with respect to the normal everyday business. For example, where I live, the government has declared various provisions of tenancy agreements unenforceable, like for example no-pets rules. You are still allowed to put such provisions in the contract, and many landlords do, probably counting on the tenants' ignorance of the law, or perhaps appealing to their consciences. However, there is no way to enforce them against a tenant, and as a result, it's hard to find very nice places for rent, except at a high price that includes implicit insurance against such tenant misbehaviors. (It's fairly easy to screen away people who will fail to pay the rent or who will behave downright destructively, but even very nice, affluent, and accomplished people may end up getting a cat whose hair the subsequent occupants will be finding in their dinner for years, or a dog that will ruin the wood floors in a way that they could excuse as normal wear and tear if you sued them over it.) As someone who is in the market for nice rentals, and would gladly assent to no-pets and other presently unenforceable provisions for keeping the place tidy and undamaged, I really don't see how this is not a very real and costly limitation on my (and the landlords') freedom of contract.

What are these libertarian principles, anyway? You refer to them but distance yourself from them, suggesting that you are arguing a point of view you do not hold, a situation vulnerable to letting a finger nudge the scales.

I'll clarify how I see the libertarian position, and please tell me if you think I'm distorting it.

Regardless of the issue of the legitimacy of private versus state violence, where there is much disagreement among them, libertarians agree that there is a certain set of property rights that a person can legitimately claim, and that people should be free to enter voluntary contracts by which they exchange these rights (i.e. alienate some and acquire others) and thus incur mutual obligations. There is of course a lot of further disagreement over the exact criteria for what makes a property right valid, but if there is any meaningful agreed-upon content to the notion of libertarianism, it is that once a property right has been established, one should be free either to keep and enjoy it unmolested or to exchange it or give it away -- including the rights transferred by a voluntary contract from someone else.

Now, what about the state? As per the above, both anarchist and minimal-government libertarians agree that the state should not limit the people's right to enter voluntary agreements concerned purely with their own rights and obligations. Such limitations may be in the form of outlawing the contract itself (for example, in many places you can go to jail for trying to negotiate a prostitution deal). However, as I explained above, they can also have the form of the state wielding its monopoly of force in contract enforcement selectively, so as to eliminate the freedom of particular kinds of contracts in practice, in order to further some other goals. Whether a libertarian is an anarchist who believes the state should get out of the enforcement business altogether and let people enforce contracts with private force, or a minimal-statist who believes it should limit itself to enforcing valid rights claims, I don't see how this selective enforcement can be reconciled with any coherent statement of the above-described libertarian principles.

This of course runs into the already mentioned problem: if I own my person and my labor, why can't I sell them in some sort of slavery contract? If I sell my car and then refuse to deliver it, Rothbardian anarchists would say that the buyer is entitled to come and subdue me and seize it by force, and non-anarchist libertarians would say that the buyer should be able to call the cops who will then subdue me and seize it for him. Similarly, why shouldn't I be able to sell my person too, so that if I try to escape, either my owner himself or the cops acting on his complaint would seize me and haul me back to his service?

This is where I see what looks, from the above described perspective, like a paternalistic slippery slope. The state won't enforce a slavery contract just like it won't enforce a no-pets clause of a rental contract where I live, even though in both cases the contract is about an exchange of what both parties otherwise uncontroversially claim as their property rights. And I don't see any potential stable Schelling points except either allowing both kinds of contracts or recognizing that the state can allow or disallow contracts at its pleasure in order to further paternalistic, ideological, or whatever other aims.

Finally, what about my own disagreement with the libertarian principles? I don't consider them workable in any general and absolute formulation, for a multitude of reasons, one of which is that all realistic human societies will consider many (though possibly different) things implied by them as impermissible. But insofar as these principles exist in a coherent and agreed-upon form, I think I am presenting them fairly.

Comment author: Grognor 10 July 2012 06:12:46AM 12 points [-]

College degrees are better signals for conscientiousness than intelligence, which is no coincidence, since employers in real life care more about conscientiousness.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 11 July 2012 04:46:50AM *  13 points [-]

Conformity too. This is a factor often overlooked in discussions of this sort.

(There are in fact two ways in which education signals conformity. The first one is the fact that you have conformed to the social norm that you are supposed to signal your intelligence and conscientiousness with this particular costly and wasteful endeavor, not in some alternative way that would signal these traits just as well. The second one is that you have successfully functioned for several years in an institution that enforces an especially high level of conformity with certain norms of behavior that are especially important in a professional context.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 July 2012 05:19:58AM 0 points [-]

Yet another reason is, of course, the draconian toughening of law enforcement and criminal penalties.

Which would, nevertheless, be considered absurdly lenient by the standards of any pre-20th century society.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 07 July 2012 04:27:25AM 8 points [-]

I wouldn't call the present U.S. system "absurdly lenient." The system is bungling, inefficient, and operating under numerous absurd rules and perverse incentives imposed by ideology and politics. At the same time, it tries to compensate for this, wherever possible, by ever harsher and more pitiless severity. It also increasingly operates with the mentality and tactics of an armed force subduing a hostile population, severed from all normal human social relations.

The end result is a dysfunctional system, unable to reduce crime to a reasonable level and unable to ensure a tolerable level of public safety -- but if you're unlucky enough to attract its attention, guilty or innocent, "absurd leniency" is most definitely not what awaits you.

Comment author: Douglas_Knight 05 July 2012 03:41:35AM 0 points [-]

It seems to me very different to say that it is difficult to assess whether something is a provocation than to say that there are some definitions of provocation under which it is and some under which it isn't.

Do you think Acheson would lie about external facts, like whether he offered to let the Japanese pay with money in a Latin American bank account?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 06 July 2012 04:26:38AM 6 points [-]

It seems to me very different to say that it is difficult to assess whether something is a provocation than to say that there are some definitions of provocation under which it is and some under which it isn't.

If we could read minds (including those in the past), it would probably be possible to come to agreement about which concrete acts have been provocations in all cases, by looking for the mens rea: was the given act specifically motivated by the desire to induce a hostile reaction?

But since we can't read minds, the practical criteria for what counts as "provocation" are murky, and they are typically a mixture of attempts to evaluate indirect evidence about motives and attempts to define certain acts in certain contexts as ipso facto provocative. So there is lots of difficulty on both fronts, even if there is a general agreement on what happened: it's hard to evaluate the evidence about motives correctly, and there is also disagreement on which acts qualify as ipso facto provocative.

In this concrete case, some people would say that the actions of the U.S. government prior to Pearl Harbor were ipso facto provocative, i.e. that they were far outside of the limits of reasonable behavior of someone who is not actively trying to provoke hostility. Others would say that it isn't so, and they'd presumably also claim that there is no clear evidence about motives to pronounce the verdict of "provocation."

Do you think Acheson would lie about external facts, like whether he offered to let the Japanese pay with money in a Latin American bank account?

It strikes me as wildly implausible that someone relatively low in the pecking order, like Acheson in 1941, could have been in a position to make such tremendous history-shaping decisions on his own whim and without directions from above. So I think his account presents, at best, a strong lawyerly spin on the events with plenty of important omissions, even if there is no outright lying.

Now, why the oil embargo was instituted in this particular puzzling way, I don't know. I've never found the time to sit down and study all the available sources in detail. However, it seems to me that the most probable explanation is that FDR and his clique wanted to execute the embargo in a duplicitous and plausibly deniable way (which would be very much within their usual modus operandi), so they tried to make it look like an underling did the paperwork of export licensing a bit too eagerly, and then also the Japanese unreasonably failed to do the correct bureaucratic procedure, etc., etc.

Comment author: Dreaded_Anomaly 05 July 2012 08:50:44AM 1 point [-]

1. Is there a simple explanation of how they estimated the "teacher quality" variable? The paper is written in a very complicated and abstruse way, and I don't have time to wade through it, but surely the basic idea, if valid, should be explicable in a paragraph of plain English.

One of the main points of the paper is that typical measures (teacher experience, education, etc.) are not good predictors of quality. The authors spend a lot of time developing a phenomenological model of teacher quality based on comparing student achievement within a school, to reduce the impact of greater variation in populations between schools. From the paper:

3. THE IDENTIFICATION OF TEACHER EFFECTS In this section we develop an estimator of the variance of teacher quality that avoids problems of student selection and administrator discretion that potentially have biased prior attempts. This estimator is based upon patterns of within-school differences in achievement gains and ignores variations in teacher quality across schools, because such variation cannot readily be disentangled from student differences and the contributions of other school factors. This strategy yields a lower bound estimator for the importance of teacher quality that relies upon minimal maintained assumptions about the underlying achievement process. Importantly, we do not focus solely on measurable characteristics of teachers or schools as is typically done in this literature but instead rely on student outcomes to assess the magnitude of total teacher effects, regardless of our ability to identify andmeasure any specific components. This semiparametric approach provides both an estimate of the role of teacher quality in the determination of academic achievement and information on the degree to which specific factors often used in determining compensation and hiring explain differences in teacher effectiveness.


2. Even if we take the findings of the paper at face value, the "$100 trillion" estimate is a complete non sequitur. Can the entire effect really be purely because better teachers impart greater wealth-producing skills? Or could it be, at least partly, because they impart advantages in zero-sum signaling and rent-seeking games?

This claim is developed in a different paper (linked in the first link I posted), which draws from the paper I linked to discuss teacher quality. Unfortunately, that paper is paywalled, but I have extracted the relevant part, section 4.2, as a pdf (only 2 pages).

They used data comparing performance on math and science tests to economic growth for different countries. They then calculated the improvement in economic growth due to an improvement in student performance from replacing lower-quality teachers with higher-quality teachers. Obviously there is a simplifying assumption of linearity being made for the correlation of test performance and economic growth, and test performance as a measure can fall afoul of Campbell's Law.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 06 July 2012 03:10:42AM *  2 points [-]

Assuming your summary is correct, it would be an insult for the cargo cults to use them as a metaphor for this sort of "science."

Comment author: [deleted] 05 July 2012 06:01:13AM 10 points [-]

Crime.

In the US at least the murder rates today are comparable to those of the 1960s only because of advances in trauma medicine.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Rationality Quotes July 2012
Comment author: Vladimir_M 05 July 2012 05:36:02PM 9 points [-]

Another important reason is that Americans have in the meantime embraced a lifestyle that would have struck earlier generations as incredibly paranoid siege mentality. (But which is completely understandable given the realities of the crime wave in the second half of the 20th century.)

Yet another reason is, of course, the draconian toughening of law enforcement and criminal penalties.

Comment author: prase 05 July 2012 02:21:38PM *  3 points [-]

In the context of this discussion the important thing is what could be reliably predicted in 1941, so we should ignore the possible effects of the atomic bomb.

Assume that the entire U.S. navy is destroyed in January 1942. A reasonable realistic scenario, if everything went really well for Japan, may be this:

  • Germans capture Leningrad and encircle Moscow in summer 1942, Stalin is arrested in the forthcoming chaos and the new Soviet government signs armistice with Germany, ceding large territories in the west.
  • German effort is now concentrated on expanding their naval power. Germany has half of Europe's industrial capacity at her disposal. The production of U-boats increases and Britain alone has not enough destroyers to guard the convoys.
  • Starvation, threat of German invasion and heavy naval losses to German submarines, leading to inability to supply the Indian armies, make Britain accept Hitler's peace offer. Britain surrenders Gibraltar, Malta, Channel islands and all interests in European mainland to Germany and Italy, Singapore and Malaya to Japan and backs from the war.
  • China now obtains no help, no arms, no aircraft and surrenders in 1944, becoming divided among several Japanese puppet states.
  • The U.S. are alone, still having no significant navy. Hawaii is lost to the Japanese. Germany is aggresively building new ships to improve their naval power and potentially help the Japanese in the Pacific. Roosevelt dies in early 1945, as he did historically. The Japanese offer peace that would secure them the leading position in East Asia, willing to give Hawaii back.

Now in this situation, being a U.S. general, what would be your advice given to Truman? Would it be "let's continue in a low intensity war against both Germany and Japan until we have a strong enough navy, which may be in 1947 or 1948, and then start taking one island after another, which may take two more years, and then, from the island bases supplied through the U-boat infested Pacific start bombarding Japan, until the damned fanatics realise they have no other chance than to surrender"? Or would it rather be "let's accept peace if it's offered on honourable terms"?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 05 July 2012 05:18:04PM *  2 points [-]

Even in that scenario, Japanese victory is conditional on the political decision of the U.S. government to accept the peace. My comments considered only the strategic situation under the assumption that all sides were willing to fight on with determination. And I don't think this assumption is so unrealistic: the American people were extremely unwilling to enter the war, but once they did, they would have been even less willing to accept a humiliating peace. Especially since the Pacific great naval offensive could be (and historically was) fought with very low casualties, and not to mention the U.S. government's wartime control of the media that was in many ways even more effective than the crude and heavy-handed control in totalitarian states.

Now, in your scenario, the U.S. would presumably see immediately that its first priority was navy rebuilding. (An army is useless if you can't get it off the mainland.) This means that by 1944, Americans would be cranking out even more ships than they did historically. I don't think the Axis could match that output even if they were in control of the entire Eurasia.

(The U-boats would have been a complicating factor. Their effectiveness changed dramatically with unpredictable innovations in technology and tactics. In actual history, they became useless by mid-1943, although Germans were arguably on the verge of introducing dramatically superior ones at the time of their capitulation. But in any case, the U-boat factor cuts both ways: Americans could swamp the Pacific with even greater numbers of U-boats and wreck the entire Japanese logistics, as they actually did.)

Comment author: Zack_M_Davis 04 July 2012 07:03:47PM *  10 points [-]

easier to maintain discipline (to keep the class quiet and make sure everyone is really doing the exercises)? I think both these effects are helpful

I realize and confess that my sentiments are unusual, that my thinking on this subject is grossly distorted by ideology and therefore not to be trusted, and that I don't myself know how to set up a learning environment that will actually work for actual children, but I must beg the community's forgiveness, because I want to say this anyway: I think this ideal of "discipline" causes tremendous harm (which of course I understand is not to say that it doesn't also have benefits, but those benefits are not the subject of this comment). I consider it a monstrous tragedy that so many millions of people grow up (as I grew up) without any conceptual distinction between learning important things and being enrolled in a school and obeying the commands of the designated "teacher", with no idea of there being a difference between morality and obedience.

Personally, I've mostly recovered from this phenomenon to my satisfaction. I now have an explicit notion that it is morally righteous to learn great ideas and train useful skills, and some experience of the pleasures and satisfactions to be had from these endeavors---which is not to boast that I'm doing well; I would never be so delusionally arrogant as to think that I'm doing well---but I think I'm doing far better than I was before I learned these ideas. It certainly seems so when I contrast myself to my fellow undergraduate students. Last semester at community college, I witnessed a student passionately arguing with an instructor that surely his paper deserved an A- rather than a B+. (I'm given to understand this is not an uncommon occurrence.) I imagine there are many who would take such incidents as evidence that there's not nearly enough discipline in "our" schools: how insolent of a mere student to argue with an instructor! I, however, draw a different moral. I wanted to cry out to the student: Don't you see how silly this is? Your work, your creation is already good or already bad, no matter what letter the instructor writes on it afterwards! But perhaps it was I who was being silly. The student, of course, didn't care about good writing; he just wanted to get into the University of California at Berkeley. That was the highest goal he had been trained to aspire to, from the days when his elementary-school caretakers rewarded him for being quiet and doing what all the other children were doing. Again, I do not claim that I know how society should be organized; any particular reform or revolution I might propose could very well just make things worse. But can I at least say that it's sad to see entire generations of human minds systematically crippled in this way?---because it's sad.

[Slightly edited from original version]

Comment author: Vladimir_M 05 July 2012 03:33:54AM 4 points [-]

Are you familiar with the signaling theory of education? I think that, properly considered, it makes sense of a lot of the things you find so aggravating.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 05 July 2012 12:32:09AM 2 points [-]

Speaking as someone who did upvote the comment because the data was interesting- there are serious issues here. I've seen stuff on VDARE which involved very poor presentation or evaluation of data, and the motivation for it was pretty apparent. The signal to noise ratio there is extremely bad, and there's a lot that's just out and out racism in the strong sense of thinking that members of minority groups are of less moral value.. The post you set was quite interesting. But frankly, whenever I see something from there I have to doublecheck the data to make sure they aren't screwing up in some way. For simple matters of signaling, if I were to link there I'd include a note of the form "yes, this website is full of racists but in this case their summary data is pretty accurate." Steve himself seems to be pretty tonedeaf- I suspect a lot more people would listen to him if he didn't post stuff on such overtly racist locations.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 05 July 2012 03:26:26AM *  13 points [-]

Steve himself seems to be pretty tonedeaf- I suspect a lot more people would listen to him if he didn't post stuff on such overtly racist locations.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, he was writing for respectable mainstream conservative papers. The trouble is, once you've written too openly about certain topics, you will be ostracised from the respectable media, and these limits of acceptability are getting ever stricter and narrower. And once you've been placed under such ostracism, unless you're willing to restrict yourself to writing for free on your personal blog, you can only write for various disreputable outlets where you'll have to share the URL or column space with less seemly people.

Comment author: Dreaded_Anomaly 04 July 2012 08:35:24PM 5 points [-]

Here's the comment I posted on gnxp.

Teacher quality does matter.

A teacher one standard deviation above the mean effectiveness annually generates marginal gains of over $400,000 in present value of student future earnings with a class size of 20 and proportionately higher with larger class sizes. Alternatively, replacing the bottom 5-8 percent of teachers with average teachers could move the U.S. near the top of international math and science rankings with a present value of $100 trillion.

From the underlying paper (pdf):

The results suggest that the effects of a costly ten student reduction in class size are smaller than the benefit of moving one standard deviation up the teacher quality distribution, highlighting the importance of teacher effectiveness in the determination of school quality.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 05 July 2012 03:00:19AM *  8 points [-]

Reading this, two comments occur to me immediately:

  1. Is there a simple explanation of how they estimated the "teacher quality" variable? The paper is written in a very complicated and abstruse way, and I don't have time to wade through it, but surely the basic idea, if valid, should be explicable in a paragraph of plain English.

  2. Even if we take the findings of the paper at face value, the "$100 trillion" estimate is a complete non sequitur. Can the entire effect really be purely because better teachers impart greater wealth-producing skills? Or could it be, at least partly, because they impart advantages in zero-sum signaling and rent-seeking games?

Comment author: Douglas_Knight 04 July 2012 04:38:03AM *  2 points [-]

Could you spell out what you mean by different definitions of "provoke"?

Anyhow, I am more concerned about the word "deliberate." The government is not a coherent actor; it does not have deliberate actions. For example, FDR explicitly rejected an oil embargo, yet oil exports stopped. Was this because his subordinates correctly interpreted his wishes? Or were they more belligerent? In Present at the Creation (p26) Acheson seems to say that he implemented the embargo by mistake, thinking that Japan had hidden assets that would keep the flow going. On the following page, he agrees to accept payment from a Latin American bank, but something goes awry, seemingly out of his control. Delong asks if FDR even knew of the embargo.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 05 July 2012 12:59:02AM *  4 points [-]

Could you spell out what you mean by different definitions of "provoke"?

Well, "provocation" is one of those problematic words, in that nearly always, the party accused of "provocation" denies it -- and the act itself is therefore nearly always done in a way that attempts for some plausible deniability. So even if there is agreement on the facts of what happened, there is usually room for debate over whether an act constituted "provocation."

Anyhow, I am more concerned about the word "deliberate." The government is not a coherent actor; it does not have deliberate actions.

Of course. But under FDR, he and his inner circle did act in a fairly coherent way (and by extension, so did the entire pyramid of New Deal patronage that they headed). There were certainly individuals and institutions within the U.S. government outside of their control, but by 1941, they had been mostly side-stepped and pushed away into irrelevance.

For example, FDR explicitly rejected an oil embargo, yet oil exports stopped. Was this because his subordinates correctly interpreted his wishes? Or were they more belligerent? In Present at the Creation (p26) Acheson seems to say that he implemented the embargo by mistake, thinking that Japan had hidden assets that would keep the flow going. On the following page, he agrees to accept payment from a Latin American bank, but something goes awry, seemingly out of his control. Delong asks if FDR even knew of the embargo.

I wouldn't consider Acheson a credible source. Certainly, it's very naive to take anything written by the political actors of the New Deal/WW2 era at face value, and disentangling the real events from the available information is a task of enormous complexity and difficulty. That rabbit hole is very, very deep.

Comment author: prase 04 July 2012 10:52:54PM 5 points [-]

If anything, the U.S. would have been in a similar position, i.e. at war with Japan with guaranteed victory, even if every single ship under the U.S. flag magically got sunk on December 7, 1941.

This is suspect. The U.S. had greater industrial capacities and population than Japan, but that doesn't guarantee victory. Rebuilding the navy would take a lot of time which the Japanese could use to end their war in China. Also, it was far from clear in late 1941 whether the USSR would withstand the German assault and whether the British would not seek peace.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 05 July 2012 12:10:08AM *  2 points [-]

Even in the worst possible case, I still don't see what could prevent the U.S. from simply cranking out a new huge Pacific navy and overwhelming Japan. Yes, the production would take a few years to ramp up to full capacity, as it did in reality -- but once it did, I can't imagine what could save Japan from being overwhelmed.

Ending the war in China wouldn't have helped the Japanese at all, even if they linked with a victorious German army in the Far East. An additional land army at their disposal could not prevent the U.S. navy steamroller from eventually reaching their home islands, whereupon they would be bombed and starved into surrender. (If not for the atom bomb ending their agony even earlier.) The Japanese islands are so exposed and vulnerable to any superior naval power that they could be lost even as the world's mightiest army is watching helplessly from the Asian mainland.

The only theoretical chance I see is if Germany somehow conquered both the U.S.S.R. and Britain, and then threw all its resources on a crash program to build up a huge navy of its own and help the Japanese. But I'm not sure if they'd be able to outproduce the U.S. even in that case. (And note that this would require a vanishingly improbable long continuation of the Germans' lucky streak.)

Comment author: cousin_it 04 July 2012 05:27:59PM *  3 points [-]

If you were to examine the heritability of accent using the standard methods of behavioral genetics, it would turn out to be near zero.

Can you explain in more detail? I don't know much about heritability, but would be pretty surprised if Shalizi turned out to be wrong on a question of fact.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 04 July 2012 06:26:26PM 11 points [-]

Can you explain in more detail?

You can take any of the usual lines of evidence for heritability, and the result will be negative. Unrelated kids growing up in the same linguistic environment end up with the same accent, while related kids, even identical twins, growing up in different linguistic environments end up with completely different accents -- with no more similarity between them compared to the other randomly selected kids from these different environments.

In contrast, with IQ, you get dramatically different results. If you discover a lost twin brother who grew up in Hungary, his accent won't be any more similar to yours than a random Hungarian's -- whereas his IQ test results would be similar to yours with much more than random chance.

(I am ignoring here some minor factors like e.g. speech impediments due to hereditary conditions. But clearly the context is normal linguistic variation.)

I don't know that much about heritability, but would be pretty surprised if Shalizi turned out to be wrong on a question of fact.

When it comes to sheer intellectual ability, I admit that I'm not worthy to sharpen Shalizi's pencils. Unfortunately, he is not reliable on ideologically charged topics; when discussing these, he will not use his abilities to clarify the matter, but rather to make the best lawyerly case for his favored side. I wish it were otherwise -- I'd be delighted to see someone as smart as him try to make sense of these controversial and muddled topics -- but that's the way it is.

Comment author: cousin_it 04 July 2012 02:33:27PM *  13 points [-]

Amusingly, Razib's post does not include the word "genetic". I can't tell if that was intentional, but in any case, when a trait is highly heritable, that doesn't mean it's genetic. One nice example is accent. It's also a nice example of a trait that a teacher would find really hard to change, unles given huge authority over the kid's entire life. Maybe basic math aptitude is similar.

ETA: this comment is wrong by the technical definition of heritability, see Vladimir_M's replies. I should have said something like "has high correlation between parents and children".

Comment author: Vladimir_M 04 July 2012 05:24:45PM *  7 points [-]

The discussion of accent in that dialog is a neat rhetorical trick, but its main premise is false. If you were to examine the heritability of accent using the standard methods of behavioral genetics, it would turn out to be near zero. (Maybe some confounding factors would yield a small spurious heritability, but there's no way you'd get a "highly heritable" result.)

Some of the other cited facts are also dubious or exaggerated. For example, while accent of adults is no longer as perfectly plastic as before adolescence, it's obviously absurd to claim that "nothing that happens after early adolescence makes an impact on it."

(Also, kids' accent can be easily influenced if you can just place them into a peer group with the desired accent. No such simple solution exists for traits that are known to be heritable.)

Comment author: Andreas_Giger 04 July 2012 12:57:25PM *  1 point [-]

Regarding the first part, the truth of that statement critically depends on how exactly you define "provoke."

I am more concerned about the word "deliberate."

  • Provoking: presenting someone with a multitude of bad choices, one of them being to attack you.
  • Deliberate: proceeding with an action in the hope of achieving a specific outcome.
  • Deliberately provoking: presenting someone with a multitude of bad choices, hoping they will attack you because of this.

As for the second part (the supposed intentional dispersion of the carriers), I don't think that's plausible. If anything, the U.S. would have been in a similar position, i.e. at war with Japan with guaranteed victory, even if every single ship under the U.S. flag magically got sunk on December 7, 1941. So even if there was a real conspiracy involved, it would have made no sense to add this large and risky element to it just to make the eventual victory somewhat quicker.

The carrier fleet being operational was decisive in preventing an expected Japanese invasion of Midway and Hawaii, and recapturing Hawaii from the American continent would have been very difficult, if not outright impossible. What if China had surrendered or made peace with Japan? What if Germany captured Leningrad, Moscow, and Stalingrad? What if the Japanese nuclear weapon program had succeded? What if the public opinion had turned anti-war, as during the Vietnam War?

"Guaranteed victory" sounds like hindsight bias to me. Even if the US mainland could not have been invaded, that doesn't mean the USA could not have lost the war.

Also, your heuristic about bias is broken. In the Western world outside of the U.S., people are on average, if anything, only more inclined to believe the official historical narrative about WW2.

The point is that the "official historical narrative" is different in different countries. For example, Japan has a strong culture of ignoring Japanese war crimes, in Polish textbooks there rarely is mention of Poland taking part in the partition of Czechoslovakia, Britons are generally unaware of the fact that GB declared war on Germany and not vice versa, many French think that the surrender to Germany was an action the government did not have the license to make, and so on.

The government is not a coherent actor; it does not have deliberate actions.

"The government" is an abstract concept. I am talking about a circle of people within the government who together had the power to provoke Japan, and to assure that the losses at Pearl Harbor were within reasonable bounds. I am not overly familiar with the way the U.S. government was organised at that time, but it seems to me that such a circle had to include either the president or high ranking intelligence officials, most likely both.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 04 July 2012 03:34:06PM *  3 points [-]

The carrier fleet being operational was decisive in preventing an expected Japanese invasion of Midway and Hawaii, and recapturing Hawaii from the American continent would have been very difficult, if not outright impossible. What if China had surrendered or made peace with Japan? What if Germany captured Leningrad, Moscow, and Stalingrad?

It wouldn't have mattered for the Pacific war, except by prolonging it somewhat. Even if Japan had conquered every single island in the Pacific and Indian oceans, as long as the U.S. government remained in control of the U.S. mainland, as it surely would have, it still would have had enough resources and industrial capacity to outproduce Japan in warships and other naval assets by orders of magnitude and eventually roll back the Japanese conquests by sheer overwhelming strength.

Germany arguably had some chance to win the European war, but Japan was doomed from day one.

Also, as someone has already noted, the greater importance of carriers over battleships in WW2 is itself known only from hindsight, and contrary to the prevailing beliefs of the time.

What if the Japanese nuclear weapon program had succeded?

Well, yes, you can always conceive of some deus ex machina. But it's implausible that fears about hypothetical Japanese superweapons would have influenced the strategic plans of FDR & Co. in 1941.

What if the public opinion had turned anti-war, as during the Vietnam War?

By 1941, FDR & Co. already had sufficiently strong grip on power that they comfortably knew that a war would allow them to seize complete control of the media (and all other means of propaganda) and ensure that this could never happen.

The point is that the "official historical narrative" is different in different countries

True enough, but thus typically has the form of the same official narrative with some additional spin, omission, and lying with regards to the relevant local details in order to accommodate nationalist sensibilities. In contrast, sensible, intelligent, well-informed, and yet radical criticism of the official narrative can be found, to my knowledge, only within the Old Right intellectual tradition in the U.S. (Which has been driven to the fringe for many decades, but its vestiges somehow still occasionally surface in the respectable public discourse.)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 04 July 2012 04:10:12AM *  17 points [-]

The site's front page looks broken on my cell phone (Opera on Android).

Also, some of the quotes on the front page (and elsewhere) seem ridiculously over the top in a way that's suggestive of some lowbrow scam. ("It's hard to see how it could be anything short of life-changing"? Come on.)

Comment author: RichardKennaway 03 July 2012 09:13:05AM 6 points [-]

This is basically a question of definition.

I didn't mean it to be. I was just pointing out that the rules written on a contract and the rules which the state applies in case of dispute are two different things. They are drastically different in Western societies, where breach of contract is a civil matter, usually incurring only damages, but the distinction applies everywhere. On the one hand is what the parties to a contract promise, and on the other, what the state does if the promises are broken. There is no a priori reason that these two things should be brought into coincidence. I don't even see it as a reasonable place for discussion to start.

There is a very well written article titled "The Libertarian Case for Slavery," which was intended as satire, but there's absolutely nothing in it, save for the sneer in its last sentence, that is not perfectly logical and valid reasoning from libertarian principles.

Are you being as satirical as Philmore? If so, I'm wasting my breath here, but on the supposition that you aren't:

Whether well-written, I think Philmore's article is not well argued (reading it straight, not as satire). "Slavery" in the article ranges from an absolute property right in someone's whole person, which he does not defend (nor, for that matter, condemn, or it would undermine his satire), to the mere sale of one's lifetime labour, which he regards as equivalent to the daily or monthly sale of labour that constitutes typical modern employment.

I am paid monthly. However, I am free to just walk, at any time. No-one will drag me back to my employer and chain me to a desk. My former employer merely ceases to pay me. If my departure is sufficiently abrupt, I will forgo my last month's pay, but that is all. All employment contracts in the UK are of that form.

Under Philmore's concept of slavery, having sold my lifetime's labour, I would similarly be free to depart at any time, subject only to the return of what I was paid, pro rata, whch he calls self-manumission.

Why does he call this slavery? It gives him a catchy title, and he gets to satirically claim that libertarians should approve of "slavery". However he has only done this by diluting the word so far as to deprive it of most of its ordinary meaning: people as property, having no right and little real possibility to change that state without the agreement of their owner. That is how slavery was practiced in the American South. There are variations on the concept, and other names, but that is what is meant, in everyday discourse, when any situation is likened to slavery: being prevented from leaving the coercive control of one's "owner".

Of course, it may be that for game-theoretic reasons, such limitations on freedom ultimately increase total freedom by some reasonable measure -- "freedom may be freedom to capitulate," as Schelling says. But once you admit exceptions to libertarian principles on these grounds, the slope is very slippery and steep.

I don't see such a slope. The freedom to become a slave in the ordinary meaning of the word is the freedom to deprive your later selves in perpetuity of their freedom. There may be room for a discussion about the extent to which, in effect, your future selves should be the property of your present self, but merely waving "libertarian principles" is not that discussion.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 04 July 2012 03:05:12AM *  6 points [-]

No, I'm not being satirical. Your effort in explaining is not wasted, and in fact, I think I've located the root of our disagreement.

In your argument, you assume the legal framework of the modern liberal states. In these states, there is a sharp distinction between criminal and civil law, the former enforced with fines, imprisonment, and loss of citizen privileges (in some places also the death penalty), and the latter enforced by awarding monetary damages. Moreover, in these states the government has a complete monopoly on violence in law enforcement -- aside from a few narrow exceptions like self-defence or citizen's arrest, and some very mild uses of force like e.g. throwing out a trespasser, if violence is necessary to enforce a law or a court decision, you must call the police to do it. As you note, in this system, contracts fall under civil law, and the worst that can befall you for breaking a contract is losing money and perhaps bankruptcy. (Where even in the latter case, you are allowed to keep some assets and thus protected from falling into complete indigence.)

You are right that a slavery contract within this system, even if it were enforceable, wouldn't be deserving of the name. The master wouldn't be able to punish and coerce the slave using private force, but only by suing him. And the slave, even if penniless, would always have the option to walk away and simply declare bankruptcy when sued. You are also right that Philmore fails to discuss this point clearly, and this is indeed a significant problem with the essay. (I can see this myself now that I have re-read it after several years.)

Now, where we disagree is our view of the relationship between the above-described modern liberal legal framework and libertarian principles. You seem to take this framework as given, and understand libertarian principles only as implying freedom of contract within this framework. However, I consider the rules of this framework as themselves highly un-libertarian, and significantly limiting the freedom of contract. It has always seemed to me that the principles of self-ownership and freedom of contract -- if one accepts them axiomatically; I'm not saying I do -- imply that one should be able to enter a contract where one gives the other party the permission to use private force to enforce its terms, and where one may take up liabilities and obligations without the safety net of comfortable bankruptcy. (Such contracts, at least in some forms, used to be legal and widespread in the Western world. Notably, North America was settled to a large degree by indentured servants, whose contracts allowed the masters to use private force to prevent them from escaping and coerce them into obedience.)

Therefore, I see the prohibition of such contracts as just one of the many historical steps towards the modern institutions of paternalistic regulatory state and welfare state that libertarians otherwise decry. I really don't see any principled difference between eliminating people's freedom to take up obligations that can't be evaded with a comfortable bankruptcy and any other paternalistic regulation. (When libertarians yearn for some golden age of classical liberalism, which they imagine roughly as freedom of contract within the limits of the above described modern liberal legal framework, they are at best yearning for a brief and transient phase of the historical descent down this slippery slope.)

Comment author: Andreas_Giger 03 July 2012 07:36:47PM *  18 points [-]

I'll bite:

The U.S. government deliberately provoked the attack on Pearl Harbour through diplomacy and/or fleet redeployment, and it was not by chance that the carriers of the U.S. Pacific Fleet weren't at port when the attack happened.

Very confident. (90-95%)

By the way, the reason I assume I am personally more rational about this than the LW average is that there are lots of US Americans around here, and I have sufficient evidence to believe that people tend to become less rational if a topic centrally involves a country they are emotionally involved with or whose educational system they went through.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 04 July 2012 01:21:38AM *  15 points [-]

Regarding the first part, the truth of that statement critically depends on how exactly you define "provoke." For some reasonable definitions, the statement is almost certainly true; for others, probably not.

As for the second part (the supposed intentional dispersion of the carriers), I don't think that's plausible. If anything, the U.S. would have been in a similar position, i.e. at war with Japan with guaranteed victory, even if every single ship under the U.S. flag magically got sunk on December 7, 1941. So even if there was a real conspiracy involved, it would have made no sense to add this large and risky element to it just to make the eventual victory somewhat quicker.

Also, your heuristic about bias is broken. In the Western world outside of the U.S., people are on average, if anything, only more inclined to believe the official historical narrative about WW2.

Comment author: RobinHanson 03 July 2012 11:56:04AM 3 points [-]

Most of those other people are doing useful tasks, without which people wouldn't get nearly as much of what they want. If you don't understand our current economy, you don't have much of a prayer of understanding future ones.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 03 July 2012 04:03:07PM *  12 points [-]

I didn't say the rest weren't doing useful tasks. On the contrary, I meant to imply that if only a fraction of the workforce works on providing subsistence directly and obviously, it doesn't mean that the rest are useless rent-seekers.

(That said, I probably do have a more pessimistic view than you about the amount of rent-seeking and makework that takes place presently.)

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 02 July 2012 10:30:18PM 4 points [-]

I've never been able to figure out what sort of work ems would do once everything available has been turned into computronium. A few of them would do maintenance on the physical substrate, but all I can imagine for the rest is finding ways to steal computational resources from each other.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 03 July 2012 02:04:04AM 11 points [-]

What are humans doing now that we need only ~2% of the workforce to grow food and ~15% to design and make stuff?

Comment author: RichardKennaway 02 July 2012 10:06:19AM 3 points [-]

The libertarian theory of contracts -- that you should have full freedom to enter any voluntary contract as far as your own property and rights are concerned -- sounds appealing in the abstract.

There is a certain tension between that theory and some other libertarian theories that also sound appealing in the abstract. The idea of a minimal state sounds appealing in the abstract, as does the idea that a contract transfers rights, a transfer which it is one of the few jobs of the minimal state to enforce.

"In the abstract" merely means "without having actually thought about it". When one does, one finds certain conflicts between these ideas. The larger the transfer of rights, the more it demands of the state to enforce it. You cannot have maximal contracts maximally enforced by a minimal state.

That a contract literally transfers the rights stated in the contract from one person to another is in fact not what a contract is, at least in Western society. If you read a contract, that might be what it looks like, but if you look at what happens as a result of signing a contract, it is not. Contracts are very rarely enforced, in the literal sense of forcing the parties to carry out their promises. (Joining the army is the only common exception.) The courts usually go no farther than imposing monetary penalties for breach of contract. In ordinary, non-libertarian states, all you risk by failing to perform on a contract is your assets and reputation. Your rights in your person are generally not transferable by any contract. That they should be seems a strange thing for a libertarian to be arguing for.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 02 July 2012 08:46:47PM *  6 points [-]

The larger the transfer of rights, the more it demands of the state to enforce it. You cannot have maximal contracts maximally enforced by a minimal state.

I disagree about this. There is a stable equilibrium in which the state is known to be fast, effective, reliable, and uncompromising in enforcing the rules, and in which transgressions are consequently extremely rare (and swiftly punished when they occur), so that the resources devoted to judiciary and law enforcement can be very small. Such an equilibrium in which little enforcement effort is necessary in practice is possible with contracts too, not just with criminal law.

(In fact, large resources devoted to law enforcement are usually a sign of the state's weakness, not strength. They indicate widespread law-breaking, which in turn indicates that a lot of people are in a position where it seems like they can get away with it -- and the state is, for whatever reason, incapable of making law enforcement more effective and pushing things towards the above described equilibrium, and instead responds by throwing more resources into the existing ineffective system.)

Contracts are very rarely enforced, in the literal sense of forcing the parties to carry out their promises. (Joining the army is the only common exception.)

That's not completely true. Specific performance orders are given by courts in other kinds of cases too, typically when the contract is about something unique, i.e. when the exact same thing can't be obtained elsewhere, like a piece of land or an artwork. (In other cases, such an order wouldn't be in the plaintiff's interest anyway, since the defendant would presumably provide the worst quality work/goods he could get away with.)

To some degree, you can even stipulate specific performance in case of breach, although I have no idea to what degree this is enforceable in different jurisdictions.

On the other hand, regarding this:

That a contract literally transfers the rights stated in the contract from one person to another is in fact not what a contract is, at least in Western society. [...] In ordinary, non-libertarian states, all you risk by failing to perform on a contract is your assets and reputation. Your rights in your person are generally not transferable by any contract. That they should be seems a strange thing for a libertarian to be arguing for.

This is basically a question of definition. If you insist on using the name "contract" only for those contracts that are enforceable in today's Western societies, fair enough. However, the following must be taken into account:

  1. The limitation that your rights in your person are not transferable by contract is just one example of the limitations I was mentioning. This limitation didn't exist (or was far weaker) even historically in Western societies, let alone in others.

  2. This limitation, while seemingly reducing to a simple statement, is by no means straightforward when you consider its implications in practice. For example, what exact types of marriage contracts would be implicitly disallowed by it? Trying to answer that question leads immediately to deep ideological clashes.

  3. This limitation, even under the broadest interpretation, is by no means the only one that exists in modern Western societies, both with regards to marriage and all other voluntary arrangements.

  4. Finally, however you turn it, this limitation is ultimately a limitation on freedom. If I'm forbidden to sell my car, this diminishes my rights in my car; similarly, if I'm forbidden to sell myself into slavery, this diminishes my rights in my person. This conclusion is very unpleasant for libertarians, but the fact is that a libertarian must make some sort of unprincipled exception to libertarian principles to disallow slavery contracts. (There is a very well written article titled "The Libertarian Case for Slavery," which was intended as satire, but there's absolutely nothing in it, save for the sneer in its last sentence, that is not perfectly logical and valid reasoning from libertarian principles.)

(Of course, it may be that for game-theoretic reasons, such limitations on freedom ultimately increase total freedom by some reasonable measure -- "freedom may be freedom to capitulate," as Schelling says. But once you admit exceptions to libertarian principles on these grounds, the slope is very slippery and steep.)

Comment author: Zack_M_Davis 02 July 2012 02:34:35AM 4 points [-]

I agree that this is possible in principle, but from what I observe in practice, libertarian arguments have extremely low weight in such trade-offs, except for the tiny minority of principled libertarians, who form a small and reasonably well-delineated cluster. When it comes to issues that are otherwise neutral and uncontroversial, people will normally default to the libertarian position. However, as soon as an issue has any bearing on ideology, tradition, religion, ethnic identity, political power, economic interests, status hierarchy, etc., etc., people normally assign near-zero weight to libertarian arguments, except insofar as they provide useful material for unprincipled rhetorical ploys.

This seems exaggerated to me (although I agree that the tendencies you mention exist and are significant). Consider, for example, the famous incident in which the American Civil Liberties Union defended a Nazi group's right to demonstrate. The ACLU was and is a non-fringe organization, and likewise, the position that "Nazism is despicable, but freedom of speech and assembly is more important than silencing Nazis" is reasonably mainstream in the United States. Similarly, the idea that "Drug use is bad, but marijuana should be legal" seems not-uncontroversial but also non-fringey.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 02 July 2012 03:26:54AM *  3 points [-]

Fair enough -- I agree that's a valid counterexample to my thesis. (I do think, however, that you overestimate the amount of principled support for free speech in the contemporary U.S. For many of its defenders, it's a matter of strategic expediency, since they are not confident that, if speech-restricting precedents were established, their side would win the subsequent political battles over whose favored speech restrictions would get instituted. In particular, many prominent ACLU-affiliated people don't seem to have any problem with the existing speech restrictions in places where their co-ideologues are firmly entrenched in power, even though they wouldn't want to establish a legal basis for such restrictions in the U.S., at least for now. But I do agree that this is one issue where there is some serious weight given to libertarian principles in the mainstream discourse.)

(I should maybe also add that I don't live in the U.S., which is a pretty extravagant outlier when it comes to the attitudes and legal norms regarding free speech, so the example didn't occur to me readily.)

That said, I still think my comments are valid when it comes to the issues of sexuality, marriage, etc. Here I really see an ideological clash fundamentally motivated by incompatible sacredness norms, with all other considerations, including libertarian principles, entering the debate only insofar as they provide useful rhetorical ammunition.

Comment author: MarkusRamikin 01 July 2012 09:09:45PM *  6 points [-]

And it's not a hard problem at all. It is in fact very simple: when people like something for ideological reasons, they will use the libertarian argument to support its legality, and when they dislike something ideologically, they will invent rationalizations for why the libertarian argument doesn't apply in this particular case.

I don't think you're solving the same problem that I am.

You seem to think (and based on your upvotes, people seem to agree for some reason) that a cynical summary of the ideological landscape is somehow an answer to anything. And sure, that is not a hard problem. I'm more interested in actual solutions and their consequences than in why people argue for them: what happens if we increase freedom thus and thus, how will this affect society and what harm will come from it as side effects?

Also I find it grating when everything gets summed up as ideology and politics. Do people only ever claim to want more freedom because they happen to be pushing some particular ideological agenda? I don't know, but personally I dislike limitations for which there isn't a good enough reason. I first started thinking about this when I was considering getting married, not when I was thinking about politics.

Likewise, are all objections to increase in freedom rationalisations? Again, I find this offensive cynicism. Maybe someone's done the math or seen how it works in another country, and sees real negative consequences?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 02 July 2012 02:55:26AM *  1 point [-]

I'm more interested in actual solutions and their consequences than in why people argue for them: what happens if we increase freedom thus and thus, how will this affect society and what harm will come from it as side effects?

If I am reading you correctly, you now seem to be saying something very different from your original comment that prompted this exchange. Yes, I certainly agree that it's a fascinating intellectual exercise to speculate on what would happen if various restrictions on freedom of contract were relaxed, in this context as well as others. However, your original comment went far beyond that -- it expressed enthusiastic support for a sweeping and blanket elimination of such restrictions, going so far as to equate such support with "sanity." Yet as I pointed out, such sweeping relaxation would, in turn, have straightforward implications that the entire mainstream public opinion nowadays would consider insane -- which position may be wrong, to be sure, but that would still make it odd to oppose it as if you were asserting something obvious and uncontroversial. I thought it would be interesting to seek some clarification on this point.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 01 July 2012 08:59:35PM 0 points [-]

Off-hand, I'd say not. What makes that the interesting part of the question, though? I don't know anyone who objects to the existence of voluntarily entered-into contracts, merely to the idea that they supersede or obviate the need for other social/legal/governmental mechanisms.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 02 July 2012 01:51:10AM *  7 points [-]

The interesting part of the question is: is there any choice a person should be allowed to make about their self or property, where they should not have the option of committing to a specific choice in advance as part of a contract?

Off-hand, I'd say not.

Really? How about these examples (given in the context of the contemporary common law jurisdictions):

  • You're allowed to commit suicide. (Assisting another person's suicide is still illegal, but legal penalties for one's own suicide attempt have been repealed for a long time.)

  • You're allowed to mutilate yourself.

  • You're allowed to act voluntarily as someone's slave or serf.

  • You're allowed to make yourself permanently available to someone for sexual acts.

  • You're allowed to remain permanently an adherent of a specific religion.

  • You're allowed to stay permanently confined to a small area, or even inside a single house.

All these are perfectly legal choices, and some of them aren't even very unusual. Do you believe that people should therefore be able to bind themselves contractually to make them?

Comment author: Zack_M_Davis 01 July 2012 11:13:54PM 4 points [-]

I conclude that there are only two possibilities: 1. The speaker is an honest libertarian. [...] 2. The speaker has an ideological vision of what the society should look like [...] He uses the libertarian argument because its implications happen to coincide with his ideological position in this particular situation, but he would never accept a libertarian argument in any other situation in which it would imply something disfavored by his ideology.

While I agree that strict adherence to libertarian principles is rare, it does not therefore follow that most appeals to libertarian principles are merely opportunistic argumentative ploys. Libertarianism is a continuum, not a boolean; it seems to me that people can simultaneously have both an ideological attachment to some particular vision of what they want society to look like, and also an ideological attachment to libertarianism, and that these conflicting desires get traded off against each other in some proportion. The end result is that people end up saying, "People should be free to do whatever they like, except x_1, x_2, ... x_n, which are obviously harmful." I agree with you that the x_i are not chosen on any sort of neutral, principled basis, but that only means that libertarian arguments have limited force, not no force. There are some things I disapprove of so strongly that I want them to be illegal, but that doesn't mean I want everything I disapprove of to be illegal.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 02 July 2012 01:24:03AM *  4 points [-]

Libertarianism is a continuum, not a boolean; it seems to me that people can simultaneously have both an ideological attachment to some particular vision of what they want society to look like, and also an ideological attachment to libertarianism, and that these conflicting desires get traded off against each other in some proportion.

I agree that this is possible in principle, but from what I observe in practice, libertarian arguments have extremely low weight in such trade-offs, except for the tiny minority of principled libertarians, who form a small and reasonably well-delineated cluster. When it comes to issues that are otherwise neutral and uncontroversial, people will normally default to the libertarian position. However, as soon as an issue has any bearing on ideology, tradition, religion, ethnic identity, political power, economic interests, status hierarchy, etc., etc., people normally assign near-zero weight to libertarian arguments, except insofar as they provide useful material for unprincipled rhetorical ploys.

This is especially true for the whole enormous cluster of controversial topics that involve sex, reproduction, marriage, and family. This is in part because these topics involve many questions of grave importance on which libertarian theory completely breaks down and can't provide any sensible answers. (For example, what should be the mutual rights and obligations between parents and children? What should be the legal age of consent? What constitutes valid adoption? What's the legal boundary between abortion/infanticide and murder? And so on -- you can squeeze out only tortured answers from libertarian principles, and yet some answers must be agreed upon, and it matters a great deal what they will be.)

However, even more importantly, the social norms on these topics in all human societies are especially heavy on what Jonathan Haidt identifies as the moral foundation of "sacredness." Again excepting the small fringe of libertarians, on these topics, none of the contemporary ideological groups takes seriously arguments based on libertarian principles, or even on cost-benefit analysis -- except insofar as such arguments may provide useful rhetorical ammunition for promoting their sacredness-based norms. (And when such arguments give answers contrary to people's sacredness intuitions, they tend to perceive them as shockingly vile or insane.)

Comment author: Strange7 01 July 2012 08:44:27PM 1 point [-]

(Suppose for example that a couple voluntarily sign a marriage contract stipulating death penalty, or even just flogging, for adultery. How can one oppose the enforcement of this contract without renouncing the libertarian principle?)

Personally I'd be okay with the flogging version. Some people are into that sort of thing. As for death... legitimate governments generally consider murder a fairly serious crime, and refuse to enforce contracts which would require illegal activity of the signatories. I'm comfortable with having the libertarian principle superceded by criminal law. The interesting part of the question is: is there any choice a person should be allowed to make about their self or property, where they should not have the option of committing to a specific choice in advance as part of a contract?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 01 July 2012 09:54:03PM *  7 points [-]

[L]egitimate governments generally consider murder a fairly serious crime, and refuse to enforce contracts which would require illegal activity of the signatories. I'm comfortable with having the libertarian principle superceded by criminal law.

Read literally, this means that you're OK with any violation of the libertarian principle, as long as this violation happens to be formally codified as part of the criminal law. Is that really your position?

Comment author: MarkusRamikin 01 July 2012 06:52:51AM *  8 points [-]

What sort of examples can you bring up of custom marital contracts that would make people scream in horror? My guess is that people would generally feel queasy about allowing legal enforcement of what looks like slavish or abusive relationships. I think this would be a genuine cause for concern, not because I don't think that people should be able to enter whatever relationships please them in principle, but because in practice I'm concerned about people being coerced into signing contracts harmful to themselves. Not sure where I'd draw the line exactly; this is probably a Hard Problem.

I simply want more freedom to do things in ways that suit me and the other person as long as it doesn't harm anyone else. There may be gotchas and necessary qualifications once you get into the details, but the basic idea I think is hardly outrageous; surely there is at least room to move from the current stale state of affairs in that direction.

So I guess I don't believe the statement I quoted earlier entirely without qualification. Still, I like it because it recognises the fact that the current situation with marriage is ridiculous and it doesn't, in principle, have to be that way. That recognition, as opposed to taking existing absurdities for granted without even thinking about them like most people do, is what I was referring to as a rare dose of sanity:

"Yes," Harry said. "It's what you do to bad teachers. You fire them. Then you hire a better teacher instead. You don't have unions or tenure here, right?"

Fred and George were frowning in much the same way that hunter-gatherer tribal elders might frown if you tried to tell them about calculus.

"I don't know," said Fred after a while. "I never thought about that."

"Me neither," said George.

"Yeah," said Harry, "I get that a lot.

Your second paragraph serves... I'm not sure what purpose. To tell me that the idea is politically unfeasable? I know that.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 01 July 2012 08:07:07PM *  9 points [-]

I think this would be a genuine cause for concern, not because I don't think that people should be able to enter whatever relationships please them in principle, but because in practice I'm concerned about people being coerced into signing contracts harmful to themselves. Not sure where I'd draw the line exactly; this is probably a Hard Problem.

Well, there you go. Any restriction on freedom of contract can be rationalized as preventing something "harmful," one way or another.

And it's not a hard problem at all. It is in fact very simple: when people like something for ideological reasons, they will use the libertarian argument to support its legality, and when they dislike something ideologically, they will invent rationalizations for why the libertarian argument doesn't apply in this particular case. The only exceptions are actual libertarians, for whom the libertarian argument itself carries ideological weight, but they are an insignificant fringe minority. For everyone else, the libertarian argument is just a useful rhetorical tool to be employed and recognized only when it produces favorable conclusions.

In particular, when it comes to marriage, outside of the aforementioned libertarian fringe, there is a total and unanimous agreement that marriage is not a contract whose terms can be set freely, but rather an institution that is entered voluntarily, but whose terms are dictated (and can be changed at any subsequent time) by the state. (Even the prenuptial agreements allow only very limited and uncertain flexibility.) Therefore, when I hear a libertarian argument applied to marriage, I conclude that there are only two possibilities:

  1. The speaker is an honest libertarian. However, this means either that he doesn't realize how wildly radical the implications of the libertarian position are, or that he actually supports these wild radical implications. (Suppose for example that a couple voluntarily sign a marriage contract stipulating death penalty, or even just flogging, for adultery. How can one oppose the enforcement of this contract without renouncing the libertarian principle?)

  2. The speaker has an ideological vision of what the society should look like, and in particular, what the government-dictated universal terms of marriage should be (both with regards to the institution of marriage itself and its tremendous implications on all the other social institutions). He uses the libertarian argument because its implications happen to coincide with his ideological position in this particular situation, but he would never accept a libertarian argument in any other situation in which it would imply something disfavored by his ideology.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Thoughts on moral intuitions
Comment author: MarkusRamikin 30 June 2012 06:20:45AM *  5 points [-]

People should have the right to sign an explicit, customisable contract governing their rights and duties as well as terms of dissolution in it.

Thank you for my daily dose of exposure to sanity. I needed that.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 30 June 2012 10:35:39PM *  14 points [-]

However, are you sure that you understand just how radical the above statement is? The libertarian theory of contracts -- that you should have full freedom to enter any voluntary contract as far as your own property and rights are concerned -- sounds appealing in the abstract. (Robin Hanson would probably say "in far mode.") Yet on closer consideration, it implies all sorts of possible (and plausible) arrangements that would make most people scream with horror.

In any realistic human society, there are huge limitations on what sorts of contracts you are allowed to enter, much narrower than what any simple quasi-libertarian theory would imply. Except for a handful of real honest libertarians, who are inevitably marginal and without influence, whenever you see someone make a libertarian argument that some arrangement should be permitted, it is nearly always part of an underhanded rhetorical ploy in which the underlying libertarian principle is switched on and off depending on whether its application is some particular case produces a conclusion favorable to the speaker's ideology.

Comment author: [deleted] 29 June 2012 05:24:13PM *  7 points [-]

Related to: List of public drafts on LessWrong

Is meritocracy inhumane?

Consider how meritocracy leeches the lower and middle class of highly capable people and how this increases the actual differences both in culture and in ability between the various parts of a society. This then increases the gap between them. It seems to make sense that ceteris paribus they will live more segregated from each other than ever before.

Now merit has many dimensions, but lets take the example of a trait that helps you with virtually anything. Highly intelligent people have positive externalities they don't fully capture. Always using the best man for the job should produce more wealth for society as a whole. Also it appeals to our sense of fairness. Isn't it better that the most competent man get the job, than the one with the highest title of nobility or from the right ethnic group or the one who got the winning lottery ticket?

Let us leave aside problems with utilitarianism for the sake of argument and ask does this automatically mean we have a net gain in utility? The answer seems to be no. A transfer of wealth and quality of life not just from the less deserving to the more deserving but from the lower and lower middle class to the upper classes. If people basically get the position in society they deserve in life they are also costing people around them positive (or negative) externalities. Meritocratic societies have proven fabulously good at creating wealth and because of our impulses nearly all of them seem to have instututed expensive welfare programs. But consider what welfare is in the real world, a centralized attempt often lacking in feedback or flexibility, it can never match the local positive externalities of competent/nice/smart people solving problems they see around themselves. Those people simply don't exist any more in those social groups! If someone was trying to get pareto optimal solutions this seems incredibly silly and harmful!

With humans at least centralized efforts don't ever seem to be as efficient a way to help them as would just settling a good mix of talented poor with them. Now obviously meritocracy produces incredible amounts of wealth and this is probably a good think in itself, but since we can't yet transform that wealth into happiness and Western societies have proven incapable of turning it into something as vital to psychological well being as safety from violence, are we really experiencing gains in utility? Now some might dispute the safety claim by noting that murder rates are lower in the US today than in the 1960s. But this is an illusion, the rate of violent assault is higher, its just that the fraction of violent assaults that result in death have fallen significantly because of advances in trauma medicine. London today is worse at suppressing crime than was the London of 1900s despite the former presumably having less wealth that could be used to do this than the latter. I find it telling that even advances in technology and erosion of privacy brought about by technology, for example CCTV camera surveillance, don't seem enough to counteract this. But I'm getting into Moldbuggery here.

Now if society is on the brink of starvation maybe meritocracy is a sad fact of life but in rich modern society where no one is starving and the main cost of being poor is being stuck living with dysfunctional poor people can we really say this is a net utilitarian gain? Recall that greater divergence between the managing and the managed class means that the problem of information and the principal-agent problems are getting worse.

Middle Class society seems incompatible with meritocracy. As does any kind of egalitarianism.

[unfinished draft]

In response to comment by [deleted] on Open Thread, June 16-30, 2012
Comment author: Vladimir_M 29 June 2012 08:26:01PM 11 points [-]

I see at least two other major problems with meritocracy.

First, a meritocracy opens for talented people not only positions of productive economic and intellectual activity, but also positions of rent-seeking. So while it's certainly great that meritocracy in science has given us von Neumann, meritocracy in other areas of life has at the same time given us von Neumanns of rent-seeking, who have taken the practices of rent-seeking to an unprecedented extent and to ever more ingenious, intellectually involved, and emotionally appealing rationalizations. (In particular, this is also true of those areas of science that have been captured by rent-seekers.)

Worse yet, the wealth and status captured by the rent-seekers are, by themselves, the smaller problem here. The really bad problem is that these ingenious rationalizations for rent-seeking, once successfully sold to the intellectual public, become a firmly entrenched part of the respectable public opinion -- and since they are directly entangled with power and status, questioning them becomes a dangerous taboo violation. (And even worse, as it always is with humans, the most successful elite rent-seekers will be those who honestly internalize these beliefs, thus leading to a society headed by a truly delusional elite.) I believe that this is one of the main mechanisms behind our civilization's drift away from reality on numerous issues for the last century or so.

Second, in meritocracy, unless you're at the very top, it's hard to avoid feeling like a failure, since you'll always end up next to people whose greater success clearly reminds you of your inferior merit.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 29 June 2012 05:15:45AM *  22 points [-]

When you receive advice, it must fall into one of these categories:

  1. The advice is worthless or even outright bad.

  2. The advice is valuable, but it's common knowledge, or at least can be obtained from public information in a straightforward way.

  3. The advice is valuable, and it's not common knowledge, nor can it be obtained from public information in any straightforward way.

Now, if you believe you're receiving advice that is in category (3), you must ask yourself what makes you so special that you are privy to this information. This leads to the following heuristics:

  • If the advice is in category (2), it is likely to be good if the source is reputable. For example, a book or website about programming written by a reputable author is likely to give you good advice on how to program. (But note that while it certainly adds value in terms of a convenient and attractive presentation, such a source doesn't give any significant information that wouldn't be available from other public sources.)

  • If the advice purports to be in category (3), and yet the source of information is public (e.g. a book or website, even a non-free one), it's almost certainly bunk. The only exception is if the message is highly unpopular or counter-intuitive, and somehow you know that you have overcome biases that prevent most people from evaluating it correctly, which is very difficult and rare. For example, nearly any book that claims to bring special wisdom about investment, career, relationships, etc. is bunk.

  • If the advice comes from a person on a private occasion, then there are several steps that you need to do. First, does this person show clear indications of the relevant knowledge and competence? If not, it's likely bunk for obvious reasons. Second, is the advice in category (2) or (3)? If it's (2), it's probably good, though it still pays off to check against other sources of information. If it purports to be (3), then you need to do the third, and most difficult evaluation: does this person have the motivation for an extraordinary degree of altruism towards you? If not, it's likely bunk, or otherwise they wouldn't grant you this privilege. If yes, for example if you're getting advice from your parents, then it is probably highly valuable.

One common failure mode is when people believe they're giving you advice of type (3), but in reality, their motivation for altruism towards you is weaker than their motivation for saying things that have high signaling value (and omitting things that have negative such value). This is one danger of socializing with people who are higher-status and more accomplished than you -- you'll be tempted to take their advice seriously, but in reality, even if they are giving it with good intentions, it's likely to be heavily censored and distorted so as to maximize its signaling value.

(This is exacerbated by the fact that good no-nonsense advice on topics that involve any aspects of human social behavior, both personal and professional, tends to sound crass, disreputable, cynical, or worse.)

Comment author: grouchymusicologist 29 June 2012 04:26:50AM 0 points [-]

Yeah, but it might be useful to know what the person in question considers to have been the crucial aspects of their procedure, as opposed to merely ancillary aspects. This won't be failproof but will at least have better than chance odds of contributing something useful to the advice.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 29 June 2012 04:57:45AM *  5 points [-]

This won't be failproof but will at least have better than chance odds of contributing something useful to the advice.

That depends on whether this person is motivated by a real desire to benefit you, or a desire to sound in a way that has maximum signaling value. (Note that the latter can be the case even when people honestly believe they're doing the former, unless they have a special and extraordinary degree of altruism towards you, which is typically the case only for close family and friends.)

Comment author: grouchymusicologist 29 June 2012 03:18:46AM 3 points [-]

For starters, I'd say it would be best to take advice from people whose careers and accomplishments are to some extent a matter of public record. Then you can evaluate (a) whether they seem to have actually accomplished the things they're trying to teach you to accomplish, and (b) whether they seem to have accomplished those things via the procedure they're encouraging you to follow. If yes to both, then you might proceed further.

In that case, the problem of making good advice seem too easy might come down to a couple of things. First, you want to see a good step-by-step procedure where you can really understand each step and imagine exactly what you'd have to do to achieve it. Second, it would be a red flag if any of those steps seem to be "magic" steps such as "Have a brilliant, lucrative idea for a business."

Comment author: Vladimir_M 29 June 2012 04:10:41AM 4 points [-]

For starters, I'd say it would be best to take advice from people whose careers and accomplishments are to some extent a matter of public record. Then you can evaluate (a) whether they seem to have actually accomplished the things they're trying to teach you to accomplish, and (b) whether they seem to have accomplished those things via the procedure they're encouraging you to follow. If yes to both, then you might proceed further.

If you are privy to the information necessary to evaluate (b), you can just look at it directly and skip listening to the advice altogether.

Comment author: Mark_Lu 27 June 2012 09:00:53AM 0 points [-]

Because people are running on similar neural architectures? So all people would likely experience similar pleasure from e.g. some types of food (though not necessarily identical). The more we understand about how different types of pleasure are implemented by the brain, the more precisely we'd be able to tell whether two people are experiencing similar levels/types of pleasure. When we get to brain simulations these might get arbitrarily precise.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 27 June 2012 02:59:03PM 4 points [-]

You make it sound as if there is some signal or register in the brain whose value represents "pleasure" in a straightforward way. To me it seems much more plausible that "pleasure" reduces to a multitude of variables that can't be aggregated into a single-number index except through some arbitrary convention. This seems to me likely even within a single human mind, let alone when different minds (especially of different species) are compared.

That said, I do agree that the foundation of pure hedonic utilitarianism is not as obviously flawed as that of preference utilitarianism. The main problem I see with it is that it implies wireheading as the optimal outcome.

Comment author: Lukas_Gloor 26 June 2012 01:40:59PM 0 points [-]

This, in my opinion, is by itself a decisive argument against utilitarianism.

You mean against preference-utilitarianism.

The vast majority of utilitarians I know are hedonistic utilitarians, where this criticism doesn't apply at all. (For some reason LW seems to be totally focused on preference-utilitarianism, as I've noticed by now.) As for the criticism itself: I agree! Preference-utiltiarians can come up with sensible estimates and intuitive judgements, but when you actually try to show that in theory there is one right answer, you just find a huge mess.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 27 June 2012 01:09:16AM 0 points [-]

Why do you believe that interpersonal comparison of pleasure is straightforward? To me this doesn't seem to be the case.

Comment author: Will_Sawin 26 June 2012 10:08:58PM 0 points [-]

Intuitive utilitarian ethics are very helpful in everyday life.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 26 June 2012 11:09:46PM 2 points [-]

Could you provide some concrete examples?

Comment author: Jayson_Virissimo 26 June 2012 05:21:09AM 3 points [-]

(If someone believes that there is a way how these interpersonally comparable utilities could actually be grounded in physical reality, I'd be extremely curious to hear it.)

I asked about this before in the context of one of Julia Galef's posts about utilitarian puzzles and received several responses. What is your evaluation of the responses (personally, I was very underwhelmed)?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 26 June 2012 06:36:50AM *  2 points [-]

The only reasonable attempt at a response in that sub-thread is this comment. I don't think the argument works, though. The problem is not just disagreement between different people's intuitions, but also the fact that humans don't do anything like utility comparisons when it comes to decisions that affect other people. What people do in reality is intuitive folk ethics, which is basically virtue ethics, and has very little concern with utility comparisons.

That said, there are indeed some intuitions about utility comparison, but they are far too weak, underspecified, and inconsistent to serve as basis for extracting an interpersonal utility function, even if we ignore disagreements between people.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 26 June 2012 01:30:36AM *  9 points [-]

There is no natural scale on which to compare utility functions. [...] Unless your theory comes with a particular [interpersonal utility comparison] method, the only way of summing these utilities is to do an essentially arbitrary choice for each individual before summing. Thus standard total utilitarianism is an arbitrary sum of ill defined, non-natural objects.

This, in my opinion, is by itself a decisive argument against utilitarianism. Without these ghostly "utilities" that are supposed to be measurable and comparable interpersonally, the whole concept doesn't even being to make sense. And yet the problem is commonly ignored routinely and nonchalantly, even here, where people pride themselves on fearless and consistent reductionism.

Note that the problem is much more fundamental than just the mathematical difficulties and counter-intuitive implications of formal utilitarian theories. Even if there were no such problems, it would still be the case that the whole theory rests on an entirely imaginary foundation. Ultimately, it's a system that postulates some metaphysical entities and a categorical moral imperative stated in terms of the supposed state of these entities. Why would we privilege that over systems that postulate metaphysical entities and associated categorical imperatives of different kinds, like e.g. traditional religions?

(If someone believes that there is a way how these interpersonally comparable utilities could actually be grounded in physical reality, I'd be extremely curious to hear it.)

In response to comment by [deleted] on Conspiracy Theories as Agency Fictions
Comment author: JoshuaZ 10 June 2012 04:39:45PM 2 points [-]

One thing that seems relevant here as a distinguishing factor which helps point out some but by no means all "conspiracy theories" is that often conspiracy theories as such are long term and overarching. So for example, the Bavarian Illuminati were founded in the 1700s. Thus, a conspiracy about the Illuminati will claim that they have been running things behind the scenes for a long time. That drastically reduces their chances. Moreover, while there are many such conspiracy theories, they often label the group behind the curtain differently. Heuristically, conspiracy theories satisfying such properties should be assigned a very low value.

This doesn't really help though for quite a few conspiracy theories that are commonly ridiculed (e.g. Apollo hoax claims, and 9/11 Truther claims).

Comment author: Vladimir_M 12 June 2012 01:34:18AM 9 points [-]

Some significant counterexamples to your heuristic are the criminal organizations with old historical roots, such as the Camorra or the Cosa Nostra. Their operations have been deeply conspiratorial and at the same time immensely influential, at least at the level of local politics, with institutional continuity of roughly the same vintage as that ascribed to the Illuminati.

Comment author: Ghatanathoah 06 June 2012 11:06:40PM -1 points [-]

Sorry to take so long getting back to you, I've had internet problems all week.

Now, it certainly isn't a source of any pleasure to me when I observe that in North America, and especially in many parts of the U.S., the class system has been evolving for several decades in a direction where there is an increasingly wide and severe chasm between the growing underclass and the middle classes

I'm somewhat familiar with Charles Murray's research on this subject, I assume you are too. But he has argued that the middle-class' efforts to separate themselves from the underclass make the situation worse, not better, because they make it harder to middle class culture to spread to the underclass, and he has advocated attempting to close the chasm in various ways. By contrast in your original comment you seemed distressed that it was so financially difficult for the middle class to separate themselves from the underclass and I got the impression you wished it was easier. Do you disagree with Murray, or was I drawing an incorrect inference from your comment? Feel free not to answer if you think doing so would break the "no discussing politics" rule.

You characterize my statements as "off-putting," but you don't indicate what exactly you find inaccurate about them. Do you believe that I'm exaggerating the above described phenomenon? Or do you think only that I should be expressing myself more diplomatically about it?

What I find off-putting is primarily that they sound rather political and we aren't supposed to discuss politics at Less Wrong. If you were making the point at some politics forum I wouldn't necessarily find it off-putting. Admittedly this sort of discussion is something of a gray area since it's hard to discuss this type human social behavior without mentioning ideas that are parts of major political ideologies. I am reticent about voicing my personal opinion on the accuracy of your description is because I'm afraid I'm skirting the edge of political discussion already.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 08 June 2012 03:03:54AM 7 points [-]

[Murray] has argued that the middle-class' efforts to separate themselves from the underclass make the situation worse, not better, because they make it harder to middle class culture to spread to the underclass, and he has advocated attempting to close the chasm in various ways. By contrast in your original comment you seemed distressed that it was so financially difficult for the middle class to separate themselves from the underclass and I got the impression you wished it was easier. Do you disagree with Murray, or was I drawing an incorrect inference from your comment?

Well, even if we assume for the sake of the argument that it exacerbates the problem, this still doesn't mean that it's irrational for individual middle-class people to separate themselves from the underclass. All that this assumption would imply is that there is a tragedy-of-the-commons effect. But this doesn't change the perspective and the incentives faced by individuals at all.

I am reticent about voicing my personal opinion on the accuracy of your description is because I'm afraid I'm skirting the edge of political discussion already.

Don't worry. As long as your comments are polite, well-argued, and made in good faith, you won't break any social norms here. Especially if the discussion is about general and long-standing social issues, and not about the ongoing political controversies from the headlines.

Comment author: juliawise 01 June 2012 01:40:27PM 2 points [-]

I don't think he was painting it as a crocodile pit

How do you interpret "it means being thrown, together with your kids, right into the dreaded underclass in which all sorts of frightful social pathologies are rampant. It's like precariously holding onto a rope above a pond full of crocodiles" ?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 02 June 2012 07:38:34AM *  9 points [-]

I think you are being unfair when you imply that I identify poor people (i.e. those who are merely not affluent) with the underclass (i.e. those social groups that display high levels of dysfunction). In a place where poor people are generally non-dysfunctional, so that a drastic fall in economic status means only that one will have to live frugally among others doing the same, clearly none of what I wrote applies. However, in a place with a large dysfunctional underclass, a similar fall in economic status is a much more dreadful prospect for someone who is used to the norms and customs of the middle class.

Now, I probably should have omitted the "above a pond full of crocodiles" part in the above quote. It came out when I was looking for a vivid metaphor for the situation of people who struggle to keep themselves above a certain level of economic status below which bad things will happen, with the crocodiles symbolizing a general feeling of fear and danger, rather than being a straightforward metaphor for underclass people. Now I realize that the way I wrote it, the latter reading is natural, but it wasn't my intention. (It also suggests incorrectly that the main problem with falling into the underclass is the physical danger of crime.)

Comment author: Ghatanathoah 01 June 2012 01:44:21AM *  -1 points [-]

I'd be curious to hear about any contrary evidence, though.

Perhaps another reason peer effects don't show up is that situations consisting of one kid of upper class background completely surrounded by lower class kids and having no other options but them as a peer group are relatively rare. In most cases there are a number of other middle classish kids in the same boat to form a peer group with.

I base this conclusion on two pieces of evidence, the first is anecdotal, my own school background. My school had a variety of kids that included a large amount of lower class kids from a nearby trailer park and a large amount of respectable kids. For the most part nothing the trailer park kids did rubbed off on me or any of the other respectable kids because we rarely socialized with them, we naturally tended to interact with the kids we had something in common with (although most of the trailer park kids were friendly enough in class, I can't really say that most of them were unpleasant to be around). The only long-term impact they had on me was to help me realize that the underclass are usually trying to be nice people, even if they fail at it a lot.

The second piece consist of articles (mostly by Thomas Sowell) I've read about various immigrant communities in poor neighborhoods and how kids from groups with middle-class values (i.e. Chinese, Jewish immigrants) tended to cluster together and interact with each other and not the poorer kids around them. So it seems plausible to me that the ability to form small clusters of like-minded peers might mitigate peer effects.

Also, I second jsalvatier's points about some of your comments having a "political" feel. In particular it seems like you have a tendency to work in angry-seeming statements about how awful and unpleasant poor people are that can be rather off-putting, to say the least.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 02 June 2012 06:32:46AM 6 points [-]

In particular it seems like you have a tendency to work in angry-seeming statements about how awful and unpleasant poor people are that can be rather off-putting, to say the least.

I didn't say anything about poor people as such. In fact, I would bet that I have more experience with actually being poor myself than most people here (and almost anyone here who is posting from a first-world country).

Now, it certainly isn't a source of any pleasure to me when I observe that in North America, and especially in many parts of the U.S., the class system has been evolving for several decades in a direction where there is an increasingly wide and severe chasm between the growing underclass and the middle classes, with rampant social dysfunction among the underclass, and increasing correlation between being poor and belonging to the underclass. (Note that I distinguish merely being poor, i.e. non-affluent, and belonging to the underclass, which is dysfunctional by definition.) But that's what the actual situation seems to be.

You characterize my statements as "off-putting," but you don't indicate what exactly you find inaccurate about them. Do you believe that I'm exaggerating the above described phenomenon? Or do you think only that I should be expressing myself more diplomatically about it?

Comment author: RichardKennaway 31 May 2012 05:12:04PM *  1 point [-]

As for heritability studies, you are certainly right that there is a lot of shoddy work, and by necessity they make a whole lot of wildly simplifying assumptions. If there existed only a handful of such studies, one would be well advised not to take them very seriously. However, the amount of data that has been gathered in recent decades is just too overwhelming to dismiss,

Piling up shoddy evidence does not make good evidence. (And it still doesn't if you -- that's the impersonal "you", not you in particular -- call it "Bayesian evidence".)

especially taking into account that often there have been considerable ideological incentives to support the opposite conclusions.

There are considerable ideological incentives on both sides.

The Sesardic book you recommended is in my university library, but when I went to look at it, I found at least a shelf-foot of books on the subject, some (I could tell just from the authors' names) on one side, some on the other. So I didn't bother looking any further and left all the books there. I could read Sesardic saying what you say he says, but then I could read Kamin arguing the opposite, and in that situation, to form a view of my own with any real basis I'd have to research the subject enough to write a book of my own. I have other things to do. Such is the nature of controversies: they cannot be settled by saying "read this book".

One observation though, that I haven't seen made on either side. Failing to find strong genetic causes for something does not imply that it's the environment; failing to find strong environmental causes does not imply that it's the genes; failing to find either does not imply that it's the interaction of genes and environment. I believe I've seen (but no cites) all three wrong arguments being made from time to time. All that failing to find the causes implies is that we have failed to find the causes.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 02 June 2012 05:54:49AM *  6 points [-]

There are considerable ideological incentives on both sides.

I don't think it can be reasonably argued that ideological incentives and pressures have been equally strong in both directions.

[T]o form a view of my own with any real basis I'd have to research the subject enough to write a book of my own.

At one point, I spent quite a bit of time trying to make some sense of these controversies, and based on what I've found, I disagree with this. Even though my initial bias back then was strongly against hereditarianism, it quickly became apparent to me that the writings of prominent anti-hereditarians raise many more red flags of kinds that are readily apparent even to a reader without an in-depth knowledge of the subject.

Now, of course, we may disagree about this when it comes to this particular topic. But as a more general point, I think it's neither necessary nor useful to approach controversies with the attitude that one must suspend judgement unless one is an expert. Often there is strong evidence in favor of one or the other side that can be correctly evaluated even if one has only a casual familiarity with the subject.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 29 May 2012 09:14:36PM 3 points [-]

If mortgage interest is tax-deductible but rent isn't, then you have to pay higher rent in order for it to be converted into an interest payment that would come out of pretax income. I think this is how Michael Vassar said the market got so messed up, though I don't know if I'm correctly attributing it to him, or if the notion is unique to him (I expect not).

Comment author: Vladimir_M 31 May 2012 03:27:49PM *  6 points [-]

There are two puzzling observations here, though:

  1. In booming real estate markets, rent may in fact be cheaper than the interest on the equivalent house price even considering the tax break. I suppose this is because people count on appreciation, but we know how good that assumption is.

  2. The lack of mortgage interest tax breaks in Canada doesn't make people's attitudes towards renting vs. buying any different than in the U.S. The only observable effect, as far as I know, is that Canadians on average struggle to pay off their mortgages more quickly.

Comment author: Douglas_Knight 30 May 2012 03:28:50PM 2 points [-]

In the US, the large majority of mortgages are fixed rate. Until about 10 years ago, virtually all were. I think mortgages are a lot more popular in the US than in Europe. I'm a bit surprised that fixed rate mortgages haven't spread into Canada simply by proximity. Maybe they're propped up by Fannie Mae.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 31 May 2012 03:19:15PM *  2 points [-]

I have no idea what the ultimate reasons for it are, but in Canada, I don't think it's even possible to fix the rate for more than ten years. When Canadians speak of "fixed rate," they typically mean fixing it for only five years or so.

Comment author: jsalvatier 29 May 2012 03:45:39PM 1 point [-]

At least in the US, there is a big subsidy for homeowning in that you can deduct the interest on you mortgage (I think this only applies to your first home ).

Comment author: Vladimir_M 30 May 2012 04:40:51AM *  4 points [-]

I wasn't aware that the tax breaks on mortgage interest were so straightforward in the U.S. Here in Canada nothing similar exists.

There seems to be an interesting natural experiment here -- in Canada, even though there is no such deduction, people's attitudes and behavior with regards to renting vs. buying are still more or less the same as in the U.S. (In fact, the recent crash has probably left Americans less eager to buy on average.) So while the tax break changes the math in favor of buying significantly for people in high tax brackets, it looks like this isn't the crucial factor motivating people to buy in practice.

Comment author: Nornagest 29 May 2012 08:14:38PM *  -1 points [-]

That's... seriously counterintuitive to me. I'm certainly not deeply embedded in parenting culture, and my childhood memories date to the early 1990s as well as being unusual in some ways, but I'm skeptical of drawing strong conclusions from an advocacy site. What else are you basing this on?

I would just ask my relatives about parenting standards, but unfortunately they're divided between having very young and adult children. And that's a pretty small and biased sample anyway.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 30 May 2012 02:55:27AM 3 points [-]

What else are you basing this on?

Just common everyday observation of people's attitudes. (I'm not a partisan of the FRK approach; in fact, I have no kids as of yet, and I'm still not quite sure what to think about it.)

Comment author: waveman 29 May 2012 10:31:18PM *  1 point [-]

It's interesting to see that the common-sense view is now that buying a house is a bad idea. Just a few short years ago anyone questioning the wisdom of buying a house was seen as mentally deficient, if not downright evil.

This just as prices have reverted close to fair value and buying is starting to make a lot of sense compared to renting. [As long as you have the capacity to pay the loan and you are not likely to move soon.]

This I take to be a sign we are close to the bottom in housing.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 30 May 2012 02:24:46AM 4 points [-]

This I take to be a sign we are close to the bottom in housing.

Absent some very extraordinary insider information, there's never any good reason to believe that. At any moment, prices are where they are because they could go either way.

Comment author: asr 29 May 2012 06:32:37AM *  2 points [-]

Comparing monthly costs is a bit misleading. There are a whole bunch of less-direct costs and benefits to ownership. A bunch of these depend on your estimation of future economic conditions and of your future desires.

1) If you own a house, you're incurring the risk that you have to move for personal or professional reasons, and then can't easily sell. Landlords typically don't have to sell on short notice -- it's perfectly possible to be an absentee landlord. Not an absentee resident.

2) As a landlord, you can potentially hold the house as one asset in a portfolio. As a homeowner, you've locked up a lot of your potential capital in that high-risk illiquid asset; you're much more exposed if property values go down.

On the flip side:

1) Residents with a mortgage get a tax break that landlords don't.

2) Being an owner means you don't have the risk of future rent increases, and can profit if property values go up.

3) Being an owner entitles you to make structural or other changes -- repainting, say -- that a tenant can't easily.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 29 May 2012 03:53:36PM *  1 point [-]

Being an owner means you don't have the risk of future rent increases...

That is true, but as far as I can tell, rent increases don't follow soaring house prices during real estate booms. Rather, the price to rent ratio tends to go out of whack. (Check out these graphs -- I can't vouch for the accuracy of their numbers, but they are consistent with what I observe on the ground. Since I've been renting my current house, my rent hasn't gone up by a single cent, not even to compensate for inflation, while the house prices where I live have gone up by something like 40%.)

Moreover, the standard ways in which mortgages are done leave one exposed to the risk of future interest rates increasing, and they can go up much faster and higher than rent. (And as far as I can tell, one must pay a huge premium to get a permanent fixed rate and avoid playing this financial equivalent of Russian roulette.)

Comment author: [deleted] 29 May 2012 08:27:22AM 0 points [-]

In the contemporary North America, buying a house definitely looks to me like a raw deal.

In US, a 3000-dollar-per-month mortgage lowers your taxable income by 36000 dollars. The standard deduction for a married couple (perhaps renting a house for 3000/mo) is 12000. Can't this go a longer way toward explaining it than peer pressure?

Of course, property taxes are high in good school districts.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 29 May 2012 03:02:58PM *  9 points [-]

Honestly, I think that for the overwhelming majority of people, these tax issues are way over their heads. (I have no confidence that I understand them myself. In finance, reliable and accessible information is very hard to find.) So I think that such considerations, while not completely irrelevant, are easily trumped by the combination of peer pressure, deeply ingrained but obsolete folk wisdom, the sheer emotional appeal of home ownership, the intuitively appealing but fallacious view that renting means giving away money while paying a mortgage means saving it, and the irrational optimism about future trends in house prices (which has abated in recent years in the U.S. but is still rampant in Canada).

On the other hand, the counterargument about asset diversification seems to me unassailable. Putting all your eggs into one basket is correctly considered as a crazy financial strategy, and a fortiori, putting a bunch of borrowed eggs along with them is crazier still. Yet houses are somehow considered an exception.

[Edit to add: Looking at this a bit more, I realize I didn't even know there was such a straightforward tax deduction for mortgage interest in the U.S. However, this only strengthens my point, since no such thing exists in Canada, but people still think and act the same way.]

Comment author: TheOtherDave 29 May 2012 04:49:19AM 7 points [-]

In the contemporary North America, buying a house definitely looks to me like a raw deal.

So, perhaps this is a sign of how brainwashed by the status quo I am, but I don't see how this is obvious, nor indeed how it could be obvious, given that everyone who is renting a house is renting it from someone who bought it, who is presumably not losing money on the deal. (Or is that a false presumption? Do landlords typically spend more to purchase and maintain their property than they make in rental income? How could that possibly be true?)

So I would love some more explanation here. Is the idea here that buying a house N years ago was a good idea, but buying one in 2012 is not?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 29 May 2012 07:09:08AM *  22 points [-]

[E]veryone who is renting a house is renting it from someone who bought it, who is presumably not losing money on the deal. (Or is that a false presumption? Do landlords typically spend more to purchase and maintain their property than they make in rental income? How could that possibly be true?)

You can also ask a different question. If you borrow money to buy a house, you must find a lender willing to lend you at some interest rate. The interest rate is nothing but the price of renting money. So if it costs less to borrow (i.e. rent) the money to buy a house than to just rent the house directly, then how can the lender possibly be willing to lend you the money instead of investing it into a house himself and earning a rent higher than your interest?

When I make this argument, people usually try to argue that somehow you profit from buying by building equity with time. But if the money rent, i.e. interest, is equal to the house rent, then to build equity, you must make payments to the lender above this basic rent/interest rate -- otherwise you'll just keep renting the same amount of money indefinitely. And if you rent the house instead of making these higher payments, you can save and invest this difference, with the same positive effect on your net worth (which will also have an effect equivalent to the reduction in payments as the principal gets lower). Of course, this isn't true if the interest is lower than the rent, but then we get to the above question of why anyone would be so irrational as to lend at such terms. It also isn't true if the house price grows faster than any alternative investment -- but even ignoring the lessons from recent history, this again gets us to the question why someone would ever lend you the money at this cheap interest rate instead of investing the money himself into these fast-appreciating houses.

What these considerations show is that according to the textbook spherical-cow microeconomics, on a free market for housing, renting and buying should be equally good deals, since in efficient markets there is no possibility of arbitrage. And buying can be profitable over renting only if there is a strange opportunity for arbitrage where it's cheap to rent money but expensive to rent a house, even though money and houses are readily convertible into each other. A similar argument can of course be made against the possible advantage of renting -- except for the issues of risk-aversion and asset diversification, which decisively favor renting over owning.

In reality, of course, these simple spherical-cow models don't work, and there are lots of complicated and ill-understood factors involved, including all sorts of people's biases and signaling issues, high transaction costs, Knightian uncertainties, exuberant speculation, and not the least of all, huge government interference in the market by various subsidies, regulations, and other convoluted and dubious enterprises. The result is a complicated mess in which an accurate analysis of what's really going on is practically impossible, and in which there may indeed be possibilities for arbitrage.

However, regardless of all that, it seems to me that buying has some tremendous drawbacks, for which I can't see comparable upsides under any realistic circumstances. The first and foremost is that you're investing the bulk of your net worth (and on top of that a huge pile of borrowed money) into a single non-diversified asset, which seems like a crazy idea by the most basic principles of sound personal finance. [1] For various other drawbacks, one could perhaps argue that they are offset by the downsides of renting (though I would disagree), but this one really seems to me by itself like a decisive argument against getting into house ownership.


[1] Note that this is one possible solution to your landlord puzzle. The tenant may want to pay a premium to avoid placing most of his net worth into this asset because of risk-aversion, while for the (rich or corporate) landlord, it's just another item in a large portfolio with the risk well spread.

Comment author: juliawise 29 May 2012 02:36:10AM 2 points [-]

A house in a place where your kids will grow up with -- and, in particular, go to school with -- kids from respectable middle-class families is very expensive.

This may be true in suburbs, but not everywhere. My mother grew up in a small college town in Kentucky. Her parents, and the parents of her friends, were mostly college educated but below national median income. They lived in small, inexpensive houses. Local kids had access neither to ballet and karate lessons nor drugs and gangs. Her social life focused around church and folk dancing. From what I understand, it was a high-quality, low-cost childhood.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 29 May 2012 03:06:38AM 4 points [-]

I believe you, but places of the sort you describe are increasingly rare. For most people, I don't see any plausible way how they could move to some place like that and organize their lives there.

Comment author: juliawise 29 May 2012 02:38:29AM 3 points [-]

I wanted to depict the way people feel about their situation, which is the relevant thing in this context, even if the way they feel is unrealistic and biased.

So it seems we all agree that your crocodile-pit description does not necessarily reflect reality.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 29 May 2012 02:53:23AM *  3 points [-]

It depends on the concrete place and people we're talking about. There are ways to escape falling into the underclass even with very little money, but that requires luck and talent that many (and I'd even say most) people don't have.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 28 May 2012 11:00:51AM *  5 points [-]

Is leasing so uncommon, though? My mom always taught me that buying a house was retarded, admittedly contra what I took to be common wisdom.

ETA: Actually, I think it might have been me always teaching my mom that buying a house was retarded. I think even at ten years old I was better than my mom at economic rationality.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 29 May 2012 02:40:27AM *  2 points [-]

In the contemporary North America, buying a house definitely looks to me like a raw deal. On the other hand, the popular wisdom is indeed the opposite, i.e. that renting is a raw deal, suitable only for people whose tarnished reputation makes them unable to get credit. (The whole issue could be approached by asking some simple and obvious questions suggested by basic economics, but puzzlingly, nobody seems to be asking them.)

On the whole, however, I definitely have the impression that among the great bulk of people who aspire to live a middle-class lifestyle, home ownership is considered as an essential goal for any serious person, let alone family. A contrarian on this issue is likely to face enormous pressures from friends, family, spouse, etc., and risk coming off as seriously weird. (Maybe I am overestimating this phenomenon in the wider society by extrapolating from my own social circles. But it certainly exists to a significant degree.)

Comment author: Douglas_Knight 28 May 2012 06:11:58PM 6 points [-]

Even with a minimalist approach to parenting, raising kids is expensive. Each additional kid makes it less likely that one will manage to remain solvent under the above described conditions.

I think Caplan is correct that this is not the marginal analysis that parents do in considering whether to have another child; that the relevant margin is their time.

More tangentially, I generally think your description is too prescriptive and not an accurate description of how people think, leading to predictions that don't match the world. In particular, I don't think we see a clean line between acceptable and unacceptable neighborhoods. People don't just seek out acceptable neighborhoods free of bad influences, but bid up ever more exclusive neighborhoods, sometimes in the name of good schools and sometimes not. People take on a lot of debt not just to get into acceptable schools, but to get into these exclusive neighborhoods. On the other hand, I think people are much less stressed than you describe, largely because they are irrationally optimistic about debt, employment stability, and real estate as an investment.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 29 May 2012 02:24:27AM *  6 points [-]

In particular, I don't think we see a clean line between acceptable and unacceptable neighborhoods. People don't just seek out acceptable neighborhoods free of bad influences, but bid up ever more exclusive neighborhoods, sometimes in the name of good schools and sometimes not. People take on a lot of debt not just to get into acceptable schools, but to get into these exclusive neighborhoods.

You're right that I oversimplified things in this regard. Besides the minimum acceptable neighborhood quality, there are also many expensive status games people play that they could in principle cut back on without any negative consequences for their kids. On the other hand, the difficult question is how much you can really cut back on status games without jeopardizing your social status in ways that could damage your career and make your life generally unpleasant. (It's a difficult topic, but it seems to me like it's hard to escape the effect where higher income comes with the requirements of more intense and expensive status signaling, thus significantly reducing the increase in one's truly discretionary spending power.) On the whole, I'm not quite sure what to think about all this.

On the other hand, I think people are much less stressed than you describe, largely because they are irrationally optimistic about debt, employment stability, and real estate as an investment.

Could be. Except for your closest friends who will presumably speak their mind to you, it's hard to figure out what people really think behind the socially expected facade of radiating success and optimism. I strongly suspect that the events of recent years have shaken a great many people out of their optimism, though.

Comment author: jsalvatier 29 May 2012 01:43:18AM 0 points [-]

'Unthinkable' seems like an exaggeration. I played outside by myself as a kid (though that's 20 years ago), and I have the distinct impression that my bosses' kids have a group of neighborhood kids they play with unsupervised.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 29 May 2012 02:02:54AM *  9 points [-]

Twenty years ago was still a very different time in this regard. (Anecdotally, I notice that people who are in their mid-twenties and older have childhood memories very different from what is considered acceptable nowadays, both informally and legally.) See the "Free Range Kids" blog for numerous stories illustrating the modern mentality and jurisprudence about leaving kids alone and unsupervised.

In any case, even if you can still find some occasional examples of people allowing unsupervised play in some situations, it's definitely unacceptable to simply send the kids out and tell them to be back for dinner, the way it was normally done some decades ago.

Comment author: jsalvatier 28 May 2012 05:12:13PM *  2 points [-]

As phrased above, your position seems like a reasonable starting point for a discussion, and I probably would not have made my comment if you had first commented with something closer to that.

I was trying to comment on the way you presented the argument before rather than argue that your object level point is mistaken, since I don't have strong views here. It's not a serious issue, just something I thought you might like to be aware of. The more I think about this, the less 'justifiable' it seems to bring this up.

You used several adjectives with a normative tinge "enormous debt", "edge of solvency" and colorful imagery "precariously holding onto a rope above a pond full of crocodiles", which sound like they're designed to get the reaction "Oy My God! What has America (or pick your favorite country) come to?!", rather than the reaction "buying a house in an expensive area sounds risky".

Does that make things clearer?

On the object level topic, your argument seems very focused on debt, do you think renting a house in a similar area substantially lessens the burden?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 29 May 2012 01:41:04AM *  3 points [-]

You used several adjectives with a normative tinge "enormous debt", "edge of solvency" and colorful imagery "precariously holding onto a rope above a pond full of crocodiles", which sound like they're designed to get the reaction "Oy My God! What has America (or pick your favorite country) come to?!", rather than the reaction "buying a house in an expensive area sounds risky".

I have no problem with your comment, and I'm glad to explain the reason why I made my original comment that way. The reason why I used such emotional imagery is that I wanted to depict the way people feel about their situation, which is the relevant thing in this context, even if the way they feel is unrealistic and biased. (Since the way they feel, and not some ideally objective evaluation of the situation, will ultimately determine their decisions about having kids.)

(By the way, do you really think that "enormous debt" and "edge of solvency" are not perfectly realistic descriptions of how many, if not most people in their child-bearing years live these days?)

On the object level topic, your argument seems very focused on debt, do you think renting a house in a similar area substantially lessens the burden?

I'm probably over-focusing on debt, since I myself consider any serious indebtedness with horror. I would guess that debt by itself is probably a much lesser source of worry to most people.

Now, when it comes to the issue of renting vs. buying, this is one of those things where people, including otherwise smart and successful people, tend to have opinions that seem seriously crazy to me. As far as I can tell, among the North American middle classes, it seems to be near-universal belief that a basic prerequisite for serious family life is owning a house, so the idea of renting is a non-starter. There is also the near-universal belief that renting is somehow a raw deal compared to buying, so that renting sends a strong signal that you're either stupid or, more likely, can't be approved for credit because of some shameful history you're hiding (and all the bad qualities it likely implies).

All this despite the fact that basic economics strongly suggests that renting should be a better deal for nearly everyone. (Unless perhaps the relevant markets are distorted to an enormous degree by subsidies, regulations, and perhaps also status signaling games, but in reality I see only the latter in sufficiently strong form.)

However, this gets us to the more general issue of various other expensive status games that one is supposed to play in order to be accepted among one's social group nowadays. This is a difficult and complicated topic, but on the whole, it seems to me that for a variety of reasons, these signaling requirements tend to expand as one's career and income advance, so in the end, it's difficult to avoid the situation where one is constantly walking on the edge financially. Needless to say, all this certainly isn't conductive to having kids.

Comment author: Emile 28 May 2012 11:32:57AM 0 points [-]

Is that true? That sounds surprising, but plausible - do you have a source for that?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 29 May 2012 01:31:20AM *  3 points [-]

I'd be surprised if it wasn't true. In the 1960s, a mother could just send the kids out to play on their own, which kids normally did if they weren't at school. Such things are unthinkable these days, and it looks quite plausible that today's standard way of helicopter parenting has increased the total amount of parents' time spent doting on kids so much that even if fathers did only a minority of it, they'd still spend a larger amount of time that the total time normally spent back in the sixties.

Comment author: jsalvatier 28 May 2012 03:27:33AM *  1 point [-]

That peer effects still seem like they would be important is a fair point. The question is: if peer effects are important, why don't they show up in adoption studies? Perhaps parents don't think peer effects are important, but that seems implausible to me. Perhaps, as you suggest, it's really expensive to affect your childrens' peers. But then that fits Caplan's argument pretty well; if if you have to spend millions of dollars to change your childrens' peers then maybe it's just not that cost effective, and you shouldn't worry about it too much.

As a side note: I sometimes get a very "politics" vibe from your comments, and it gives me the impression that your thought quality isn't very good on those topics (other comments good quality). I don't know if others get the same feeling from your posts; maybe it's just me.

For example, "enormous debt, which you won't be able to pay off for decades, and living a stressful and anxious existence on the edge of solvency, in which a fit of bad luck can easily send you into ruin. And this latter possibility doesn't mean just falling back to a more frugal but still respectable lifestyle -- it means being thrown, together with your kids, right into the dreaded underclass in which all sorts of frightful social pathologies are rampant. It's like precariously holding onto a rope above a pond full of crocodiles." reads a lot like standard political rants.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 28 May 2012 04:37:13AM *  18 points [-]

The question is: if peer effects are important, why don't they show up in adoption studies?

Generally speaking, when I search for literature on peer effects, the information is sparse and confusing. I'm not too surprised, since such effects are much more difficult to disentangle than heritability and shared environment.

My working hypothesis is that:

  1. Peer effects matter a lot, but only up to a certain threshold of peer quality, and this threshold is basically what people intuitively perceive as sufficiently respectable company for their kids. So, basically, underclass peers will ruin your kids, but upper-class or genius peers won't improve things relative to the company of ordinary middle-class kids. (Just like downright abuse will ruin them, but helicopter parenting won't improve them.)

  2. In order to quality for adoption, people must pass through sufficiently strict checks that they are highly unlikely to provide an environment below this threshold. So there aren't any good natural adoption experiments that expose kids to underclass peer groups.

I'd be curious to hear about any contrary evidence, though.

I sometimes get a very "politics" vibe from your comments [...] For example, [the middle paragraph in the above comment] reads a lot like standard political rants.

Maybe it does, but this really is my honest impression of what the situation looks like to a typical person aspiring to a middle-class lifestyle these days. I'm curious if you would disagree with any of the following statements, which seem to be roughly equivalent to what I wrote above (all given in the context of contemporary North America):

  1. A house in a place where your kids will grow up with -- and, in particular, go to school with -- kids from respectable middle-class families is very expensive. In many places, and especially prosperous centers of economic activity that offer good career opportunities, it is somewhere around an order of magnitude above the median yearly household income.

  2. Unless one is extraordinarily wealthy, to obtain such a house, one has to get into debt that is, just like the house price, enormous relative to one's income.

  3. Such debt, due to its sheer size, can't be repaid in any time shorter than several decades. Just to pay the interest, let alone to make any dent in the principal, one must part with a significant part of one's income during this period. In this situation, a plausible bad luck scenario like job loss, health problems, etc. can easily push one into insolvency.

  4. Worse yet, this situation implies that the bulk of one's net worth is completely non-diversified and invested in a single asset -- of a sort that is notoriously prone to bubbles and price crashes. Even worse, the occurrence of such crashes is positively correlated with bad economic conditions that make job loss and decreased earning power especially likely.

  5. Even with a minimalist approach to parenting, raising kids is expensive. Each additional kid makes it less likely that one will manage to remain solvent under the above described conditions.

  6. Sufficiently bad financial ruin can plausibly put one into a situation where one is no longer able to afford to ensure a peer group for one's kids that will be above the threshold where bad peers exercise significant bad influence. Also, generally speaking, below a certain class threshold, all sorts of social pathologies are rampant to a degree that seems frightful to a typical middle-class person -- and, again, bad financial ruin can make one unable to afford to insulate oneself from people that fall below this threshold.

  7. Taken together, (1)-(6) makes for a rather stressful existence, in which having more kids will seem to a lot of people like an additional burden in an already difficult situation, and an additional risk in an already uncomfortable gamble.

I'd be really curious to see where exactly our opinions diverge here.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 28 May 2012 12:39:52AM *  29 points [-]

I haven't read the book, but I've been reading Caplan's blog for years, so I think I'm sufficiently familiar with his positions to comment.

It seems to me that the elephant in the room here are the peer effects. I don't think even the strongest hereditarian theories would imply that it doesn't matter for your kids' future outcomes if they socialize with peers who display low-class or antisocial habits and behaviors.

Now, if you live in North America, making sure your kids are isolated from low-class kids is extremely expensive. If nothing else, you must be able to afford a house in a nice neighborhood. Unless you are extravagantly wealthy, or perhaps enjoy some very unusual combination of an upper-middle class income and high job security, this means getting into an enormous debt, which you won't be able to pay off for decades, and living a stressful and anxious existence on the edge of solvency, in which a fit of bad luck can easily send you into ruin. And this latter possibility doesn't mean just falling back to a more frugal but still respectable lifestyle -- it means being thrown, together with your kids, right into the dreaded underclass in which all sorts of frightful social pathologies are rampant. It's like precariously holding onto a rope above a pond full of crocodiles. Needless to say, the marginal expense of raising each additional kid will make your situation only more precarious!

Of course, this may be nonobvious to a professor who proudly admits to living in a bubble (and who is presumably not rich, but does enjoy the extremely unusual position of having an upper middle class income and full job security). However, while Caplan is certainly right that people should relax and stop the ridiculous helicopter parenting, he seems to be oblivious to the problem of ensuring quality peers for your kids.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 12 May 2012 04:24:37PM *  7 points [-]

For an especially blatant example of this, consider their bizarre claim that peer review is somehow an essential part of science -- whereas in reality, as anyone with even a cursory familiarity with the history of science knows, peer review is a bureaucratic innovation that has been widely imposed only in the decades since WW2, and science had functioned perfectly well for centuries before that.

Peer review existed in some forms well before that. The major journals like the various journals of the Royal Society often had pieces vetted by the editors rather than independent referees, but the point of independent review was not uncommon. Also, if one looks at the RW article on peer review, one sees that they list some of the more serious problems with the system.

The only bit of their section on peer review that seems really problematic is this:

If an idea has not been published in a single peer review journal, it is safe to say it is not science.

Whereas in physics and math and some other areas, many results come out in preprint form well before they are formally published (and in math their are a few examples of fairly important results that exist only in preprint form). Would you object to this sentence instead saying " If an idea has not been published in a single peer review journal, it is a warning sign that the idea may not be science?"

Most of the rest of the article seems ok to me, although others of your points may be valid, especially in regard to the low status nature of most of their examples (although in many locations alt med is pretty high status, especially in the American left-wing which undermines your claim somewhat.)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 12 May 2012 05:50:54PM *  17 points [-]

Peer review existed in some forms well before that. The major journals like the various journals of the Royal Society often had pieces vetted by the editors rather than independent referees, but the point of independent review was not uncommon.

That is true, of course, but the sorts of editorial review that were standard before the mid-20th century were different in some very important ways. When Max Planck accepted Einsten's annus mirabilis papers, the decision was under his personal responsibility, and he was putting his own reputation on the line. This is a very different procedure from today's reliance on anonymous reviewers and impersonal committees. It's also very different from a setup where officially designated "peers" (i.e. insiders of an single exclusive group) serve as bureaucratic judges of what is valid science about some issue and what isn't. (See this old comment in which I elaborated on some important aspects of these differences.)

Also, if one looks at the RW article on peer review, one sees that they list some of the more serious problems with the system.

Notice that the "pseudoscience" article confuses peer review and replication. This clearly indicates a writer who has a very poor understanding of the present institutions of official science, but is nevertheless driven by a strong desire to mount ideological crusades on their behalf. Furthermore, the linked "peer review" article informs us that "peer review is a key part of the scientific method." This is just plain false: whether or not a given work follows the scientific method depends only on the way it's conceived and executed, and not at all on whether it's been given some kind of bureaucratic imprimatur. Robinson Crusoe would be perfectly capable of using the scientific method, limited only by his own knowledge and the resources available on the island.

Furthermore, I don't think the "peer review" article goes anywhere near a comprehensive critique of the system. It doesn't even discuss the most obvious problems that struck me the same moment I was assigned peer review work for the first time some years ago. But that's a topic for a separate long discussion.

Would you object to this sentence instead saying " If an idea has not been published in a single peer review journal, it is a warning sign that the idea may not be science?"

It depends on the field in question. In some fields (basically the hardest of the hard sciences), it is indeed a pretty good heuristic. At the other extreme, in some other fields the situation is so bad that publication in a peer-reviewed journal strongly indicates that even if the work has some valid insight, it's buried in a quagmire of bias and bad epistemology -- whereas on the other hand, perfectly valid insight is often made outside of any official accredited institutions.

In yet other cases, valid science can be done entirely unofficially by amateurs, and this isn't so rare when it comes to topics that are of little or no academic interest.

Most of the rest of the article seems ok to me, although others of your points may be valid, especially in regard to the low status nature of most of their examples (although in many locations alt med is pretty high status, especially in the American left-wing which undermines your claim somewhat.)

I didn't claim that RW falls for left-wing nonsense in general. If the left-wing nonsense in question is opposed by the mainstream academia, or if it's too far left to be embraced by the respectable left-center intellectual and media institutions, RW will also be opposed to it. (Although, again, its criticism will end up biased insofar as these institutions are biased towards the issue.)

The real problem is what happens if pseudoscience is in fact done by the official and prestigious academia and with all the official bureaucratic trappings of "science" in place. A truly correct and informative treatment of "pseudoscience" should give us some idea of how to recognize this situation. Yet the RW writers seem incapable of even conceiving such a possibility, and their entire output is driven by the desire to equate "pseudoscience" with non-academic contrarian positions. (Or, in case of the example of The Bell Curve, with work whose conclusions are unacceptable to the ideological left-center, even though they are more or less in line with the beliefs of a substantial number of academics specializing in the issues it deals with, and the work has some academic affiliation.) Now, you may disagree whether it's fair to label such bias as "ideological" -- although I think it's an appropriate description -- but I don't see on what grounds you would disagree with the diagnosis of the problem itself.

Comment author: David_Gerard 10 May 2012 04:05:54PM *  0 points [-]

I suspect the effect you're seeing is relative to a US-based libertarian viewpoint, and comes from many of the contributors not being in that category. So it might well look that way relative to LessWrong community norms. Describing it as a "heavily ideological website" when it's nothing of the sort is not how I would steel-man your argument, and may not serve your advocacy of said argument optimally.

What are the best example articles of what you're talking about, and what's wrong with their positions? (If possible, pick something bronze or better, silver if possible - there's certainly a lot of complete shit there, but anything silver or higher means effort's been put in and saves me just answering with a probably annoying "yeah, that article's shit".)

And by the way, what are "the intellectual institutions whose output inspires the RW writers"? I can tell you if they in fact inspired me, for example.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 11 May 2012 07:30:37AM *  34 points [-]

Describing it as a "heavily ideological website" when it's nothing of the sort is not how I would steel-man your argument, and may not serve your advocacy of said argument optimally.

I'm surprised that you perceive this characterization as controversial and unfair. From what I've seen, RW articles engage in scathing rhetoric of ideological warfare constantly and unabashedly, and their ideological perspective is, as far as I can tell, remarkably uniform and consistent.

The only way one could object to my characterization is if one agrees with the ideological positions of RW to such degree that one sees them as objectively correct, i.e. a matter of mere common sense and rational thinking, so that characterizing them as "ideological" would by itself be a dishonest rhetorical ploy. Now, I can accept this argument when it comes to the RW articles that sneer at, say, various physics crackpots (although even there, one wonders why the authors find it a worthwhile use of their time). However, I don't see how one could extend it to topics that are inherently heavily ideological and where we have nothing like the solid epistemological base that exists in hard sciences, like for example economics, history, politics, etc. Yet, from what I've seen, RW articles on such topics sneer and jeer with the same strength of conviction.

What are the best example articles of what you're talking about, and what's wrong with their positions? (If possible, pick something bronze or better... )

To avoid any possibility of cherry-picking, I'll take the links on top of the main page of RW. The first one is RW's article about itself, so I hope I can be pardoned if I skip that one. The next one is an article about "pseudoscience." So what does RW tell us about pseudoscience?

What it tells us is, basically, that "science" should be understood as the bureaucratic system implemented by the contemporary academia, and "pseudoscience" as any effort at finding truth that doesn't have the official imprimatur of this system. For an especially blatant example of this, consider their bizarre claim that peer review is somehow an essential part of science -- whereas in reality, as anyone with even a cursory familiarity with the history of science knows, peer review is a bureaucratic innovation that has been widely imposed only in the decades since WW2, and science had functioned perfectly well for centuries before that. Also, the writers seem to be badly confused about the difference between peer review and the truly important fundamental issue of replication. (By the way, one wonders what cognitive dissonance might be induced if they were aware that Homeopathy is a bona fide peer-reviewed journal!)

Note how the article doesn't even conceive of the possibility that pseudoscience might in fact be practiced by some branches of the official high-status academia, with peer review and all the other bureaucratic frills in place. Its authors clearly wouldn't be able to discuss meaningfully the question of how one could try to evaluate the reliability of the academic output in different areas and determine what sorts of pseudoscience might be thriving under prestigious academic titles and affiliations. On the contrary, all their examples are from low-status folkish superstitions and distant history. (Also, tellingly, the closest thing to a mainstream academic work that is included as an example of "pseudoscience" is The Bell Curve -- a book which was co-authored by a Harvard professor, but whose conclusions are ideologically unpalatable for the sort of people who write on RW.)

This is by no means the worst example -- for that, we'd need to look at articles about topics that have more direct political implications. But I think it does illustrate my points pretty well.

And by the way, what are "the intellectual institutions whose output inspires the RW writers"? I can tell you if they in fact inspired me, for example.

I think this should be clear from the above. What I have in mind is the mainstream academia and, in case of more immediate political topics, the left-centrist perspective of the mainstream media. (For the latter, a good litmus test is if you can imagine a given position being argued by a New York Times op-ed columnist.)

Comment author: David_Gerard 10 May 2012 06:58:23AM -1 points [-]

I've browsed through a bunch of topics on RationalWiki, and it looks like a heavily ideological website.

Well, that's one I haven't heard before. What precise examples were you thinking of?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 10 May 2012 03:11:15PM *  34 points [-]

Pretty much any RW article I've ever seen takes the premise that the position of the mainstream academia -- and, in case of more explicitly politicized topics, the left-center of the respectable public opinion -- is correct, and any serious contrarian position can be held only by comically nutty crackpots or sinisterly malevolent extremists. Now, this isn't always a bad heuristic: it produces more or less correct conclusions on topics where the aforementioned institutions are usually reliable, such as, say, physics. But on any topic where they are significantly biased, RW ends up as a passionate defender of all their biases and falsities. And from what I've seen, the RW writers typically make no serious effort to study such topics dispassionately, but instead jump at the first opportunity to engage in ideological warfare, typically via ignorant sneering and mocking.

As an example, you can take pretty much any topic that's matter of significant ideological controversy -- economics, history, human differences, political theory, let alone everyday politics. Out of several dozen RW articles I've read, I don't think I've seen a single one that looks like a fair attempt to make sense of the topic at hand.

Of course, you may believe that the intellectual institutions whose output inspires the RW writers are in fact reliably correct about everything. But even then, it would be clear that the latter are mostly just parroting the former without much real understanding and motivated mainly by the thrill of ideological warfare.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 10 May 2012 12:31:07AM *  33 points [-]

I've browsed through a bunch of topics on RationalWiki, and it looks like a heavily ideological website. Thus, it tends to be extremely unreliable and biased on any topic that has even the slightest whiff of controversy. Anyone who makes a genuine effort to form an accurate view of the world will surely come to have at least some beliefs that will be met with scorn and sneering by the sort of people who write on RW.

Comment author: John_Maxwell_IV 08 May 2012 01:13:43AM *  17 points [-]

I have personally purchased Toyotas, Hondas, and a Volkswagen this way. Some of my students at NYU have taken up this method and bought cars this way too... They and I have always beat the price quoted on the Internet with this method.

He further claims to have once saved $1,200 over the price quoted on the Internet for a car he negotiated for his daughter, who was 3000 miles away at the time.

Apparently being a game theory expert does not prevent one from being a badass negotiator.

Why did you guess otherwise?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 09 May 2012 03:08:35AM *  2 points [-]

He further claims to have once saved $1,200 over the price quoted on the Internet for a car he negotiated for his daughter, who was 3000 miles away at the time.

What does he mean by "price quoted on the Internet"? If it's the manufacturer's suggested retail price, then depending on the car model and various other factors, saving $1,200 over this price sounds unremarkable at best, and a badly losing proposition at worst. If it was the first price quoted by the dealer, it could be even worse -- at least where I live, dealers will often start with some ridiculous quote that's even higher that the MSRP.

Comment author: John_Maxwell_IV 07 May 2012 06:09:23PM *  31 points [-]

How a game theorist buys a car (on the phone with the dealer):

"Hello, my name is Bruce Bueno de Mesquita. I plan to buy the following car [list the exact model and features] today at five P.M. I am calling all of the dealerships within a fifty-mile radius of my home and I am telling each of them what I am telling you. I will come in and buy the car today at five P.M. from the dealer who gives me the lowest price. I need to have the all-in price, including taxes, dealer prep [I ask them not to prep the car and not charge me for it, since dealer prep is little more than giving you a washed car with plastic covers and paper floormats removed, usually for hundreds of dollars], everything, because I will make out the check to your dealership before I come and will not have another check with me."

From The Predictioneer's Game, page 7.

Other car-buying tips from Bueno de Mesquita, in case you're about to buy a car:
* Figure out exactly what car you want to buy by searching online before making any contact with dealerships.
* Don't be afraid to purchase a car from a distant dealership--the manufacturer provides the warranty, not the dealer.
* Be sure to tell each dealer you will be sharing the price they quote you with subsequent dealers.
* Don't take shit from dealers who tell you "you can't buy a car over the phone" or do anything other than give you their number. If a dealer is stonewalling, make it quite clear that you're willing to get what you want elsewhere.
* Arrive at the lowest-price dealer just before 5:00 PM to close the deal. In the unlikely event that the dealer changes their terms, go for the next best price.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 09 May 2012 02:43:56AM *  14 points [-]

From my limited experience with buying cars, as well as from theoretical considerations, this won't work because you lack the pre-commitment to buy at the price offered. Once they give you a favorable price, you can try to push it even further downwards, possibly by continuing to play the dealerships against each other. So they'll be afraid to offer anything really favorable. (The market for new cars is a confusopoly based on concealing the information about the dealers' exact profit margins for particular car models, which is surprisingly well-guarded insider knowledge. So once you know that a certain price is still profitable for them, it can only be a downward ratchet.)

The problem can be solved by making the process double-blind, i.e. by sending the message anonymously through a credible middleman, who communicates back anonymous offers from all dealers. (The identities of each party are revealed to the other only if the offer is accepted and an advance paid.) Interestingly, in Canada, someone has actually tried to commercialize this idea and opened a website that offers the service for $50 or so (unhaggle.com); I don't know if something similar exists in the U.S. or other countries. (They don't do any sort of bargaining, brokering, deal-hunting, etc. on your behalf -- just the service of double-anonymous communication, along with signaling that your interest is serious because you've paid their fee.) From my limited observations, it works pretty well.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 04 May 2012 10:08:52PM 0 points [-]

Any other recommendations in a vaguely similar vein? (I've already read Szabo's other stuff.)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 09 May 2012 12:09:26AM 0 points [-]

I can't think of anything of similar quality right now.

In response to Why do people ____?
Comment author: Athrelon 04 May 2012 06:53:37PM 5 points [-]

Why do people not punish useless status-seeking behavior? People rightly respond warmly to productive status-enhancing behavior, such as including people in conversation, fishing out common interests, and telling entertaining stories. But people also frequently reward outright bragging, cocky attitudes, and social aggressiveness - which to me are obviously done with status in mind, have no value to anyone else, and are pretty uncorrelated with the productive kinds of status behavior.

Since status is zero sum, why aren't other people more proactive in noticing, being annoyed by, and socially punishing such behavior? Are people not consciously aware of these types of behavior, which can be trained to be more or less automatic? Do they assume that swaggerers might have social clout to match their personalities and are afraid of having them as enemies?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 09 May 2012 12:08:01AM 9 points [-]

Why do people not punish useless status-seeking behavior?

They do, whenever such behavior seems like it's bound to fail. However, when it looks like it will succeed (and thus bring high status to whoever is practicing it), an attempt to punish would mean a declaration of war against someone of high status, which is usually not a smart move.

Do they assume that swaggerers might have social clout to match their personalities and are afraid of having them as enemies?

Often yes, as explained above, but it's usually not done consciously. Most status-related behaviors are instinctive, and the conscious mind only invents rationalizations for them (which can be of many different kinds).

Comment author: Vladimir_M 28 April 2012 07:29:01PM *  17 points [-]

I don't think "parochial" is the right word here -- a more accurate term for what you're describing would be "contrarian."

In any case, insofar as there exists some coherent body of insight that can be named "Less Wrong rationality," one of its main problems is that it lacks any really useful methods for separating truth from nonsense when it comes to the output of the contemporary academia and other high-status intellectual institutions. I find this rather puzzling: on the one hand, I see people here who seem seriously interested in forming a more accurate view of the world -- but at the same time, living in a society that has vast powerful, influential, and super-high-status official intellectual institutions that deal with all imaginable topics, they show little or no interest in the question of what systematic biases and perverse incentives might be influencing their output.

Now, the point of your post seems to be that LW is good because its opinion is in line with that of these high-status institutions. (Presumably thanks to the fact that both sides have accurately converged onto the truth.) But then what exactly makes LW useful or worthwhile in any way? Are the elite universities so marginalized and powerless that they need help from a blog run by amateurs to spread the word about their output? It really seems to me that if a forum like LW is to have any point at all, it can only be in identifying correct contrarian positions. Otherwise you might as well just cut out the middleman and look at the mainstream academic output directly.

Comment author: Kaj_Sotala 25 April 2012 07:32:41AM 5 points [-]

This isn't evidence of rigging as such, but I should note that some of my psychologist friends are rather skeptical about the methodology of Moral Foundations Theory. E.g. in his 2009 paper, Haidt reports the Cronbach's alphas for the three MFT studies:

Study 1 [...] Cronbach’s alphas for the three-item measures of each foundation were .62 (Harm), .67 (Fairness), .59 (Ingroup), .39 (Authority), and .70 (Purity).

Study 2 [...] Cronbach’s alphas for each foundation were .71 (Harm), .70 (Fairness), .71 (Ingroup), .64 (Authority), and .76 (Purity)."

Study 3 [...] Cronbach’s alphas for each foundation were .69 (Harm), .69 (Fairness), .69 (Ingroup), .67 (Authority), and .58 (Purity).

I'm no expert in statistics myself, but I'm told that an alpha of .70 indicates a measure for which half of the result is just noise/error and half something real, while alphas of less than .7 are composed more of noise than anything else. As can be seen in the above numbers, Haidt's measures occasionally reach that minimum level, but more frequently (at least in that paper) they don't. Which implies that the MFT questions may not really be measuring what Haidt thinks they're measuring.

(Still, many of Haidt's claims seem intuitively right, so I'm inclined to believe that he's roughly on the right track.)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 28 April 2012 06:45:36PM *  13 points [-]

Looking again at the questions listed in this paper, I remembered a blog post by Bryan Caplan in which he proposed some skillfully thought up alternative questions that make Haidt's biases especially apparent:
http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2010/03/do_liberals_use.html

(Here is Haidt's response, which I find rather unconvincing.)

In fact, the more I think about Haidt's questions, the more heavily biased they seem. For example, one of his "authority" questions asks for how much money you'd curse your parents in their face, and have to wait for a year to explain and apologize. Imagine if he instead asked for how much money you'd yell racial insults at a black person. Now, Haidt would presumably say that the latter falls properly under "harm," since it would be greatly emotionally hurtful to this person. But how does this same argument not apply to someone being cursed by their own child?!

Comment author: JoshuaZ 24 April 2012 07:06:38PM *  7 points [-]

Haidt's own evident (though likely not intentional) rigging of the criteria by which he detects expressions of loyalty, authority, and purity/sacredness so as to maximize them on the right side of the political spectrum and minimize them on the left one.

Can you expand on this? I've thought for a while that he underemphasizes purity/sacredness on the left (in particular that he essentially ignores things like caring about organic food or vegetarianism which fit classic food taboo forms) but I'm not sure I've seen anything that looked like rigging in his studies.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 27 April 2012 06:28:57AM *  19 points [-]

"Rigged" was a bad choice of word on my part, since it suggests intentional manipulation, and as I've already written, I'm not suggesting anything like that in Haidt's case. Rather, it's a matter of deeply internalized biases. More specifically, the problem is that with enough motivation, almost anything can be rationalized in terms of harm and fairness, and people whose favored ideology emphasizes these elements are likely to invent such rationalizations for their own specific norms of purity, sacredness, group loyalty, and authority. Haidt's approach ends up heavily biased because it correctly recognizes these latter elements in those cases where they are more or less explicit (which happen to be mostly on the political right), while at the same time failing to uncover them when they exist under a veneer of rationalizations in terms of harm and fairness.

Now, the concrete examples of leftist purity manifested in nutritionist and environmentalist ways are recognized by Haidt, as another commenter has already noted. (Though, in my opinion, he is certainly biased in underplaying their overall importance.) However, I believe there are other examples that illustrate the problem even better.

Take for example the norms about sexual matters. One puzzle I've always found fascinating is why, for modern liberals, support for laissez-faire in matters of sex is so strikingly correlated with opposition to laissez-faire in economic matters and support for paternalistic government regulation in pretty much everything else. After all, most of the standard arguments of liberals against economic laissez-faire and in favor of government paternalism hold just as well for sexual matters. (Arguably, they are even stronger in the latter case -- just consider how much it involves in terms of zero- and negative-sum games, tremendous inequalities, common patterns of irrational behavior, health concerns, discrimination across protected categories, etc., etc.) Yet an attempt to apply these arguments to sex immediately triggers a strong negative reaction that can't be justified by any reasonable argument based on harm or fairness.

From this, it seems pretty clear that modern liberalism incorporates a strong element of sacredness associated with individual autonomy in matters of sex. This, of course, is nothing very surprising, considering that strong norms of sacredness regulating sex are a human universal. Yet even if he had a perfectly unbiased view of the matter, how could Haidt possibly reveal this element in his questionnaires without violating the associated norms of sacredness as they apply to the public discourse about sex-related topics?

Another fascinating topic is the peculiar way in which in-group morality is commonly manifested on the left. What I have in mind is the phenomenon that was discussed recently on LW in a thread about Orwell's essay "Notes on Nationalism," which Orwell termed "transferred nationalism." See this subthread, in which I made some points whose relevance in this context should be clear. Again, this is something highly relevant in the real world, whose discussion however requires much more subtlety and de-biasing than anything within the reach of Haidt's questionnaires.

I'd like to elaborate on some examples of authority norms that are common on the left too, but right now I'm short on time. I'll get back to it if this thread remains active in the next few days.

Comment author: MixedNuts 09 April 2012 03:24:07PM *  12 points [-]

On specificity and sneaking on connotations; useful for the liberal-minded among us:

I think, with racism and sexism and 'isms' generally, there's a sort of confusion of terminology.

A "Racist1" is someone, who, like a majority of people in this society, has subconsciously internalized some negative attitudes about minority racial groups. If a Racist1 takes the Implicit Association Test, her score shows she's biased against black people, like the majority of people (of all races) who took the test. Chances are, whether you know it or not, you're a Racist1.

A "Racist2" is someone who's kind of an insensitive jerk about race. The kind of guy who calls Obama the "Food Stamp President." Someone you wouldn't want your sister dating.

A "Racist3" is a neo-Nazi. You can never be quite sure that one day he won't snap and kill someone. He's clearly a social deviant.

People use the word "Racist" for all three things, and I think that's the source of a lot of arguments. When people get accused of being racists, they evade responsibility by saying, "Hey, I'm not a Racist3!" when in fact you were only saying they were Racist1 or Racist2. But some of the responsibility is on the accusers too -- if you say "That Republican's a racist" with the implication of "a jerk" and then backtrack and change the meaning to "vulnerable to unconscious bias", then you're arguing in bad faith. Never mind that some laws and rules which were meant to protect people from Racist3's are in fact deployed against Racist2's.

-celandine13

Comment author: Vladimir_M 24 April 2012 07:30:01PM *  8 points [-]

How about:

  1. Someone who, following an honest best effort to evaluate the available evidence, concludes that some of the beliefs that nowadays fall under the standard definition of "racist" nevertheless may be true with probabilities significantly above zero.

  2. Someone who performs Bayesian inference that somehow involves probabilities conditioned on the race of a person or a group of people, and whose conclusion happens to reflect negatively on this person or group in some way. (Or, alternatively, someone who doesn't believe that making such inferences is grossly immoral as a matter of principle.)

Both (1) and (2) fall squarely under the common usage of the term "racist," and yet I don't see how they would fit into the above cited classification.

Of course, some people would presumably argue that all beliefs in category (1) are in fact conclusively proven to be false with p~1, so it can be only a matter of incorrect conclusions motivated by the above listed categories of racism. Presumably they would also claim that, as a well-established general principle, no correct inferences in category (2) are ever possible. But do you really believe this?

Comment author: JoshuaZ 24 April 2012 01:22:39AM *  2 points [-]

While some of that may be true, it may well be that the solution is to get other's to adopt a morality that has less emphasis on ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, purity/sanctity. It may be possible to hijack them somewhat (transferring respect for authority to respect for subject matter experts who have a history of making correct predictions, and transferring purity to a distaste for poor reasoning), but to a large extent these moral inclinations are part of the problem, not a solution. Ingroup loyalty is why politics are the mindkiller and why many wars and similar events occur. That said, I think your point may have a core of truth, and I've upvoted your remark.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 24 April 2012 06:40:47PM *  16 points [-]

While some of that may be true, it may well be that the solution is to get other's to adopt a morality that has less emphasis on ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, purity/sanctity

The trouble is, these things are indispensable for any large-scale (and possibly even small-scale) cooperation and coordination between people. Of course, it's possible to masquerade them, but it's always easy to see them in operation among the kinds of people who loudly deny them and insist they're bad. In particular, this certainly holds for the modern intellectual elites, and it's particularly notable in Haidt's own evident (though likely not intentional) bias in the criteria by which he detects expressions of loyalty, authority, and purity/sacredness so as to maximize them on the right side of the political spectrum and minimize them on the left one.

Now, when making this point, it's always tempting to engage in an attack on this blindness and hypocrisy, but at the same time, we are lucky that they exist. An actual disappearance of loyalty, authority, and sanctity in the moral calculus of people would mean literally the end of organized society, so we're certainly much better off if they're negated only in a false and hypocritical way than if they were truly absent.

Comment author: [deleted] 08 April 2012 11:43:06AM 1 point [-]

Well, there have been many dead-ends in political evolution, but at the end of the day and all things considered and between one thing and another, one can say that:

  • The law applies equally to everyone regardless of wealth, birth, sex, sexual preference, creed, etc. etc.
  • You don't get punished retroactively.
  • Everyone is involved to some degree in lawmaking and policy decision.
  • Children having rights and being granted special protection.
  • The diffusion of barriers between in-groups and the progressive elimination of mutual exclusivity between them.
  • The Scientific Method, and its continuation in Modern Rationalism
  • The development in gender equality when it comes to rights and powers.
  • And so on and so forth.

Are actually healthy structural improvements in a society, and make it more fit to achieve any goal it sets its collective mind to. At least in terms of productivity, both economical and intellectual. It's also better at averting the Original Position Fallacy: the less the original position matters over your skills to keep it, the better the distribution of powers in terms of competence and work capacity (not accounting for the frightful overhead wasted in power-jockeying, but that can be moderated in a society where people are properly equipped to assess their own competence and that of others, so that they don't aim for a position they weren't capable of keeping).

Comment author: Vladimir_M 21 April 2012 09:40:25PM *  9 points [-]

See, that's the kind of thing I'm talking about. Except for the scientific method, I could take pretty much any of these examples and show that -- even assuming complete agreement on values, which by itself means almost begging the question -- the contemporary narrative of progress rests on the twin pillars of ignorance (or falsification) of actual history and arbitrary assignment of weight to trends that have gone in opposite directions. (And even for the scientific method, it can be argued that the contemporary official academic science is in far worse shape than the scientific community a century or two ago.)

Now, it is true that one can criticize certain narratives of progress without raising too much controversy. For example, I could dispute your first two points by arguing that the modern Western legal systems place common people in a far worse position than what their theoretical high principles would suggest, so much that, by some reasonable measures, the system is in fact more capricious, cruel, and unjust than what existed in the past. (However, it would be more difficult to get away with saying that the attempts to enforce some of these contemporary high principles, rather than insufficient vigor and consistency in enforcing them, are in fact among the causes of these problems.) On the other hand, for many other narratives of progress, any similar argument would quickly brand the speaker as unfit for polite society.

Comment author: Multiheaded 13 April 2012 05:40:04AM *  1 point [-]

you may well prefer a world in which there is a patchwork of places, where in some of them your opinions might get you in serious trouble, but in others you'd be free to discuss them in respectable venues

The trouble with such a setup is that it's the people who are least protected from backlash for doing, speaking or being unapproved things who'd find it the hardest to move to a more ideologically friendly venue. Try telling e.g. a poor black family in 1920s Alabama that they "only" have to move to New York if they want to be treated less like second-class citizens! Oh, wait, wait, you said no race issues. OK, then, one meta-level up: a family of a known but poor egalitarian activist that also mingles a lot with "respectable" minority members - not (exclusively) because it seeks them out to signal its fashionable egalitarianism, but because everyone else truly is hostile to those and they have no-one of an equal economic stratum to turn to. I imagine that the vast majority of their middle-class neighbours would (at least) actively shun and spread gossip about them. At worst, they might get a burning cross in front of their home and such.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 17 April 2012 03:00:33AM 1 point [-]

The trouble with such a setup is that it's the people who are least protected from backlash for doing, speaking or being unapproved things who'd find it the hardest to move to a more ideologically friendly venue.

You're losing sight of the topic. My remarks were not about the norms imposed on common people, but specifically about the ideological norms imposed on people in intellectual and governmental positions.

Comment author: [deleted] 08 April 2012 11:28:51AM 0 points [-]

it has also led to an utterly dreadful intellectual uniformity compared to what had existed before.

I don't see what's "dreadful" about it: I'm fairly happy I can go do some tourism in the Deep South without fearing getting lynched after dark. That said, how do you think the Age of the Internet affects this ideological uniformity?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 09 April 2012 03:39:33AM *  10 points [-]

I don't see what's "dreadful" about it: I'm fairly happy I can go do some tourism in the Deep South without fearing getting lynched after dark.

Just to be clear, I didn't mean to get into any race issues, but merely to discuss the prevailing norms of public discourse. In many places in the U.S. a century ago, I can well imagine that spiting the local public opinion too heavily might get you in really bad trouble, including even mob violence. Nowadays this is no longer the case, but such improvements come at a cost. Instead of a bunch of places with different standards in which different things are permitted and forbidden, you get the same standard imposed everywhere. Hence the present uniformity.

Of course, judging these changes is ultimately a matter of personal opinion, value, and preference. If you believe that the ideological standards of public discourse, academic scholarship, etc. that are presently imposed across the Western world are merely promoting truth and common sense, clearly you'll see the present situation as a vast improvement. If you seriously disagree with them, however, you may well prefer a world in which there is a patchwork of places, where in some of them your opinions might get you in serious trouble, but in others you'd be free to discuss them in respectable venues -- even if the present standards are not enforced by any sort of draconian penalties, but mostly by ostracism, marginalization, and career damage.

That said, how do you think the Age of the Internet affects this ideological uniformity?

The effect is twofold. On the one hand, it has given rise to various obscure venues in which extremely interesting contrarian opinions can be read. These are however read by tiny audiences and written by people who are either anonymous or, for whatever reason, don't have much to lose in terms of further marginalization and public opprobrium. Their influence on the mainstream opinion is effectively zero.

On the other hand, the internet is greatly increasing the pressure for ideological conformity, because it has vastly amplified all sorts of reputational damage. Once you're on record for having expressed some disreputable opinion, this record will be instantly accessible to anyone who just types your name into a computer, forever and irreversibly. I think this is the strongest effect brought about by the internet, and it clearly goes towards strengthening of the ideological uniformity.

One also often reads opinions about how the internet is supposedly some big technological game-changer that's somehow going to undermine the traditional institutions of public opinion. As far as I can tell, however, such arguments have never risen beyond sheer wishful thinking.

Comment author: Multiheaded 31 March 2012 09:23:13PM *  -1 points [-]

except that the object of transferred allegiance is typically some more or less abstracted group, rather than a concrete political unit. (The vulgarity, silliness, malignancy, and dishonesty are by no means lacking, of course.)

That's very easy to imagine as a concept... but are you really making a falsifiable claim that Western intelligentsia typically does all that right now? "Africans/Blacks/Gays/Arabs/Immigrants/Trotskyists/Opponents of evil regime X are such a virtuous and naturally blessed group that they can do no wrong, and everything that they believe as a group must therefore also be correct."? I hardly recall seeing this kind of sentiment expressed by modern authors with any frequency*; if they have do have partisan feelings for some group (e.g. articles by straight liberal people in favor of gay marriage), they're usually more circumspect - and more sane (as in, less doublethink & vulgar use of unspoken assumptions) - about it. Maybe you and me just read the same words differently.

I know you're likely to prefer avoiding any mention of individual "respectable" authors in such context, but... any examples? Please? (I'd like some where such association with a distantly-viewed group is more or less explicit, of course, and I'm also curious to see if you feel that people renowned as cynics and skeptics fall prey to such sentiment.)

-* For "Opponents of evil regime X", see the ongoing coverage of the "Arab Spring" (yes, the naming does display a little partisan bias); do the overwhelming majority of publications imply that 100% of the rebels commit no atrocities, have exclusively noble motivations and are of good moral character, share a lot of priors with Western liberals, etc? If so, I haven't noticed it; in fact, the most partisan pro-uprising source so far has arguably been Al-Jazeera, not e.g. Huffington Post or Guardian.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 07 April 2012 08:07:18PM *  9 points [-]

I know you're likely to prefer avoiding any mention of individual "respectable" authors in such context, but... any examples? Please?

OK, I'll try to give a current example, with the caveat that I'm giving it purely for illustrative purposes, not to start unwelcome politically charged discussions.

Observe the ongoing controversy over the recent shooting in Florida. Now, I'm not going to speculate on the details of the case itself at all -- for the sake of the argument, you can assume any version of the events you wish, and what I'll say will still apply.

Whatever may have actually occurred in this case, there is no doubt that: (1) conclusive evidence of what really happened is still lacking, and even less evidence was available when the controversy erupted some weeks ago, and yet (2) numerous respectable voices of the mainstream opinion rushed to express passionate condemnation of the shooter that went far beyond anything that could be reasonably inferred from the evidence, often going even beyond mere bias and spin into outright lies and fabrication. Even if, hypothetically, some evidence eventually emerges showing that their general conclusion was right, and the shooter really did something as nasty as they believe, it is simply undeniable that they have gone far beyond anything that might be justified given the presently available knowledge. (And it's easy to find plenty of examples of vulgarity, silliness, malignancy, and dishonesty in their reactions.)

Now, how to explain these reactions? Clearly, some people's reactions are easily explained with just plain "nationalism" in Orwell's sense, since they share their own identity with the person who got killed. But what about those who have no such connection, which certainly includes the majority of the respectable opinion that got inflamed with such passionate intensity? It seems to me like a clear-cut case of "transferred nationalism" in Orwell's sense.

(Again, I really hate to introduce any discussions of controversial daily politics on LW. I'm giving an example like this one only because I was specifically asked to do so, and I don't intend to follow up with any specific discussion of the case. I'm interested in it only as a case study for examining the mechanisms of public opinion demonstrated in it.)

Comment author: gjm 31 March 2012 08:16:03PM 0 points [-]

just like in those countries it was dangerous to be too critical [...] in the Western world it can also be quite dangerous for one's reputation to question the results of some of the contemporary grand narratives of progress.

Um. In the USSR, being too critical of the government's policies and their effects could get you sent to a prison camp in Siberia. In the present-day US, being too critical of "the contemporary grand narratives of progress" can get some people to think your opinions are weird. "Just like"? Really?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 07 April 2012 07:13:21PM *  5 points [-]

I didn't mean to say that their mechanisms of enforcement are identical; that would certainly be absurd. I just made an analogy between the two systems' ideological narratives of progress and their confounding of the alleged beneficial effect of the system itself with the exogenous effects of technological progress. (Note the difference between my characterizing of dissent in the former system as dangerous in general, and my claim that in the West nowadays, it is typically dangerous only for one's reputation. I did mean by this that the latter system practices, for the most part, more subtle reputation-based mechanisms instead of downright censorship, repression, etc.)

Comment author: [deleted] 01 April 2012 02:06:08AM 7 points [-]

In a way, FDR managed to play the ultimate head-game with all future American right-wingers by wrapping his legacy into the image of a great war leader whom someone strongly patriotic can't despise without feeling disloyal.

Actually that's far from original. Obtaining great victories for the advancement of your power unit is a great way to take control at a very hearts-and-minds level and memetically and without further effort brand all opposition or even serious criticism as traitorous to the cause of the power unit. De Gaulle did it (with limited but still substantial success), Churchill did it, Lenin did it, Ben-Gurion did it, Patton tried to do it but got shot, same for MLK and Julius Caesar (but Augustus succeeded and lived to enjoy it), Gandhi did it, Hassan II of Morocco did it, and every tinpot strongman dictator tries to invoke it even though they never stepped on a battlefield!.

It does feel liberating to express this fact so bluntly, though, especially in the cases of Churchill, FDR, and De Gaulle.

That has been a permanent feature of American society ever since the New Deal,

You mean to say it wasn't even before that, or that it is in any way exclusive to American society, as opposed to every society in the planet save for very specific corners of the Internet?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 07 April 2012 06:47:41PM *  9 points [-]

Actually that's far from original. Obtaining great victories for the advancement of your power unit is a great way to take control at a very hearts-and-minds level and memetically and without further effort brand all opposition or even serious criticism as traitorous to the cause of the power unit.

Sure, but I meant something more specific in FDR's case. Basically, any post-WW2 American right-winger (by which I mean someone whose values and beliefs are roughly in line with what's commonly understood as "right-wing" in the American context) is in a position where his values and beliefs would naturally lead him to a strongly negative overall view of FDR -- except for FDR's role as a great war leader, where his patriotism will lead him to feel like it would be treasonably unpatriotic to condemn FDR and examine critically the whole mythical legacy of WW2. This has indeed been a source of major cognitive dissonance for the entire post-WW2 American right, and one of the reasons why it could never come up with anything resembling a coherent and practical ideology. (The previously discussed 1950s era McCarthyists being one example.)

Of course, there have been some right-wingers who have bit the bullet, condemned FDR, and went on to attack the sacred myth of his legacy head-on. However, these have never been more than a marginal phenomenon, and in fact, such tendencies have always been a surefire way to get oneself ostracized from the respectable mainstream of the American conservatism.

You mean to say it wasn't even before that, or that it is in any way exclusive to American society, as opposed to every society in the planet save for very specific corners of the Internet?

The key difference is that in the pre-New Deal American society, the norms to which one was supposed to conform were determined at the local level. The enforcement of conformity was indeed often quite severe and unforgiving, and it ranged anywhere from just shunning to extralegal retaliation by the local law enforcement to downright mob violence, up to and including lynching. However, it was completely local in character, and one always had the option of moving to a different town or state where the local opinion would be more to one's liking.

The New Deal was an innovation in that it established the bureaucratic and legal infrastructure for ideological enforcement on the nation-wide scale, not just directly through the vastly expanded federal government, but also through its myriad tentacles that have since then grabbed just about every institution of organized society, both state and private. Of course, this control has been much gentler than the previous localism, and, thanks to the enormous wealth it commands, this system has been able to afford using carrots more than sticks. However, it has also led to an utterly dreadful intellectual uniformity compared to what had existed before.

(To be precise, there had been some precedents before that, but they were all short and happened during exceptional wartime situations. The New Deal however established it as a permanent and regular feature.)

Comment author: [deleted] 01 April 2012 01:43:42AM 4 points [-]

it is can also be quite dangerous for one's reputation to question the results of some of the contemporary grand narratives of progress

Without questioning them yourself, could you give examples of such grand narratives? I'm worried because, well, we in Less Wrong do buy into a particular grand narrative of progress.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 07 April 2012 06:14:28PM *  7 points [-]

I'm worried because, well, we in Less Wrong do buy into a particular grand narrative of progress.

I don't know in whose name you're speaking when you talk in first person plural. However, if I would have to point out one valuable insight from the whole of OB/LW, it's that the kind of progress that is considered the least controversial and problematic one nowadays, and which is hailed as uniformly beneficial by a strong consensus across the ideological spectrum -- namely, technological progress -- in fact likely has some nasty surprises in store for us.

On the other hand, technological progress is a matter of objective and measurable accomplishment, not some grand moral narrative. For the sort of example you're looking for, you can consider any major social change in recent centuries that is considered a matter of enlightenment and moral progress nowadays.

Comment author: gjm 31 March 2012 08:31:14PM 4 points [-]

people's (quite reasonable) anger against the worst outrages of the New Deal regime.

Could you give a few examples of those worst outrages?

Moldbug has written a very insightful analysis

I can't say I find it very convincing. In particular, he writes (and I think this claim is central to his argument, in so far as there actually is an argument)

McCarthyism, in neutral language, is the irrational belief that unelected and/or extra-governmental officials should be responsible to elected officials.

which seems to me rather like saying "Intelligent Design, in neutral language, is the irrational belief that the education establishment should be responsive to the opinions of the parents of the children it's educating", or "Communism, in neutral language, is the irrational belief that the marginal utility of money decreases with wealth". That is, yes that's part of it, but it's far from all of it, and it's not the bit that people actually get upset about, and pretending otherwise is just silly.

McCarthyism was the belief that unelected officials should be accountable to elected ones. And that that accountability extended to having them fired for having Communist connections. And that this applied not only to unelected government officials, but movie-makers and teachers and union leaders and so forth. And that "having Communist connections" should be interpreted very broadly indeed.

So it seems to me, anyway. I'm very willing to be informed better -- but I'd like, y'know, some actual evidence.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 31 March 2012 10:06:12PM *  12 points [-]

Could you give a few examples of those worst outrages?

Have in mind that the New Deal and WW2 are at the very heart of the political myth of the modern U.S. (and the whole modern West by extension). Demythologizing this part of history is extremely difficult, since huge inferential distances have to be bridged and much counter-evidence to the mainstream view must be marshalled before it's possible to establish a reasonable discussion with someone who is familiar only with the mainstream view, even assuming maximum open-mindedness and good faith on both sides.

(In fact, one of the reasons for McCarthyists' seemingly obsessive focus on Communist infiltration was that although they perceived correctly at some level that the problem was much deeper, they never dared to proceed with any further serious attack on the whole grand sacred myth of FDR's regime. The Communism issue was a convenient thing to latch onto in their struggle against the New Deal establishment, since it was by itself an extremely powerful argument but didn't require questioning any of the central untouchable sacred legacies. In a way, FDR managed to play the ultimate head-game with all future American right-wingers by wrapping his legacy into the image of a great war leader whom someone strongly patriotic can't despise without feeling disloyal. Sometimes this leads to grimly amusing stories, like when a few years ago American veterans protested over a new WW2 memorial that featured a bust of Stalin along with FDR and Churchill.)

The least controversial examples, however, are those related to the American cooperation with the Soviets during WW2 and in the immediate post-war period, many of which go far beyond any plausible claims of strategic necessity. Some of them are in the "outrage" territory by any reasonable meaning of the term, like for example the Katyn massacre coverup or the Operation Keelhaul. Another example, which was perhaps the principal impetus for McCarthyism in practice, was the handling of the civil war in China (see the OB post I linked elsewhere).

McCarthyism was the belief that unelected officials should be accountable to elected ones. And that that accountability extended to having them fired for having Communist connections. And that this applied not only to unelected government officials, but movie-makers and teachers and union leaders and so forth. And that "having Communist connections" should be interpreted very broadly indeed.

In a sense, you are right. It would be fair to say that the McCarthyists -- again, using the term loosely, not specifically for McCarthy and his personal sympathizers -- did want to make Communism disreputable in a similar way in which racism is nowadays. For a brief while, they had some success -- some people's careers were seriously damaged due to their supposed Communist connections, much like many people's careers are damaged nowadays due to their supposed racist beliefs or connections. And indeed, as always happens when ideological passions are rife, there were some overbroad interpretations of Communist connections and sympathies. (Just like today it's by no means necessary to be a card-carrying neo-Nazi to be accused, with serious consequences, of "racism" and "hate.")

On the other hand, the McCarthyists were by no means the first ones to start with such hardball ideological politics. FDR's regime certainly didn't use any gentler methods to destroy its own ideological opponents, and the tactics that were used against McCarthy and other similar figures of the period were also every bit as dirty from day one. (By the way, did you know that the media assault on him was in fact CIA-orchestrated?)

So, on the whole, it shows a huge lack of perspective if you believe that McCarthyism was somehow novel or unique in pushing the idea that people's careers, especially public careers, should suffer if they commit certain ideological transgressions. That has been a permanent feature of American society ever since the New Deal, and the only question was who would get to wield the ideological hegemony and determine these bounds of acceptability. Therefore, I don't think it's justified to define McCarthyism by this aspect, when in fact it merely meant acceptance of the already established rules of the game. Sure, you may want to condemn all sides from some idealistic perspective, but believing that McCarthyism was really exceptional in this regard is merely buying into the propaganda of the winning side.

With that in mind, I do think it's accurate to see the struggle of elected politicians against the permanent bureaucracy (and its close allies in the media, academia, etc.), and the defeat of the former that firmly confirmed the dominance of the latter, as the central and most important element of the whole McCarthyist phenomenon.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 31 March 2012 07:36:08PM 2 points [-]

While Raymond is mostly correct in the particular facts he points out, his overall picture is ill-informed and misleading.

Could you go into more details on what you think is wrong with his overall picture.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 31 March 2012 08:59:15PM *  9 points [-]

Don't get me wrong, the basic story about the Soviet-directed subversion is true and well-attested by testimonies of Soviet defectors. However, there are two major problems with Raymond's narrative.

First, his ideological concept of "suicidalism" is highly contrived and detached from reality on a number of points. Raymond starts from his own libertarian ideology -- with which I in fact have some sympathy, but which is in his case very nerdy and simplistic -- and then he takes a caricatured version of every opinion he disagrees with, and amalgamates all this. Now, I do think a correct analysis along these lines could be done (i.e. reducing the dominant ideology in the modern West to a list of principles, some of which need to be only stated plainly to see how pernicious they are). However, I think Raymond fails in this task, being driven by the desire to see something as close as possible to a simple evil inversion of his own principles.

(He also displays a trait common among modern libertarians and conservatives that I find indescribably irritating. Namely, they often scour the rhetoric of liberals and then exclaim in triumph when they find something that seems like a good target for propagandistic attack because it superficially looks bad from the liberal point of view. Of course, they never managed to fool anyone of any consequence this way, it and just makes them look like clowns to anyone but their own choir to whom they are preaching.)

Second, I think that a correct historical analysis would show that Soviet subversion -- in the sense of subversion planned and directed from Moscow -- was by no means unimportant, but not of such central and exclusive importance as Raymond believes. Furthermore, it's very simplistic to believe that whenever some ideological interaction and intermixing occurred, it was just diabolically clever Russians duping their Western useful idiots. Plenty of that happened, of course, but the overall picture is much more complex than that. The story of the cooperation and mutual ideological influence between the Soviet and American elites was definitely not simple and unidirectional.

That said, there is much that is perfectly correct in Raymond's article, and it would be a good reference if it were written in a more cautious and less ranting way. But as it is, it has serious flaws.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 31 March 2012 02:33:50AM 1 point [-]

What specific changes in positions advocated occurred based on this disconnect? I'm particularly interested in changes that occurred because the leaders were Communist sympathizers when the membership wasn't.

I linked to a relevant article elsewhere in this thread.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 31 March 2012 06:39:20PM *  6 points [-]

I don't think this is a good place to start. While Raymond is mostly correct in the particular facts he points out, his overall picture is ill-informed and misleading. His ranting style also doesn't help.

A better example to answer Tim's question would be the fall of China to Mao, discussed in this Overcoming Bias post.

Comment author: gjm 30 March 2012 10:28:36AM 5 points [-]

Let's suppose -- for I am no expert on the history, nor am I well placed to evaluate your expertise -- that you're right, and that indeed the US in the early 1950s was stuffed with communist infiltrators and communism-sympathizers. And that McCarthy was not successful in changing this situation.

It seems to me that the US did rather well for itself over those years and the ones that followed, in terms of prosperity and progress and international influence and happiness and just about any other metric you might care to name.

Would our hypothetical history-reviewing rationalist, then, also conclude that communist infiltration -- even on the grand scale you say it achieved in McCarthy's time -- was not such a bad thing?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 31 March 2012 04:02:59PM *  8 points [-]

It's a much more complex question. For start, while Joe McCarthy himself is the greatest individual symbol of this whole period, there were many other crucial people and events in which he played no role. (For example, the Hiss affair, arguably the very central event of the whole era, had happened before McCarthy came to any national prominence.)

Now, the whole "McCarthyist" reaction (a.k.a. the "Second Red Scare") did have some significant influence on things. After all, the U.S. back then still had some strong and functional institutions of democracy and federalism, and the Washington elites were in genuine fear of politicians who were riding on people's (quite reasonable) anger against the worst outrages of the New Deal regime. This clash was resolved with the complete defeat of these politicians, who were either destroyed and consigned to infamy, like McCarthy, or eventually lost their edge and got assimilated into the establishment, like Nixon. But the blow they delivered did have a significant influence in altering the course of events in a number of different ways.

(By the way, Moldbug has written a very insightful analysis of McCarthyism as the last dying gasp of meaningful representative democracy in the U.S.)

As for the U.S. prospering in the 1950s and 1960s despite all this, it's always futile to discuss historical counterfactuals. There are way too many confounding factors involved, not the least of which is that in the 20th century, the benefits of technological progress for living standards tended to exceed the damage by bad government in all but the most extreme cases, making it hard to speculate on what might have happened without the latter. (Also, due to a confluence of lucky technological and social factors, the period in question happened to place low- and medium-skilled labor in industrialized countries in an exceptionally favorable situation.)

(Note that if it hadn't been for the empirical example of the Western world across the Iron Curtain, people in the Communist countries 30 years ago could also claim, as an argument in favor of the system, that their standard of living was higher than a century earlier. Also, just like in those countries it was dangerous to be too critical of the alleged great progress achieved, nowadays in the Western world it is can also be quite dangerous for one's reputation to question the results of some of the contemporary grand narratives of progress.)

Comment author: Viliam_Bur 30 March 2012 12:59:40PM *  8 points [-]

I needed to re-read your comment twice to understand what you meant, because I got it completely wrong the first time. This is how I understand it now, so I write it clearly for readers like me:

What is the dominant form of nationalism (in Orwell's very loose sense) today in our society?

Would criticizing it make other people percieve you as one of people considered dangerous delusional extremists?

I abstain from the first question, and the answer to the second one is: yes, and it is kinda scary. (Well, disagreeing with majority on a topic that the majority blindly follows is always scary.)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 31 March 2012 03:19:38PM *  13 points [-]

Your reading is correct, but I would also emphasize one particularly bad failure mode for people reading Orwell's essay nowadays. Namely, people often read it and imagine crude and overt expressions of "nationalism" (in Orwell's sense) that were common in his own day, and are still common outside of the Western world. So the most subtle and insightful points of the essay are likely to go right over their heads.

More concretely, how many people will stop and think about this part of the essay (bold emphasis mine):

But for an intellectual, transference [of "nationalist" allegiance] has an important function... It makes it possible for him to be much more nationalistic — more vulgar, more silly, more malignant, more dishonest — that he could ever be on behalf of his native country, or any unit of which he had real knowledge. [...] In societies such as ours, it is unusual for anyone describable as an intellectual to feel a very deep attachment to his own country. Public opinion — that is, the section of public opinion of which he as an intellectual is aware — will not allow him to do so. [...] [Yet] [h]e still feels the need for a Fatherland, and it is natural to look for one somewhere abroad. Having found it, he can wallow unrestrainedly in exactly those emotions from which he believes that he has emancipated himself. [...] [A]ll the overthrown idols [of traditional nationalism] can reappear under different names, and because they are not recognised for what they are they can be worshipped with a good conscience. Transferred nationalism, like the use of scapegoats, is a way of attaining salvation without altering one's conduct.

Now, Orwell had in mind here primarily the Communist Russophile intellectuals of his own day, whose allegiance was transferred to a specific and readily identifiable foreign state and ideology. Nowadays, things are rarely so crude and obvious, but it seems to me that essentially the same phenomenon is still rampant -- except that the object of transferred allegiance is typically some more or less abstracted group, rather than a concrete political unit. (The vulgarity, silliness, malignancy, and dishonesty are by no means lacking, of course.)

(Now that I've written this, I remember a more recent writer who once wrote an essay that reads practically like an update of Orwell's above cited paragraph for our time. Yet his very name is associated with such unseemly controversies that I'd have to get into long and bothersome disclaimers about where exactly my agreement with him ends, so I'd rather not get into it. This latter fact, of course, is just another reminder of how rampant the "nationalist" passions are in the respectable public discourse nowadays.)

Comment author: buybuydandavis 30 March 2012 06:10:44PM 3 points [-]

Every so often I get downvoted for something I consider completely noncontroversial, but with no comments to say what the objections are.

The general term for the kind of ideology Orwell is talking about is collectivism, and the epistemological error is methodological collectivism. Clearly nationalism is just not the right word, because he is not just talking about nations. Collectivism more accurately captures what he is talking about. If anyone has a more precise and accurate term, feel free to share.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 31 March 2012 01:34:36AM *  7 points [-]

I didn't downvote you, but my guess is that your comment came off as an attempt to push Randianism, or perhaps some other closely related ideology. I'm pretty sure that wasn't your intention, but the problem is that many such people are highly active on the internet, and "collectivism" happens to be a word that they use incessantly and which is not very common otherwise.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 30 March 2012 05:46:04AM *  20 points [-]

Interestingly, Orwell -- who can hardly be portrayed as a rabid right-wing zealot -- characterizes the intellectual elites of the English-speaking world of his day with these words:

Among the intelligentsia, it hardly needs saying that the dominant form of nationalism is Communism--using this word in a very loose sense, to include not merely Communist Party members, but 'fellow travellers' and russophiles generally.

Rather than extolling Orwell's essay for its applause-lights-inducing qualities, we can ask ourselves -- what does this imply about the descendants of these same intellectual elites today, and about the results one would get from applying Orwell's criteria impartially to the predominant, high-status beliefs of our own day?

After all, the consensus among the respectable mainstream nowadays is that people who shared Orwell's above-quoted opinion back in the day were dangerous, rabid, delusional, and malevolent extremists. There's even a popular term of opprobrium for these people ("McCarthyism"). So, what conclusion should be derived from the facts that: (1) everyone will applaud the general principles espoused by Orwell's essay, and yet (2) Orwell's own application of these principles to the Anglospheric intellectual elites of his own day led him to a conclusion that places him among these frightful extremists, whom any respectable person nowadays can only abhor?

Now, I'm not writing all this to start a discussion about these controversial historical topics. I'm writing to point out that it's easy to fall for the warm fuzzies awoken by a superficial, applause-lights-style agreement with Orwell's general remarks -- while at the same time remaining blissfully oblivious of their actual implications on various opinions that are high-status in the society in which one lives, including the modern Western societies. (Especially considering that the Western intellectual elites of today have direct institutional continuity with those whose "dominant form of nationalism [was] Communism," according to Orwell.)

Comment author: Blueberry 27 March 2012 07:27:23AM 0 points [-]

The obvious question is, what about female partners, or group sex partners with the guy in question? Do they count against the girl?

I'm not seeing why the asymmetry means that the guy will end up in an unfavorable position even if he knows how to be attractive enough. Other than the girl finding the guy unattractive, I'm not sure what else you're hinting at. Given that I like girls who have had large numbers of partners, is there anything else I need to know or do or be aware of?

Re: looks, are we talking the "blonde = ditzy, glasses = geeky" level of stereotype? Or are you talking about the way someone's mood, shyness, introversion, and so forth can be read from body language? Or something as straightforward as someone wearing a lot of makeup spent a lot of time on her appearance, and thus probably wants attention/cares what people think of her a lot?

The only "discourse breakdown" I've seen is the crowd that thinks any attempt to improve dating skills is fake and evil, and I don't really care about them. I think we're past the reflexive "pickup = evil" by now. I'd really like to hear this stuff talked about in plainer and more concrete ways, or at least PM me with a few specifics!

One idea: we've had a thread on LW where people post their online dating profiles for feedback. I think it'd be an interesting game to post pictures of people, either ours or other random pictures, and see what kind of guesses we come up with about them based on clues from their appearance.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 28 March 2012 07:04:37AM *  6 points [-]

The obvious question is, what about female partners, or group sex partners with the guy in question? Do they count against the girl?

Why would it be "obvious"? Even completely ignoring these questions still leads to useful insight for the majority of cases in practice.

To answer your question, we'd need to get into a discussion of the motivational mechanisms of the behaviors you mention, but that is certain to lead to even more controversial questions, which I'd really prefer not to get into.

I'm not seeing why the asymmetry means that the guy will end up in an unfavorable position even if he knows how to be attractive enough. Other than the girl finding the guy unattractive, I'm not sure what else you're hinting at. Given that I like girls who have had large numbers of partners, is there anything else I need to know or do or be aware of?

That depends on what exactly you're aiming for. Saying "I like girls who [have the characteristic X]" sounds as if you like such girls for non-serious, shorter-term relationships in which you have the upper hand. Clearly, you shouldn't worry too much if it's really just a throwaway relationship that will soon end one way or another. (Still, you should watch for traits that indicate propensity for troublesome behaviors that can get you into unpleasant situations, or even serious problems, even in the context of such a relationship. What's indicated by sheer partner count in this regard, independent of the mechanism I described earlier, is another can of worms I'd rather not open.)

On the other hand, if you're aiming for a committed relationship, a woman's high number of previous partners (which in fact doesn't even have to be extremely high) definitely makes the deck stacked against you. This follows from the basic statistics of the situation, and "if he knows how to be attractive enough" is a can-opener assumption in this context.

The only "discourse breakdown" I've seen is the crowd that thinks any attempt to improve dating skills is fake and evil, and I don't really care about them. I think we're past the reflexive "pickup = evil" by now. I'd really like to hear this stuff talked about in plainer and more concrete ways, or at least PM me with a few specifics!

In fact, the situation has gotten significantly worse on LW in this regard since I started commenting here around two years ago. Back then, it seemed to me like discussions of these topics on LW might result in interesting insight whose worth would be greater than the trouble. However, ever since then, a string of ever worse and more cringe-worthy failures that occurred whenever these topics were opened has convinced me in the opposite.

As for the specifics and straight talk, there are plenty of blogs and forums where such things can be discussed ad infinitum. (Though admittedly these days none are anywhere as good as what could be found during the heyday of the contrarian blogosphere some years ago.) I really don't see any point in trying to open them in a forum like this one, which has conclusively shown to be a bad place for them.

Comment author: Multiheaded 26 March 2012 08:59:27AM *  -1 points [-]

A better way to go about it would be slipping Vlad some drug that will overwhelm his barriers and make him blabber out the horrible truth. Look at his comment history and you'll see that no-one ever got anything serious out of him after him dropping such hints with just talk.;)

(I might be joking now, but my jimmies are overall quite rustled with his entire soap opera; moreso when I consider how clear-headed and constructive he can be with simple and ideology-free comments.)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 27 March 2012 06:17:49AM *  6 points [-]

Based on the comments you've left so far in response to what I've been writing, I estimate a low probability that you are genuinely intrigued by what I might think about certain questions, and a much higher probability that you are baiting.

However, just in case the less probable hypothesis is true, I will for once respond to you. Namely, if you want me to talk about things that I'm reluctant to discuss because I'm not sure if it's worth the controversy it will cause, then I'd first like to see that you're making some effort to understand the arguments that I have already made on related topics. So far, I've seen zero indication of this, which makes it likely that you are indeed baiting.

Now, this may be a misunderstanding on my part, but honestly, I can hardly see how it might be so. Someone who is genuinely curious about my contrarian opinions would make some effort to respond intelligently to those comments where I have already discussed them, even if I've done it only in a cautious and indirect way. You, on the other hand, have shown absolutely no inclination to do so. Rather, you are behaving as if you are eager to get some juicy soundbites that would be a convenient target for attack. And you can't possibly claim that my writings so far have been devoid of substance, since dozens of other people have evidently found enough substance in them to write well-thought-out responses.

Comment author: Blueberry 26 March 2012 12:04:10AM 4 points [-]

So basically, if a guy tries to have a long-term relationship with a girl who's had a lot of partners, he better study Game or there's a good chance she'll get bored, because she's used to very attractive guys? That makes sense; I wouldn't think of that as very controversial. Of course, that ignores that some women actually do also make an effort to work on their long-term relationship skills and find ways to deal with periods where their partners seem less attractive.

I didn't see anything about looks in that subthread; does something similar apply to dating someone very good-looking?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 27 March 2012 05:18:22AM *  6 points [-]

By "looks" I didn't mean the level of attractiveness, but more generally, all clues available from people's appearance. Clearly, this is going to lead to strife once people start recognizing themselves, or someone they care about, in the criteria under discussion. (This may in fact be due to understandable annoyance on part of someone who represents an actual statistical exception, but again, this makes it no less a barrier to rational discussion.)

Re: relationships with women who've had a lot of partners, the problem is that for a typical man, the extreme skew of the male attractiveness distribution and the asymmetry of the male-female mating strategies mean that even with some dedication to studying and practice of game, he'll likely end up in an unfavorable position. But again, talking about this stuff in plainer and more concrete ways is hard to do without crossing the bounds that have repeatedly shown to be a trigger of discourse breakdown on LW.

Comment author: Blueberry 25 March 2012 11:03:20PM 0 points [-]

So basically which stereotypes are accurate? If you're willing, I'd like to know what specific inferences can be made from sexual history, looks, or behavior: you can PM me. I assure you it won't personally aggravate me. Are you thinking lots of partners/good looks correspond to intimacy issues, low self-esteem, or craziness?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 25 March 2012 11:27:47PM 3 points [-]

Well, it's a topic for a whole book, not a brief comment buried deep in a vast old thread. But for some concrete examples, see e.g. the comments I left in this subthread.

Comment author: Blueberry 25 March 2012 09:20:15AM 0 points [-]

Redheads? Now I'm curious what kinds of traits X you're talking about.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 25 March 2012 04:32:03PM *  6 points [-]

To take a prominent example, it's impossible to discuss the inferences that can be made from a woman's sexual history without getting into the problems described above. (Especially considering that statistically accurate criteria of this sort are, as a purely factual matter, highly asymmetrical across the sexes.) Or similarly, any sorts of inferences that can be made from looks and behavior, where it's usually impossible to even get to a rational discussion of whether they are statistically accurate, since any such discussion will at the same time hit the ideological boo light of "prejudice" and personally aggravate those to whom these inferences apply personally (or who have important people in their lives in this category, or who will perhaps just react for signaling reasons).

On these topics, there really is no way to avoid either sounding crude and offensive or being misleading by omitting important elements of the truth.

Comment author: Kaj_Sotala 20 March 2012 03:22:12PM 9 points [-]

In medicine, John Ioannidis has basically built his career around exposing unpleasant truths that the perverse incentives have led the field away from. He has gotten several of his papers to various top journals, is currently a Professor of Medicine at Stanford, and been cited over 30,000 times. Isn't that evidence that you can make fundamental criticisms of the state of the field without sacrificing your career?

My intuition suggests that both in the case of Ioannidis and other somewhat similar cases - such as the WEIRD paper, which seriously questioned the generalizability of pretty much all existing psychological research, and which has been cited almost 300 times since its publication in 2010 - is that when a field is drifting away from reality, most of the people working within the field are quite aware of the fact. When somebody finally makes a clear and persuasive argument about this being the case, everyone will start citing that argument.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 21 March 2012 04:25:48AM 8 points [-]

I certainly don't deny that the self-correcting mechanism you describe has worked to some extent in some fields in recent past. However, it also seems evident that in certain other fields nothing like that is happening, even though their mainstream has long been drifting far from reality, and the only people making cogent fundamental criticism are outsiders completely out of grace with the establishment. I don't have anything like a complete theory that would explain when correct fundamental criticism will be acclaimed as an important contribution, and when it will trigger a negative career-killing response from the establishment.

Now, of course, one possibility is that I have simply acquired crackpot beliefs on several subjects and I'm completely misdiagnosing the situation. Clearly, I would disagree, but examining the problem further would require getting into a complex discussion of each particular subject in question.

That said, regarding the specific question of fields that have bearing on the global warming controversies, my current positions are (mainly) ones of confusion and indecision. They are not among the examples of clearly pathological fields that I have in mind. In the context of this thread, I merely want to point out that the arguments such as that advanced by Nordhaus aren't enough to give much certainty about the health of these areas.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 19 March 2012 10:36:04AM *  11 points [-]

(Is there a set of conditions that would convince/enable you to write posts explaining to LessWrong how to engage in meta-level Hansonian/Schellingian analyses similar to the one you did in your comment? Alternatively, do you know of any public fora whose level of general intelligence and "rationality" is greater than LessWrong's? I can't immediately think of any better strategies for raising the sanity waterline than you or Steve Rayhawk writing a series of posts about signaling games, focal points, implicit decision policies, social psychology, &c., and how we should use those concepts when interpreting the social world. But of course I have no idea if that would be a good use of your time or if it'd actually have any noticeable impact. Anyway it seems possible there'd be a way to raise funds to pay you to write at least a few posts, Kickstarter style, or I could try to convince Anna and Julia from the new/upcoming Center for Modern Rationality to write up some grants for you.)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 21 March 2012 03:47:35AM 6 points [-]

Thanks for the kind words, but I wouldn't be able to allocate enough time for such a project at the present moment. In fact, I've had plans to write something along these lines for quite a while, but original articles take much more time than comments. (And I've barely had any time even for comments in recent months.)

Also, realistically, I'm not sure how successful the product would be. I don't have much talent for writing in an engaging way, which is further exacerbated by English not being my native language. So I think that even with the best possible outcome, not very many people would end up reading it.

Comment author: [deleted] 16 March 2012 06:43:26PM *  7 points [-]

http://lesswrong.com/lw/9n/the_uniquely_awful_example_of_theism/

Tests which were proposed in the comments include whether a person favours legalization of marijuana, and whether they believe in astrology. (Well, the one about marijuana also includes value judgements: two perfectly rational agents with identical priors and access to the same evidence would agree about the possible effects of marijuana legalization but disagree about whether they're good or bad because of different utility functions.)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 17 March 2012 09:50:01PM 5 points [-]

Tests which were proposed in the comments include whether a person favours legalization of marijuana, [...]

This is actually a good test, but not in the way it was intended. Drug laws are not about drugs, and I expect someone who claims a high level of rationality about political issues to understand this point. So when someone discusses the issue of marijuana prohibition by doing some sort of cost/benefit analysis that takes the purported motives of these laws at face value, I find this to be a miserable failure, no matter what his ultimate conclusions.

Comment author: CarlShulman 16 March 2012 08:10:36PM *  2 points [-]

Here's an article by William Nordhaus, a climate economist often attacked by people like Joe Romm for arguing for a slower path of carbon emissions reduction than others.

Key graph here. It's hard to do a thorough search and miss such things.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 17 March 2012 08:42:56PM 7 points [-]

Here's an article by William Nordhaus, a climate economist often attacked by people like Joe Romm for arguing for a slower path of carbon emissions reduction than others.

In this article, Nordhaus says that because there is no outright Soviet-style repression against dissenters in the academia, it's absurd to suppose that dissenters might be afraid to speak their mind. Regardless of whether his overall positions about global warming are correct, Nordhaus is being either naive or disingenuous here. Clearly there are many ways in which expressing contrarian opinions might be deadly for one's academic career, and which don't involve any open persecution (or even any open formal condemnation by the official institutions).

Comment author: Stuart_Armstrong 17 March 2012 10:27:50AM -2 points [-]

how important the problem is relative to other problems, what ethical theory to use when deciding whether a policy is good or bad

Apart from those two issues, the other points you bring up are the domain of experts. Unless we are experts ourselves, or have strong relevant information about the biases of experts, the rational thing to do is to defer to expert beliefs. We can widen the uncertainty somewhat (we can confidently expect overconfidence :-), maybe add a very small systematic bias in one direction (to reflect possible social or political biases - the correction has to be very small as our ability to reliably estimate these factors is very poor).

I might still complain about it falling afoul of anti-politics norms, but at least it would help create the impression that the debate was about ideas rather than tribes.

Excessive anti-politics norms are a problem here - because the issue has become tribalised, we're no longer willing to defend the rational position, or we caveat it far too much.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 17 March 2012 08:22:00PM *  13 points [-]

Unless we [...] have strong relevant information about the biases of experts, the rational thing to do is to defer to expert beliefs.

Well, yes, but the very fact that a question has strong ideological implications makes it highly probable that experts are biased about it. (I argued this point at greater length here.)

Comment author: orthonormal 17 March 2012 04:03:42PM 0 points [-]

In essence, you're saying that evolutionary psychology fails evolutionary theory. If this were the case, I really would have expected prominent evolutionary biologists to have noted it- that is the sort of evidence that would make me reconsider.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 17 March 2012 06:59:59PM *  7 points [-]

If this were the case, I really would have expected prominent evolutionary biologists to have noted it

This is one of those issues in science where the controversies are ideological in origin, so one should not put too much trust in the prevailing opinions in the academic establishment (especially publicly expressed ones).

Basically, the problem is that application of evolutionary theory to human behavior (i.e. human sociobiology) quickly leads into territory that is, from today's predominant ideological perspective, too frightful to contemplate. Some 30-40 years ago, there was a raging controversy over whether human sociobiology is a legitimate field of inquiry. Its proponents argued that it's just a regular application of evolutionary theory, while its opponents maintained that it's epistemologically flawed and at the same time motivated by evil and dangerous ideology. The former, of course, claimed in return that the latter were themselves motivated by fear of their own ideology being falsified.

As the outcome of this controversy, around two decades ago a compromise was struck. The field would be recognized as a legitimate academic discipline, but under a tacit agreement to remain limited to questions with relatively low ideological impact, and insofar as ideological spin is put on the results, it would be in a respectable direction. (The opening essay in The Adapted Mind has a pretty explicit statement of these founding principles.) Moreover, the field would be rebranded as "evolutionary psychology," abandoning the "sociobiology" moniker, which had, as a result of the prior controversies, acquired sinister connotations.

This new field has been successful in building a good public image, and some of its practitioners have become prominent and respectable public intellectuals. On the other hand, as may be expected, the more hard-line anti-sociobiology ideologues have continued to be its harsh critics, and to this day, discussion about its fundamental epistemological validity has remained an ideological battleground.

Comment author: Urquhart 17 March 2012 03:34:24AM 16 points [-]

How they're viewed has little to do with these decisions. Harding is seen as a weak President who was manipulated by those around him and who allowed corruption to flourish in his administration. The most famous example of this was The Teapot Dome Scandal. He may also, much like his successor Coolidge, have become associated with the boom that preceded the Great Depression.

Wilson is, unfairly I think, rewarded for leading America during WWI. This is in spite of the fact that he promised to keep America out of the war and managed to lose the peace that followed. Besides upholding sedition laws he did a number of other thoroughly un-liberal things.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 17 March 2012 07:36:32AM *  11 points [-]

How they're viewed has little to do with these decisions.

That is true, literally speaking. The point, however, is that the qualities that got Wilson celebrated and Harding forgotten or despised in the century since then were actually the same ones that led the former to fill jails with political prisoners and the latter to consider it unacceptable to preside over a country whose jails are filled with political prisoners. Besides, compared to the way things were done under Wilson, holding these petty corruption scandals as a heavy sin against Harding shows a complete lack of perspective.

But here we are getting into a historical and ideological discussion for which this forum is probably not a good place.

Comment author: Oligopsony 16 March 2012 04:42:48PM 5 points [-]

Many very smart people wouldn't unreservedly agree that the Terror was bad, either. If you're far left enough to cheer the Terror or far right enough to boo civil rights or rebel in a clown suit enough to do both, you should be used to not being the default audience and practiced at separating such "obvious" examples from the formal role they play in the argument.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 17 March 2012 07:16:21AM *  22 points [-]

You are ignoring the fact that the historical developments commonly known as "civil rights" have in fact led to a progression of ever more extreme policies (i.e. a slippery slope) whose present outcome is controversial even in the mainstream. This is indisputable no matter what position (if any) you happen to support in these controversies.

This slippery slope can be roughly described with the following progression:

1: Government-mandated discrimination across racial/ethnic/religious groups.

2: Libertarian/classical liberal position: procedural equality for everyone as far as the government is concerned, freedom to discriminate (or not) for private parties.

3: Prohibition of overt discrimination even for private businesses and organizations.

4(a): Affirmative action -- the government (and private parties under its influence and pressure) actively try to equalize statistical outcomes across groups by favoritism towards members of groups that do worse on average.

4(b): Disparate impact doctrine -- even if there is no overt discrimination, unequal statistical group outcomes are considered as evidence of discrimination by themselves, and any institution that produces such outcomes can be held legally liable on that basis alone.

While 1-3 are no longer controversial in the mainstream, 4(a) and 4(b) are still matters of intense public controversy. (Admittedly, for unclear reasons, 4(b) gets far less publicity than 4(a), despite its arguably even greater impact in practice.)

Comment author: wedrifid 15 March 2012 08:33:13AM 7 points [-]

Edit: By the way, none of these Americans (as far as I know) actually served a full ten-year sentence. They were all pardoned in the early 1920s by Warren Harding under his policy of "return to normalcy."

I take pleasure in reading this. Sanity is out there somewhere!

Comment author: Vladimir_M 16 March 2012 12:56:21AM 11 points [-]

Yes, but it certainly hasn't won out when you look at the way Woodrow Wilson and Warren Harding are remembered nowadays...

Comment author: wedrifid 14 March 2012 05:47:20AM 12 points [-]

My country?! I'm not American. I haven't even been to the U.S. in several years.

My apologies. I assumed too much from your evident awareness of US internal politics.

I've definitely seen stuff written on LW that is technically illegal in Victoria -- google for "serious contempt for, or revulsion or severe ridicule," with the quotes.

Without at all claiming that examples don't exist it isn't technical illegality that concerns me but actual instances of punishments, along the lines of the two cases of 10 year incarceration.

As you have illustrated, things being legal or otherwise is not too important. Far more important is the inclination of the judge (and the surrounding political incentives) to punish any given behavior. Both of the cases you cite illustrate how easily laws can be ignored by introducing a fully general excuse along the lines of "except when it is really politically expedient to do so!"

Comment author: Vladimir_M 15 March 2012 01:28:23AM *  29 points [-]

Without at all claiming that examples don't exist it isn't technical illegality that concerns me but actual instances of punishments, along the lines of the two cases of 10 year incarceration.

The Victorian law is one of those laws whose real meaning is quite different from its formal one. Read literally, it is a sweeping law that criminalizes anyone who says anything unkind about any religion. (It's literally criminal to "behav[e] in a way that encourages... revulsion or ridicule of another person, because of the other person's... religion," or to "encourage[]... severe ridicule of... [a] class of persons, because of their... religion.") Yet in practice, of course, it's tacitly clear what kinds of people should watch their mouths or else fear prosecution under this law, and who can in turn safely ignore it. (Generally, throughout the Western world, with the U.S. as a lone exception, modern speech restrictions commonly have this form, providing effectively a broad mandate for ideological censorship.)

Note also that a century ago people were tougher and had less to lose, so that much more severe penalties were necessary to get them in line. Also, a criminal or even just an arrest record of any sort is by itself a far more severe and permanent penalty for a respectable person nowadays than back then. Even defending yourself successfully in court will require a ruinous expense for everyone but the very rich, and this cost has gone up way out of proportion with income. So, while nobody in the West is facing ten-year sentences for speech these days, I don't think the chilling effects are much less severe than in the WW1-era U.S.

Edit: By the way, none of these Americans (as far as I know) actually served a full ten-year sentence. They were all pardoned in the early 1920s by Warren Harding under his policy of "return to normalcy."

Comment author: Vladimir_M 15 March 2012 01:09:48AM *  48 points [-]

Thinking about this article a bit more, you're missing a very important point. Namely, a "Schelling fence" is often of supreme importance even when there aren't multiple interest groups involved. (Nor even time- or value-inconsistent versions of the same party.)

This is because in most cases of conflict, pre-commitments are difficult to communicate. If you're maintaining some line of defence against an opponent and you're credibly pre-committed to defend even if the cost of defence is higher than the value of the prize fought over, you're safe against a rational opponent who perceives this pre-commitment correctly. However, if you have no such pre-commitment, the opponent has the incentive to mount an overwhelming attack even if the cost of the attack is higher than the prize -- since in that case you'll find it rational to retreat and avoid fighting.

The trouble is, communicating pre-commitment credibly is difficult, since it's always in your interest to assert pre-commitment to defend as credibly as possible, but secretly plan to withdraw if your bluff gets called. So this is where the Schelling points come into play: a conspicuous Schelling point helps create a meeting of minds about pre-commitments between the conflicting parties. Your commitment to defend at that line is credible because by failing to defend it, you lose not only that particular prize, but also everything up to the next strong Schelling point, which may even be nonexistent. (And is certainly harder to use effectively once you have a reputation as a pushover who gives up on valuable Schelling points.)

So, in case of Holocaust denial laws, there might be rational reason to oppose them even if a single Holocaust denier didn't exist. The principle that the government can't legislate official truth is a very clear Schelling point. The same principle modified by an exemption for those cases where the truth is evident and its denial offensive, much less so. Who gets to decide what's evident and what's offensive anyway? So once you've conceded that the government can prohibit you to say that that the Holocaust didn't happen, or that 2+2=5, there isn't any clear Schelling point where you'd draw the line and pre-commit to fight the prohibition.

Or is there? Currently, in the Western world outside the U.S., there are several fairly strong Schelling points based on a general perception about a few extremely low-status kinds of people -- basically, speech restrictions are considered OK if and only if they specifically target these sorts of people. In most places, these groups include neo-Nazis (and right-wing extremists in general) and certain kinds of sexual deviants, and Holocaust denial prohibition is considered OK because it specifically targets the former. However, there is definitely an ongoing slippery-slope effect here -- in many countries, the class of speech restrictions that is vaguely associated with the "right-wing extremist" exception is increasingly used to enforce ideological conformity on a number of issues where dissent from the respectable opinion should not merit that title by any reasonable definition. (And where, arguably, honest pursuit of truth will lead one to disagree with the respectable opinion.)

Comment author: wedrifid 14 March 2012 04:29:42AM 10 points [-]

I wonder how many people would use this example nowadays if they knew that it comes from a WW1-era U.S. Supreme Court opinion upholding a ten year prison sentence for sedition against an anti-war activist -- whose crime was to distribute pamphlets arguing that military conscription is unconstitutional under the 13th Amendment, which prohibits "involuntary servitude."

Wow. The 'fire' thing doesn't even fit well as an analogy in that context. Your country scares me!

Comment author: Vladimir_M 14 March 2012 04:47:16AM *  26 points [-]

My country?! I'm not American. I haven't even been to the U.S. in several years.

(That said, you're Australian, right? I've definitely seen stuff written on LW that is technically illegal in Victoria -- google for "serious contempt for, or revulsion or severe ridicule," with the quotes.)

The fire analogy must be understood in the context of the legal test of "clear and present danger" that the court was upholding. The theory is that just as the shouting "fire" in a theater creates a clear and present danger of a stampede in which people get hurt, so does the anti-war agitation create a clear and present danger of subverting the war effort, in this case by inciting resistance to conscription.

Of course, you may reply that this "clear and present danger" stuff can be stretched this way without limit, but that is the point. (By the way, in U.S. jurisprudence, this standard has in the meantime been superseded by a much clearer one of imminent lawless action, which, whatever its overall merits and faults, has shown in practice to provide for a very strong Schelling point.)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 14 March 2012 04:03:22AM *  59 points [-]

There are also a host of other well-respected exceptions to free speech, like shouting "fire" in a crowded theater.

I wonder how many people would use this example nowadays if they knew that it comes from a WW1-era U.S. Supreme Court opinion upholding a ten year prison sentence for sedition against an anti-war activist -- whose crime was to distribute pamphlets arguing that military conscription is unconstitutional under the 13th Amendment, which prohibits "involuntary servitude."

(By the way, speaking of slippery slopes, the following year the same court upheld another ten year conviction for a speech whose content was carefully crafted to remain within the bounds of the sedition laws, but which was still judged to be illegal on the grounds of intent and indirect implication.)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 14 March 2012 04:20:58AM *  35 points [-]

As an interesting side note, the grimly ironic pinnacle of these American WW1-era sedition laws was the ten-year sentence (another one!) against a certain Robert Goldstein for defying the censorship of his film about the American Revolution. The film was deemed to be seditious on the theory that it incited hostility towards Britain, a war ally.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 14 March 2012 04:03:22AM *  59 points [-]

There are also a host of other well-respected exceptions to free speech, like shouting "fire" in a crowded theater.

I wonder how many people would use this example nowadays if they knew that it comes from a WW1-era U.S. Supreme Court opinion upholding a ten year prison sentence for sedition against an anti-war activist -- whose crime was to distribute pamphlets arguing that military conscription is unconstitutional under the 13th Amendment, which prohibits "involuntary servitude."

(By the way, speaking of slippery slopes, the following year the same court upheld another ten year conviction for a speech whose content was carefully crafted to remain within the bounds of the sedition laws, but which was still judged to be illegal on the grounds of intent and indirect implication.)

Comment author: Alejandro1 19 December 2011 04:31:32AM 3 points [-]

And if you asked back then whether Rome was a republic or a monarchy (using any commonly recognized word for the latter), to a Roman it would have sounded as laughable as if you gave the same question to a modern-day American.

I'm not sure about this. Caesar was murdered because of fears that he would become a king, and surely well-informed later Romans would have realized that the concentration of power under the emperors matched or surpassed the one under Caesar (plus hereditary succession, of course). And in fact Tacitus' 'Annals' begin with a contrast between the "freedom and consulships" that started with Lucius Brutus and the "despotism" of Augustus and his successors. Perhaps a patriotic double standard ("we Romans are not slaves to a king like those Eastern barbarians") would have prevented them from calling the Empire a monarchy, but if asked whether the actual organization of their government resembled more closely that of Rome in 200 BC or that of the Kingdom of the Parthians, they might have admitted to the latter.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 19 December 2011 06:08:14AM *  3 points [-]

Sure, with years the pretense became increasingly transparent -- and of course, already in the time of Caesar, it was clear to any informed observer that things were very different from the heyday of the republican institutions. Still, I'm sure a second-century Roman would have been offended if one were to suggest that the proud republican "SPQR" inscriptions on public buildings and military standards were just a hypocritical sham, even if that claim would have been more or less correct.

Moreover, the imperial succession is one issue where it seems like the need to maintain the pretense had serious practical implications, since it was impossible to legislate clear succession rules that would recognize the imperial office as hereditary. In this regard, as much as the republican institutions had become increasingly irrelevant from Augustus on, there was still a deep and fundamental difference from explicit hereditary monarchies such as the Parthian Empire.

Comment author: komponisto 19 December 2011 04:09:16AM *  6 points [-]

Roma rem publicam uel imperium habit?

My high-school Latin has rusted almost to the point of nonexistence, but shouldn't this be vel and habet?

Habet yes, but "u" is actually a better transcription than "v", and is in fact preferred by some modern scholars. (Latin did not have the sound represented by "v", and Roman writing did not have the character "U"; instead, the character "V" was used to represent the phonemes /u/ and /w/.)

(ETA: Also, though my Latin is rusty as well, the word we want here is probably aut [roughly "xor"] rather than uel.)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 19 December 2011 04:25:16AM *  5 points [-]

Interesting -- I know that the original Latin alphabet didn't have the letter "U," but I've never seen a modern transcription that uses "u" for both /u/ and /w/. How recent is this trend?

Comment author: Oligopsony 18 December 2011 07:08:05PM 1 point [-]

For my part, I agree that there's something here that is a marker for unreliable explanations, though I'm more inclined to unpack it as "explanations which require entities for which no strong evidence exists" rather than "explanations which require ontologically basic mental entities," and it seems to me that in the real world we encounter such explanations in all sorts of secular situations as well -- for example, many explanations of economic and political events seem to fall in this category.

Do you mean that we often encounter social/political explanations involving entities for which no strong evidence exists, or the less trivial one that social/political explanations often involve (not explicitly supernatural) ontologically basic mental entities? It's hard for me to think of mental entities employed in social explanations - "investor confidence," "blowback," "will of the indomitable German people," whatever - that aren't charitably reducible to more basic mental and non-mental entities, or explicitly mystical anyway, like say Alfred Rosenberg's conception of the will of the indomitable German people.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 18 December 2011 10:38:00PM *  5 points [-]

Do you mean that we often encounter social/political explanations involving entities for which no strong evidence exists, or the less trivial one that social/political explanations often involve (not explicitly supernatural) ontologically basic mental entities?

But why should the mental quality of the postulated entities be such a big deal?

Note that in the context of ideology and politics, the critical question is not so much about positive explanations of phenomena, but about normative justifications. And in this context, I really don't see why one should privilege justifications whose metaphysical element happens not to include any antropomorphic (or as you say "mental") entities.

For example, what is supposed to be so much more irrational about semantic stop signs that say "X must be done because otherwise we'd violate God's commandments" versus those that say "X must be done because otherwise we'd violate human rights"? (Of course, it may be that you mostly prefer those concrete Xs that happen to be justified the latter way in the present public discourse, but surely it's not difficult to imagine an opposite hypothetical situation, i.e. one where people justify something you otherwise favor by invoking God's commands while others justify something you oppose by invoking human rights.)

Comment author: [deleted] 18 December 2011 06:22:05AM *  6 points [-]

This argument primarily comes down to arguing that because a certain category has blurry boundaries that we shouldn't use it. This confuses having blurry boundaries with being useful. There seems to be a fair bit of implicitly arguing over definitions also which isn't helpful.

Not at all. It tries to expose the mental dissonance of many people who would support cracking down on and wiping out Nazism the ideology, but as soon as there was a supernatural element to the belief system such as the god Thor, they wouldn't and would talk only about dealing with Nazi "extremists".

Why in the world should we care about metaphysical entities in people's heads to the point of changing our ethical judgements on them? Crazy is crazy. If its transmitted like a religion, if it often springs from and back into religion, it causes as much change in political arrangements and personal behaviour as religion, people use the same rationalizations... if it quacks like a duck and walks like a duck, isn't the rational thing to just consider it a duck?

Feel free to have different words for white, purple and yellow ducks, but don't thinks surface features will give you great predictive value beyond people considering yellow ducks lucky and purple ducks more yummy, even though there dosen't seems to be any evidence of this.

You claim the distinction is very useful and that there is no gain to be had by thinking just about ducks in general most of the time, shouldn't you be the one at least come up with some reasons why this is so? The only reason I can think of is that "religion" is formally protected against persecution with legislation. But I don't let law affect my personal ethical judgement elsewhere to a great extent, why should it do so here?

But even this is word games. Among other problems, it assumes that one actually supports the current German law against Nazis. One can be against or in favour of this whether or not one treats it as a religion.

But why do you think some people wouldn't be changing their view on the laws if Nazism was perceived as a religion?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 18 December 2011 10:06:39PM *  6 points [-]

Why in the world should we care about metaphysical entities in people's heads to the point of changing our ethical judgements on them?

Following the insights of Max Stirner, I would go still further and claim that the difference is not between belief systems that involve metaphysical entities and those that don't, but merely between different kinds of metaphysical entities. This means that the issue at hand is whether the antropomorphic quality of these entities is by itself such an important difference for the worse.

The really scary thing is that humans seem incapable of establishing a workable system of Schelling points that would be capable of serving as the basis for organized society, and which wouldn't base its Schelling points on some kind of shared metaphysical fictions. An objective evaluation of different belief systems that are capable of filling this role would be a fascinating project. (Unfortunately, it would also be a project of immense difficulty, not just because of the sheer complexity of the problem, but also because all sorts of biases would interfere with it -- not least since it would likely make the current reigning ideologies look quite bad in comparison on at least some important metrics.)

Comment author: JoshuaZ 18 December 2011 02:06:01AM 6 points [-]

This argument primarily comes down to arguing that because a certain category has blurry boundaries that we shouldn't use it. This confuses having blurry boundaries with being useful. There seems to be a fair bit of implicitly arguing over definitions also which isn't helpful.

The only marginally interesting section is:

The Allies invaded Nazi Germany and completely suppressed Nazism. To this day in Germany it is illegal to teach National Socialism. I think most Americans, and most Germans, would agree that this is a good thing.

But if we make this one trivial change, turning Nazism into Thorism and making it a "religion," which as we've seen need not change the magnitude or details of Nazi crimes at all, the acts of the Allies are a blatant act of religious intolerance.

But even this is word games. Among other problems, it assumes that one actually supports the current German law against Nazis. One can be against or in favor of this whether or not one treats it as a religion.

Overall, I'm unimpressed.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 18 December 2011 09:51:34PM *  14 points [-]

This argument primarily comes down to arguing that because a certain category has blurry boundaries that we shouldn't use it. This confuses having blurry boundaries with being useful.

The problem is not with the category having blurry boundaries, but with the fact that it (arguably) leads to grossly miscalibrated heuristics for evaluating beliefs. Such bad heuristics then end up being not just widely used by individuals, but also built into the system of government.

There is one especially common pattern in ideological disputes where such heuristics can be catastrophically bad. Suppose side A in a dispute claims a religious basis for its beliefs, which are however not derived from the religious axioms in some strict logical manner, but in fact the religious stuff serves only as the supporting narrative for what is just accumulated conventional wisdom and tradition. Suppose then that the opposing side B claims that its beliefs are a product of pure rational thinking, whereas in reality their supposed "rational thinking" or even "science" is a mere rationalization for their ideology -- which is, at bottom, just another collection of human biases and metaphysical beliefs, although the latter are not about any anthropomorphic entities.

In situations of this sort, it is not at all unusual that the beliefs of the side A about practical issues are in fact reasonably close to reality, while the beliefs of the group B are grossly delusional and incredibly destructive if applied in practice. But the "religion" heuristic can make a wannabe rational thinker side with B for the ultimately silly reason that their metaphysics doesn't involve anthropomorphic entities. (Even if the entities it does postulate are just as fictitious, the resulting reasoning equally fallacious, and the ultimate practical implications far crazier.)

Now, of course, contemporary examples of this pattern are likely to be ideologically charged to an extreme degree. But for a distant and hopefully uncontroversial example, imagine living in some country circa 1930 where there is an ongoing struggle for power between, say, some run-of-the-mill Christian conservatives and Communists. The religion heuristic might tell you that the latter, whatever their faults, are at least attempting to base their worldview on rational thinking, so they can't possibly be the worse choice -- even though they are in fact, by any reasonable measure, the more insane side by orders of magnitude. (And unsurprisingly, around that time plenty of purported rational thinkers did end up supporting the crazier side in disputes of this sort.)

Also, to end this comment on a more controversial note, what I find really scary is that the modern "separation of church and state" principle, which uses the "religion" heuristic for determining who is allowed to influence the workings of the government, is actively selecting for ideologies that are most adept at hiding their metaphysics below layers of purportedly pure rational (or even "scientific") thinking. While this is admittedly a controversial view, it seems to me that these are quite possibly the most dangerous sorts of delusions.

Comment author: Oligopsony 18 December 2011 06:34:41PM 5 points [-]

But that's because the meaning of res publica most foundational for them would have been "the system of government we live under," and it wouldn't have been ridiculous for them to consider it continuous with the system of government in place in Rome before the Principate. When Gibbons uses the idiomatic translation of the term, "commonwealth," to refer to what he and we call the Empire, or James Madison and the bunch talk about how republics like Rome are the best sort of government because they combine monarchy with aristocracy and democracy, we shouldn't be surprised; words change. Things changed with the Principate but they also changed with the Aventine Succession, Marsic War, rise of the Praetorian Guard, and so on.

Likewise for quite some time before the Principate Rome together with its holdings constituted an "empire" in the modern sense, but if you traveled back 21 centuries and inquired Roma rem publicam uel imperium habit? they'd consider the question confused.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 18 December 2011 09:22:38PM *  8 points [-]

But that's because the meaning of res publica most foundational for them would have been "the system of government we live under," and it wouldn't have been ridiculous for them to consider it continuous with the system of government in place in Rome before the Principate.

The foundational event of the Roman state, on which its institutions based their claim to legitimacy, was the 509BC revolution that threw out the king and established the Republic. (Not at all unlike the U.S., in fact.) Even well into the imperial period, monarchy was seen by the Romans as characteristic of barbarians and Oriental aliens, and it would have been extremely offensive to suggest that the reigning imperatores were in fact monarchs, and the whole system utterly and irreconcilably different from the old Republic. It took three centuries of this charade until Diocletian finally ended the pretense and openly proclaimed himself a monarch and demanded to be approached and addressed as such.

That's my strong impression at least, though admittedly I'm not an expert in classical history. So I think the analogy with the modern U.S. government is quite pertinent if, indeed, its de facto system of government is very different from what it is supposed to be according to its formal constitution and the political formulas that are piously declared in public.

Likewise for quite some time before the Principate Rome together with its holdings constituted an "empire" in the modern sense, but if you traveled back 21 centuries and inquired Roma rem publicam uel imperium habit? they'd consider the question confused.

My high-school Latin has rusted almost to the point of nonexistence, but shouldn't this be vel and habet?

In any case, if you travelled back 21 centuries, the imperium would have been understood as an office given to certain military commanders within the republican institutions (sometimes only honorific, and sometimes conveying actual authority). It had nothing resembling the modern meaning of "empire." And if you asked back then whether Rome was a republic or a monarchy (using any commonly recognized word for the latter), to a Roman it would have sounded as laughable as if you gave the same question to a modern-day American.

[EDIT: Due to sheer carelessness, I interpreted "back 21 centuries" as the early first century AD, i.e. the time of Augustus. Looking back, I'm now not sure what exact period it was supposed to refer to.]

Comment author: TimS 13 December 2011 03:21:18AM 1 point [-]

However, I don't think any part of these historical developments involves contrarians winning through public activism while faced with a uniformly hostile elite.

I think that some activism is necessary, but not close to sufficient, to cause certain kinds of social change. At least in a post-Enlightenment society (i.e. a society that pays any attention to the concept of "consent of the governed").

Comment author: Vladimir_M 13 December 2011 03:37:01AM *  1 point [-]

I think that "consent of the governed" is a concept too incoherent to be salvageable. After all, the very purpose of government is to do things that are arguably necessary but can't be done consensually, and that circle simply cannot be squared.

As for activism in general, I didn't mean to say that activism is necessarily without influence. What happens in reality is some sort of interplay between the activism and the dynamics of the intra-elite conflict, whose exact nature varies greatly between different cases. But some degree of elite support and participation is always involved whenever activism doesn't get routinely suppressed or laughed off.

Comment author: TimS 13 December 2011 02:49:13AM 2 points [-]

Civil Rights (1940-1960 edition) has clear support from some political elites, and that explains a substantial amount of the progress in that time period.

But the change in elite positions from 1900 to 1940 needs explanation. Once, there was relatively little institutional support of civil rights. For example, Strauder v. West Virginia is basically a roadmap of what to say to "justify" Jim Crow. The change in institutional support needs some explanation, which is hard to come up with if the only thing that causes changes is institutional support.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 13 December 2011 03:14:14AM *  1 point [-]

Clearly, the elite opinion changes gradually over time for all sorts of reasons, sometimes unclear and puzzling. Often there are also conflicts within the elite (sometimes further complicated by foreign influences), which may lead to sudden and unexpected developments. My above comments assume that the state of affairs is stable in the short run, and that the contrarians in question face uniform opposition from the elite.

As for the specific changes in the U.S. elite's positions in the first half of the 20th century, I don't have a ready answer, even though I am reasonably familiar with the relevant history. I have seen multiple theories espoused by different people, but none has struck me as clearly correct, and I can only speculate how they might be fit together. However, I don't think any part of these historical developments involved contrarians winning through public activism while faced with a uniformly hostile elite.

Comment author: TimS 13 December 2011 02:27:48AM 1 point [-]

Whatever your message, the fact that you're not accredited by them -- or, in the unlikely case that you manage to raise a significant fuss with some unusual trick, that you're condemned by them -- automatically makes you so low-status, and the presumption that you're a crackpot or some malevolent extremist so strong, that it's effectively impossible to get a fair hearing outside of a tiny contrarian clique.

How then do you explain the social change that has occurred? For example, the Civil Rights Movement in the United States started out very low status, and the elites who opposed it often invoked the rhetoric of crackpot and extremist. Yet it eventually won, in part by being so confrontational that it couldn't be ignore, but not so confrontational that it could be suppressed.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 13 December 2011 02:41:42AM *  4 points [-]

Social change due to activism happens only if this activism has some support from the elites in charge. Otherwise, such activism will be suppressed swiftly and easily. (Or perhaps simply laughed off, if it's clear that it poses no realistic threat.)

Of course, this contradicts various myths of spontaneous popular rebellion winning against oppressive elites and brave contrarians changing society through sheer moral strength. However, a realistic look at history and the present-day world will show that such things simply don't happen in human societies. The 20th century U.S. is no exception.

Comment author: [deleted] 12 December 2011 12:04:25PM 6 points [-]

It is the same factors that have since then made pamphleteering into a province of irrelevant contrarian weirdos that also make the system immune to the lowered cost of pamphleteering enabled by the internet.

I would be interested in hearing more about these factors.

In response to comment by [deleted] on [SEQ RERUN] Stop Voting For Nincompoops
Comment author: Vladimir_M 13 December 2011 01:43:13AM *  2 points [-]

It is basically an observation about the extraordinarily firm and secure grip on public opinion held by the official intellectual institutions nowadays. I don't have anything like a complete theory of how exactly this state of affairs came into being, or even of what exact mechanisms make their present influence so decisive and secure. (Though I could speculate at length.)

Whatever the mechanisms behind it might be, however, the influence of these institutions does appear to be so decisive and secure that no matter how cheap and convenient contrarian publishing may become, it poses no threat and can be safely laughed off. Whatever your message, the fact that you're not accredited by them -- or, in the unlikely case that you manage to raise a significant fuss with some unusual trick, that you're condemned by them -- automatically makes you so low-status, and the presumption that you're a crackpot or some malevolent extremist so strong, that it's effectively impossible to get a fair hearing outside of a tiny contrarian clique.

Of course, things were different in the past, and only time will tell if someone will eventually figure out a way around this system, in which case all bets are off.

Comment author: Emile 12 December 2011 04:39:50PM 7 points [-]

Since any "mainstream" idea was most likely marginal at some point, changes in the way marginal ideas start and spread should eventually have a significant impact.

I don't see any significant advantage that The New York Times enjoyed over some contrarian's xeroxed pamphlets 20 years ago that wouldn't also apply to the nytimes.com website relative to some contrarian blog nowadays.

Twenty years ago, educated readers would get their news from newspapers, books, and TV, with (some) newspapers being the most intellectually respectable source of news; few educated readers would be getting news from xeroxed pamphlets.

Today, newspapers like the New York Times have a smaller share in the attention of educated readers, who also read blogs and other news sites on the internet. The New York Times may still be the biggest, but it seems much less impressive than it used to be.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 12 December 2011 06:09:26PM *  3 points [-]

There is also the contrary trend of consolidaton, as smaller local newspapers are dying. I'm not sure what the net trend is.

But more importantly, I simply don't observe any lessening of the mainstream media's control over the limits of respectable public discourse and the set of people and issues that will be in the public spotlight (whether positive or negative). The facts about which the original article complains are as true today as they were four years ago.

Similarly, I don't observe any weakening of the intellectual monopoly of the academia, although its output is now widely scrutinized, and interesting contrarian voices heard, on countless blogs and websites. (And it's not like no naked emperors are being revealed in the process.)

On the whole, it seems to me that a vast chasm of status separates contrarian blogs from mainstream online intellectual outlets just as effectively as it separated xeroxed pamphlets from the latter's paper incarnations in the past. High-status and influential people (as well as all those who imagine themselves as such, or hope to become one day) still get their information from the latter, whether in paper or online form, and instinctively shun the former.

Comment author: SilasBarta 12 December 2011 03:42:55PM *  1 point [-]

If your position is marginalized, the problem is not in producing enough copies of your screeds, but in getting people to read them and take them seriously, since they are perceived as low-status relative to the respectable mainstream sources. I don't see any significant advantage that The New York Times enjoyed over some contrarian's xeroxed pamphlets 20 years ago that wouldn't also apply to the nytimes.com website relative to some contrarian blog nowadays.

I think there's an Emporer's-New-Clothes / Common-Knowledge effect that differentiates the two. If a significant minority holds marginalized view X, but all such people think virtually no one else holds the view, then it's easier for a blogger to help the Xers identify each other and come out the woodwork (closet?) than for a lone pamphleteer.

And if I may indulge in some mind-killing speculation, I think that's exactly what happened with libertarianism pre- and post-internet. Before, it was relegated to low-circulation newletters, with most adherents thinking themselves alone in the dark, and afterward it dominates internet discussion, a now mainstream medium.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 12 December 2011 05:42:49PM *  6 points [-]

I think there's an Emporer's-New-Clothes / Common-Knowledge effect that differentiates the two. If a significant minority holds marginalized view X, but all such people think virtually no one else holds the view, then it's easier for a blogger to help the Xers identify each other and come out the woodwork (closet?) than for a lone pamphleteer.

Sure, but all they will achieve is to form an online echo chamber. To have real-world impact, they will have to establish themselves in the mainstream institutions of public opinion (principally media and academia). And nothing is a surer way to have the doors of these institutions closed to you than to be seen as belonging to some identifiable strongly contrarian cluster.

And if I may indulge in some mind-killing speculation, I think that's exactly what happened with libertarianism pre- and post-internet. Before, it was relegated to low-circulation newletters, with most adherents thinking themselves alone in the dark, and afterward it dominates internet discussion, a now mainstream medium.

Frankly, if you really believe that libertarianism dominates internet discussion, you have likely fallen for the echo chamber illusion.

Libertarian ideas have any impact only insofar as they have gained circulation in the mainstream media and elite academia, and I'm not noticing any increase in such circulation since the internet became widespread. (Notice that there is a vast chasm between these institutions and the internet libertarian circles, and people who manage to cross it almost inevitably do so only at the cost of becoming indistinguishable from the mainstream liberal or conservative positions.)

Comment author: cousin_it 12 December 2011 05:17:20AM *  3 points [-]

In the recent Russian parliamentary elections many leaders of small opposition factions gave their supporters the same advice: ignore your own political preferences, but don't ignore the elections. Please come and vote for any big party except the ruling party. Eventually the ruling party got less than 50%.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 12 December 2011 09:29:59AM 4 points [-]

I haven't followed Russian politics much for the last few years, and I'm just asking for curiosity: do you think the result was due to this appeal, rather than just because of popular resentment that would have been demonstrated anyway? Looking at the figures from Wikipedia, the overall voter turnout appears to be smaller than in 2007, which would suggest the latter hypothesis.

Comment author: Zack_M_Davis 12 December 2011 08:17:14AM 6 points [-]

What is supposed to be this magical property that differentiates the internet from previous technologies for communication and publishing so radically?

The magical property is the zero marginal cost of publishing. In the age of print, most people had very little opportunity to publish their views, but now anyone can start a blog. No doubt an interesting debate could be held on the topic of exactly how radical of an innovation this is (some saying "extremely radical," some saying "hardly radical at all"), but surely you agree that the accessibility of the medium has some effect, or I wouldn't be reading your words.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 12 December 2011 08:50:04AM *  7 points [-]

Sure, there is some non-zero effect, but I don't think it's relevant overall. The zero marginal cost of internet publishing, in my opinion, doesn't make for a significant difference relative to the moderate cost of vanity press. (Or in more recent pre-internet times, the even smaller cost of xeroxing.)

If your position is marginalized, the problem is not in producing enough copies of your screeds, but in getting people to read them and take them seriously, since they are perceived as low-status relative to the respectable mainstream sources. I don't see any significant advantage that The New York Times enjoyed over some contrarian's xeroxed pamphlets 20 years ago that wouldn't also apply to the nytimes.com website relative to some contrarian blog nowadays. In both cases, the public opinion is shaped by high-status sources, regardless of whether accessing low-status sources has become somewhat less onerous for the weird minority of people who have interest in them.

Also, note that in past centuries, before the monopolization of high-status public discourse by the mainstream media and academia, pamphleteering was seen as a formidable means of ideological warfare, and often a serious threat to the established order that required constant censoring to keep the peace. It is the same factors that have since then made pamphleteering into a province of irrelevant contrarian weirdos that also make the system immune to the lowered cost of pamphleteering enabled by the internet.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 12 December 2011 06:00:30AM 3 points [-]

From the original article:

If the voters had ignored the media telling them who the front-runner was, and decided their initial pick of "serious candidates" based on, say, the answers to a questionnaire, then the media would have had no power.
Yes, this is presently [extremely unlikely]. But there's this thing called the Internet now, which humanity is still figuring out how to use, and there may be another change or two on the way.

I've lost count of the number of times that I've read such claims from otherwise reasonable people. Yet to me they've always seemed absurd. What is supposed to be this magical property that differentiates the internet from previous technologies for communication and publishing so radically?

Comment author: Oligopsony 11 December 2011 11:53:17PM 6 points [-]

This is correct; I have no intention of publishing usernames, nor could I, had I such an intent.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 12 December 2011 12:11:55AM *  6 points [-]

Hm, now I see that's indeed the case. But then what exactly do you mean by "no option to keep your answers private"? Only that each individual's whole set of answers will be published as a row in a spreadsheet, thus making it possible to guess who the respondent might be for outliers?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 11 December 2011 05:44:22PM *  9 points [-]

Aside from one sensitive question, there's no option to keep your answers private, since in my opinion that would defeat the point

I don't understand. What exact point would be defeated by not making people's individual answers public?

It seems to me that that the main effect of your policy will be to introduce a significant selection bias for people who expect general public approval of their views.

Comment author: gwern 08 December 2011 09:33:05PM *  2 points [-]

Also, your Wikipedia link above fails to mention even a single assassination that would have been within living memory in 1939, and which would have matched the pattern of a government conspiring to assassinate a foreign leader. So if anything, it goes against your claims.

'a government'? Yeah, it doesn't because it's not a comprehensive list. If you want lists, look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assassinations_and_assassination_attempts or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assassinated_people#Assassinations_in_Europe or heck, for anything to do with Hitler like the Nazi assassination of Engelbert Dollfuss, look in Google Books pre-1940.

If you're going to be mind-killed yourself, Vlad, posting endless nitpicking comments here trying to rebut anything anyone says, you should at least be more precise in your demands, because it is trivial to find attempts, even despite all secrecy and faded memories.

(And I believe the mutual wars of assassination between the British and the Irish, eg. Tomás Mac Curtain, have already been pointed out to you, which would have been well-known to any educated person living through the troubles; feel free to dig through Google Books looking for even more assassinations.)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 09 December 2011 04:51:51AM *  4 points [-]

If you're going to be mind-killed yourself, Vlad, posting endless nitpicking comments here trying to rebut anything anyone says, you should at least be more precise in your demands, because it is trivial to find attempts, even despite all secrecy and faded memories.

I am disputing your very central claim, so even if I am wrong, I don't see how this can possibly constitute "nitpicking." If it was in fact reasonable in 1939 to consider the possibility of a British plot to assassinate Hitler as wildly implausible, your original points don't stand at all.

And indeed, I do believe that government-orchestrated assassination plots against a head of a foreign state were indeed considered a wholly separate category of wrongdoing back then, and one that was a particular taboo. You just can't put other sorts of assassinations in the same reference class.

If you insist that things like the assassinations during the sectarian struggles in Ireland fall into the same reference class, then the inferential distances may really be too large for us to have a productive discussion here. But still note that you won't find any examples of the particular sort I asked for. (Except arguably for the killing of Dollfuss, something that it actually took the Nazis to do.)

In response to comment by Vladimir_M on Value evolution
Comment author: PhilGoetz 09 December 2011 03:23:45AM 0 points [-]

I seriously dispute your claim.

In response to comment by PhilGoetz on Value evolution
Comment author: Vladimir_M 09 December 2011 04:25:30AM 4 points [-]

Please see my reply to Gabriel Duquette below.

In response to comment by Vladimir_M on Value evolution
Comment author: [deleted] 09 December 2011 03:18:32AM *  10 points [-]

I can list half a dozen or so particularly bizarre claims.

Please do. Not disputing, just interested.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Value evolution
Comment author: Vladimir_M 09 December 2011 04:17:46AM *  42 points [-]

Well, where should I start? A few examples:

  • The Roman Empire reached its maximum extent under Trajan circa 100AD. (And even that was a fairly small increase relative to a century earlier under Augustus.) Signs of crisis started appearing only towards the end of the 2nd century, and Christianity started being officially tolerated only in the early 4th century. How these centuries of non-expansion before Christianity entered the political stage can be reconciled with the theory from the article is beyond me.

  • There is clear evidence that the fall of the Roman empire occasioned a huge fall in living standards throughout the former Empire, including its provinces that it supposedly only pillaged and exploited. (See The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization by Bryan Ward-Perkins for a good recent overview.)

  • Ascribing the decline in masculinity to some mysterious "reprogramming" that is narrated in passive voice strikes as me as bizarrely incoherent.

  • Large cities are not a modern invention. In the largest cities of the ancient world, enormous numbers of men (certainly on the order of hundreds of thousands) lived packed together much more tightly than in modern cities. How did the states ruling these cities handle that situation, if the mysterious "reprogramming" occurred only in the last few centuries?

  • In the antebellum U.S., the South was not fighting to implement federal tariffs, but opposing them bitterly.

  • Cotton picking wasn't widely automated until the mid-20th century. How long slavery would have remained profitable without abolition is a difficult question, but in 1861, "mechanical reapers.. mak[ing] slavery uneconomical" were still firmly in the realm of science fiction.

  • If the reason for the lack of interest in slaves in the North was their short growing season, then the ongoing industrialization should have changed that. Factories can utilize labor profitably 365 days a year. So clearly other factors were more important.

In response to Value evolution
Comment author: Vladimir_M 09 December 2011 01:43:58AM *  20 points [-]

Upvoted for making an interesting general point. Downvoted for cartoonish history that reads like it's about some weird parallel universe. (A point by point criticism would require a comment of almost the same length, but if someone seriously disputes my claim, I can list half a dozen or so particularly bizarre claims.)

Comment author: TimS 08 December 2011 06:12:47PM 1 point [-]

contrary to the commenter's claim, there are issues outside of the proposed category (religious, ideological, etc. identification with parties in foreign disputes) where heuristics based on national character make accurate predictions.

Can you give examples? Because my paradigmatic example of the use of national character to make predictions is Napoleon's (failed) prediction that a "nation of shopkeepers" would not be able to successfully resist his domination of Europe based on their supposed lack of will.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 09 December 2011 01:01:16AM *  2 points [-]

That was indeed a prediction driven by obvious biases. But there are many examples where it's easy to make predictions so clearly true that they seem trivially obvious based on certain norms that are a matter of wide consensus in particular nations.

For example, the same plan for a public project implemented in a country known for notoriously corrupt practices in business in government will result in vastly more graft and embezzlement than if it's implemented in a country known for a low level (and generally zero tolerance) for such corruption. What's more, even if tomorrow both these countries were occupied by some third country and had the same system of government imposed on them, in practice the former one would likely still end up with a more corrupt system, since this sort of thing tends to be influenced by deeper cultural factors that can't be readily changed by dictate from above.

Whether or not you think "national character" is an appropriate term for these factors (and it is indeed a somewhat antiquated term), it's this sort of thing I have in mind, and it's easy to think of many such examples. Surely you have often thought yourself that something is much more or less likely to happen in one place than another based on the deeply ingrained local culture, customs, attitudes, etc.

Comment author: TimS 08 December 2011 05:15:56PM *  0 points [-]

Does this argument help your case about "national character"? It's clearly true that a naive anti-communist would do a terrible job of predicting the actions of the United States during the Cold War. That's an argument that anti-communism was not a part of the national character of the US.
But your position seems to require that national character have some predictive power in policy decisions. So what particular national character drove US actions in the Cold War? I personally think that national self-interest (i.e. Great Power politics) drove the Cold War, not ideology. But self-interest is an odd thing to label a "national characteristic" because it seems unlikely that there are nations that lack that quality.


To recap, this is the quote that started this sub-debate:

To the extent that there's a "national character" that affects policy, I feel it has primarily, perhaps even solely to do with concepts of self-identification similar in type to the concept of Clash of Civilizations by Huntington. e.g. Greece supported the Serbs in the Yugoslav wars for no more and no less reason than that its "national character" contained a self-identification with Eastern Orthodox significantly more than with Catholics or with Muslims. Now there's predictive power. In any dispute between orthodox and non-orthodox, I know that Greece will back the orthodox. I know that Arab nations will back the Palestinians against Israel. America in the Cold War self-identified as anti-communist, so in any dispute between people identifying as communists and people that didn't , I know America would back the people that didn't.

There's the extent that national character plays in regards to policy. If there's some other element in it with predictive power, I don't see it.

I don't see how disproving the highlighted portion shows that the following sentences are untrue.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 08 December 2011 05:42:36PM *  1 point [-]

But your position seems to require that national character have some predictive power in policy decisions.

Indeed, but it has significant predictive power only in cases where some state of affairs would be in striking contradiction with the "national character." It's clearly not a heuristic that would give concrete and reliable predictions about all issues.

My objection to the comment you cite is that: (1) the proposed anti-communism heuristic, while not entirely devoid of predictive power, is nowhere as consistently accurate as the commennter claims, and (2) contrary to the commenter's claim, there are issues outside of the proposed category (religious, ideological, etc. identification with parties in foreign disputes) where heuristics based on national character make accurate predictions.

Comment author: ArisKatsaris 08 December 2011 12:10:07PM *  1 point [-]

The point is that the U.S. took the same side as the Soviet Union and a Soviet-aided regime

Or that the Soviet Union took the same side as a US-aided regime. Since said regime was anti-communist, that's a bit more surprising perhaps than the USA supporting it.

Though Castro and arguably Mao provide such examples

I'm getting tired of this contrarian view of history. America was selling guns, bombers and napalm to Batista for the majority of the duration of his government, and even for the majority of his combatting Castro. That America stopped backing Batista a couple months before the end, that's not "supporting Castro"... that's America cutting its losses.

Moreover, note that you were the one who claimed that the U.S. anti-communism was simple and clear-cut.

How many communist/anti-communist nations did USA invite into NATO during the cold war?
How many communist/anti-communist nations did USA sell weapons to?
The torturers of how many communist/anti-communist regimes did CIA help train?

Zero and lots.

For the sake of my argument imagine that when I said "America consistently supports the anti-communist side", that by 'supports' I meant "sells weapons to, invites to military alliances, or helps train its torturers"

Contrarian views of history work by focussing on minor details and enlarging them until they swamp out the plain-to-see elephant in the room.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 08 December 2011 03:39:29PM *  4 points [-]

Or that the Soviet Union took the same side as a US-aided regime.

It is unrealistic to paint Nasser's relationship with the U.S. and the Soviet Union as symmetrical. In any case, simple and clear-cut anti-communism would have implied joining the colonial forces against a Soviet-leaning and Soviet-armed local ruler, not joining the Soviets in an effort to restrain them.

That America stopped backing Batista a couple months before the end, that's not "supporting Castro"... that's America cutting its losses.

However you turn it, the U.S. at some point did go out of its way to support Castro and destroy Batista. (This is a simple matter of public record, not a conspiracy theory. It involved, among other things, placing an arms embargo on Batista in a critical moment.) The fact that this was a reversal still makes it a problem for your "simple and clear-cut" theory.

How many communist/anti-communist nations did USA sell weapons to?
...
Zero and lots.

This is just plain false -- if anything, the communist Yugoslavia received plenty of U.S. aid and weapons after its break with the U.S.S.R. in 1948. Thus demonstrating another problem with your theory: the U.S. apparently did't mind getting friendly with at least some communists who were willing to show some degree of cooperation. Again, not what I'd call simple and clear-cut anti-communism.

Contrarian views of history work by focussing on minor details and enlarging them until they swamp out the plain-to-see elephant in the room.

The existence of even minor contrary details (and I wouldn't call these minor) is a valid argument against a theory that presents things as simple and clear-cut. You are writing as if I were arguing for some bizarre mirror image of your position, whereas I'm merely pointing out that reality is much more complex.

Comment author: ArisKatsaris 08 December 2011 05:51:09AM 1 point [-]

Besides Rhodesia and South Africa, some other major examples are the Katanga Crisis and the Suez Crisis.

Are Nasser and Mobutu supposed to be communists in your model of history? They are not in mine.

In the latter, the U.S. effectively joined forces with the Soviet Union to support Nasser against the British and the French.

Nasser opposed communism. Sure, both American and the Soviet Union preferred a non-Europe-controlled Egypt, because they respectively preferred an America-controllled and a Soviet-controlled Egypt. What does that have to do with anti-colonialism trumping anti-communism? It wasn't a communist regime that America supported then, it was Nasser's anti-communist regime.

Look, I'm not interested in having a discussion where "communism" has been redefined to mean pretty much the entire modern world. I'm well aware that there exist some people (e.g Moldbug-type reactionaries) that believe that even modern-day America is "communist" according to their own definition, but I'm talking about ordinary definitions of "communism".

Comment author: Vladimir_M 08 December 2011 06:20:50AM *  3 points [-]

Are Nasser and Mobutu supposed to be communists in your model of history? They are not in mine.

Mobutu consolidated power only in late 1965, and there were many other relevant people involved about whose degree of affiliation with communism we could debate. (And frankly, I'm not very knowledgeable about, or particularly interested in, the details of this particular war.) The point however is that a reflexively and consistently anti-communist U.S. policy would have simply backed Tshombe and his Katangan government.

As for the Suez crisis, the point is not about Nasser's ideology. The point is that the U.S. took the same side as the Soviet Union and a Soviet-aided regime (though, as you correctly point out, not a Soviet-run one), and against European colonial powers that opposed the latter. Again, a model that postulates consistent anti-communism on part of the U.S. cannot predict this; it will require at the very least a few epicycles.

Moreover, note that you were the one who claimed that the U.S. anti-communism was simple and clear-cut. To dispute that claim, it is enough to demonstrate that the situation was in fact much more complicated and murky. It is not necessary to provide examples where the U.S. clearly and indisputably aided communists. (Though Castro and arguably Mao provide such examples.)

Look, I'm not interested in having a discussion where "communism" has been redefined to mean pretty much the entire modern world.

I don't know at whom, or what, this is supposed to be directed. While I readily acknowledge that you may have reasonable disagreements with my opinions, I don't think this is a reasonable response to anything I have written in this thread or elsewhere.

Comment author: gwern 07 December 2011 03:41:58PM *  1 point [-]

Particular examples? No, not really; but http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_assassination is good reading, if a bit short and lacking in less substantiated details.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 08 December 2011 05:27:18AM *  1 point [-]

As far as I see, neither of the examples you linked provides any evidence that in 1939 it was incorrect to consider a British government assassination plot against Hitler as wildly implausible. The Oster conspiracy was an internal German plot, and the Foxley plan was just a proposal that was never approved nor carried out (and even as such, it occurred only after five years of a total war in which nearly all other centuries-old conventions of civilized warfare had been discarded -- a world very different from the one five years earlier).

Also, your Wikipedia link above fails to mention even a single assassination that would have been within living memory in 1939, and which would have matched the pattern of a government conspiring to assassinate a foreign leader. So if anything, it goes against your claims.

Comment author: Prismattic 08 December 2011 12:33:13AM *  4 points [-]

Hypothesis: People who IRL are relatively well-connected socially (but feel obliged to conceal many of their views from their meatspace associates) and people who actually feel socially isolated or alienated IRL will have divergent views about the optimal level of familiarity in this online community.

For what its worth, I think abrasiveness breeds more contempt than does familiarity.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 08 December 2011 05:13:26AM 2 points [-]

Hypothesis: People who IRL are relatively well-connected socially (but feel obliged to conceal many of their views from their meatspace associates) and people who actually feel socially isolated or alienated IRL will have divergent views about the optimal level of familiarity in this online community.

Probably true, but if one suffers from social isolation and alienation in meatspace, trying to remedy that situation by seeking internet friends in a place like this one would likely be a highly suboptimal (to put it charitably) way of addressing that problem.

For what its worth, I think abrasiveness breeds more contempt than does familiarity.

It might conceivably breed more ill feelings in general, but not contempt in particular.

I agree that abrasiveness is better avoided too, though.

Comment author: Vaniver 07 December 2011 03:49:21PM *  3 points [-]

Namely, it provides for a convenient Schelling point for national leaders

The Schelling Point is stronger for monarchs than for ministers, and so as monarchies disappear or become less relevant one could expect assassinations to increase.

But more importantly, who are all these heads of state supposedly assassinated under orders from rival governments prior to 1939?

Does the first such assassination have to be a surprise? I think unprecedented events can be unsurprising if they were anticipated. We may be interpreting Wittgenstein's comment very differently: for me, "X would not surprise me" means something like P(X)>.01, not something like P(X)>.5.

But, since you asked, consider the case of Tomas Mac Curtain, assassinated by British forces in 1920. I don't think he qualifies as a head of state, but he was a fairly prominent government official. In 1939, it would have been plausible that Napoleon had been poisoned by the British (though that's a bit outside your hundred year window).

do you think that it was possible for a non-biased observer in 1939 to view the accusation against British government plot to assassinate the German head of state as unsurprising?

I don't think this is the question you meant to ask, but I think that the accusation should have been entirely unsurprising, regardless of its veracity. I think that most observers would assign a higher probability to the accusation being false than true, but I don't think an unbiased, moderately informed observer could put the chance that the accusation was false at less than ~5% on the day the accusation was reported.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 08 December 2011 05:08:52AM *  1 point [-]

The Schelling Point is stronger for monarchs than for ministers, and so as monarchies disappear or become less relevant one could expect assassinations to increase.

Why? Even an elected ruler who breaks the convention against assassination makes himself fair game for immediate retaliation of the same kind. I don't see why the transitory nature of his office would make the incentives significantly different.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Rationality Quotes December 2011
Comment author: ArisKatsaris 07 December 2011 05:11:24PM 0 points [-]

Frankly, because two examples (Rhodesia and South Africa) don't make for a well-substantiated pattern -- especially when United States was less severe than most of the rest of the world in its condemnation of these states.

American opposition to communism does make for a much more obvious, simple, and clear-cut example, in contrast, with dozens of substantiated anti-communist actions. And I'm not a troll that I would give unclear and controversial examples to be disputed and argued over when more clear-cut and obvious examples suffice to make my point.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 08 December 2011 04:49:38AM *  3 points [-]

Frankly, because two examples (Rhodesia and South Africa) don't make for a well-substantiated pattern... [...] American opposition to communism does make for a much more obvious, simple, and clear-cut example...

A well-substantiated more general pattern is that in U.S. foreign relations, anti-colonialism trumped anti-communism solidly. Besides Rhodesia and South Africa, some other major examples are the Katanga Crisis and the Suez Crisis. In the latter, the U.S. effectively joined forces with the Soviet Union to support Nasser against the British and the French.

Moreover, in some cases the U.S. "support" for anti-communists was of the "with friends like that, who needs enemies" variety, sometimes with major elements within the U.S. government effectively favoring the communists. China is the most notable example. Not to mention the cases where the U.S. supported communists who fought under a flimsy and transparent pretense of being non-communists, like Castro in Cuba.

So, on the whole, I wouldn't say the pattern of U.S. Cold War anti-communism is so consistent and clear-cut.

Comment author: [deleted] 07 December 2011 01:20:38PM *  0 points [-]

If the exceptions are about opposition to white-racist regimes, I believe this is explained by modern-day United States identifying itself even more as multiracial and egalitarian (atleast in regards to race), than it does as anti-communist.

Yes I was mostly referring to countries that where under white rule such as South Africa and Rhodesia.

Note that equal predictive power on this set of examples can be gained by say US opposition to any system except somewhat free market universal suffrage democracy. It would also fit with the recent rhetoric that strings together meddling from Libya to Iraq in the past decade. And it fits the popular narrative about the 20th century that's been with us since way back in the late 1920's about Fascisms, Liberal Democracy and Communism battling to capture the future of mankind. But as I write I can think of many more exceptions to my hypothesis than I can to yours in the last 40 years.

Which leads me to a question, why didn't you then put that as the example for Americans in line with Greeks supporting the Orthodox side?

Edit: The last question was referring to your hypothesis rather than mine.

I believe this is explained by modern-day United States identifying itself even more as multiracial and egalitarian (atleast in regards to race), than it does as anti-communist.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Rationality Quotes December 2011
Comment author: Vladimir_M 07 December 2011 03:47:57PM *  2 points [-]

The problem with this discussion is that "support" is an ambiguous term. The U.S. government is not a monolithic entity whose parts all act in unison so that it would be meaningful to speak of its support or opposition as a clear-cut matter. What's more, its ostensible "support" is in many cases qualified, indecisive, badly executed, and attached with monstrous strings (often due to internal conflict within USG itself) so much that it ends up being ruinous for the "supported" party.

To take only the most notable example, the U.S. "support" for the Chinese nationalists against Mao's communists was, for all practical purposes, equivalent to a prolonged backstab.

Comment author: [deleted] 07 December 2011 03:51:24AM 0 points [-]

It is a fairly obvious problem, and what's more it's already been brought up, so maybe people have noticed it and just decided the game is worth the candle? For myself, I figure I'm really not capable of feeling neutral toward people for any length of time, and the almost complete lack of any positive social interaction on LW, combined with the continual arguing, had left me feeling sort of annoyed and uncomfortable toward the average LWer. I'm not looking to join any kind of e-clique, just trying to shift the balance back the other way a bit.

In response to comment by [deleted] on More "Personal" Introductions
Comment author: Vladimir_M 07 December 2011 05:43:26AM 9 points [-]

the almost complete lack of any positive social interaction on LW, combined with the continual arguing

Funny, I see that as the defining feature of LW, and as its principal advantage over other places. You get to see the distilled essence of concrete things that people have to say on a given topic, unobscured with distractions that would otherwise inevitably follow. (Don't get me wrong, in real life I'm much more personable and merry than I choose to be here, but outside of strictly technical discussions, this has an inevitable large cost when it comes to the precision and rigor of discourse.)

had left me feeling sort of annoyed and uncomfortable toward the average LWer

Are you sure it wouldn't be much worse with people trying to be "friends"? As they say, familiarity breeds contempt.

Comment author: TimS 07 December 2011 02:45:59AM 1 point [-]

If it happens in Croatia, I'll shrug my shoulders. If I heard about this happening in, say, Denmark, I would, like Malcolm, express disbelief because it would, indeed, sound incompatible with their national character.

I understand that you are trying to defend a better form of Malcolm's statements, but is there any other reason you are defending the phrase "national character"? One could just as easily explain the differences you note by reference to national culture, national values, national commitment to rule of law, or suchlike. By contrast, "character" is often deployed as an applause light without any way of cashing out the reference more specifically.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 07 December 2011 05:19:55AM *  2 points [-]

All these terms are also often deployed as applause lights. "National character" is just a term that is supposed to subsume them all. Nowadays this term is somewhat antiquated, and it's not a part of my regular vocabulary, but I definitely don't see any reason for why someone's casual use of it 72 years ago should raise any eyebrows (either back then or now).

Comment author: Vaniver 07 December 2011 04:10:28AM 3 points [-]

Basically, I think Wittgenstein was too quick to pattern-match every mention of such things as "national character" with propagandistic nationalist ramblings.

You suspect he's too quick to pattern-match every mention from a single example?

I suspect this is just an instance of a bias that's been widespread in the Western world for quite a while now, namely the tendency to write off the use of certain kinds of conditional probabilities about people, including most of those conditioned on national origin, as inherently incorrect or immoral.

I'm aware this is a common bias now, but I don't think it was that widespread in 1939.

Moreover, from the "wouldn't surprise him at all" comment, it does appear that Wittgenstein had, for whatever reason, a biased unfavorable view of the British government.

Perhaps this is because I have an unfavorable view of governments in general, but it seems that for an even slightly cynical student of history assassination attempts on rival heads of state by a government should not come as a surprise, especially as monarchies were replaced by democracies. It's not clear he was singling out the British, and even if he were singling out the British, it's not clear if that was the result of bias or cool calculation. (The British did have the best spy network in Europe, although whether or not Wittgenstein would have known that is not something I am able to guess.)

I agree that being biased can lead to fury, but I think for someone as passionately logical as Wittgenstein seeing bias, especially in a friend, could also lead to fury. It's not clear to me that his immediate reaction is evidence between those hypotheses, and his persisting fury strikes me as slightly better evidence for the latter. (Background: Almost twenty years earlier, Wittgenstein was rebuked as a teacher because he would also beat the girls if they made mathematical mistakes.)

That is, it is possible that Wittgenstein was biased in pronouncing Malcolm's bias, but it seems to me unlikely. The evidence seems to point the other way, especially the conclusion he draws- that philosophy should help one with the important questions of everyday life.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 07 December 2011 05:08:40AM *  4 points [-]

You suspect he's too quick to pattern-match every mention from a single example?

Admittedly, this is speculative, but from his tone I did get the impression that he was prone to such matching.

Perhaps this is because I have an unfavorable view of governments in general, but it seems that for an even slightly cynical student of history assassination attempts on rival heads of state by a government should not come as a surprise, especially as monarchies were replaced by democracies.

Actually, a very strong taboo against such assassinations follows from a very cynical theory. Namely, it provides for a convenient Schelling point for national leaders, where they can otherwise escalate war as much as they like without fear for their personal safety. (As long as they don't let themselves get totally conquered, of course.)

But more importantly, who are all these heads of state supposedly assassinated under orders from rival governments prior to 1939? Can you name any attempts of such assassinations in the period of, say, one hundred years preceding 1939? Or even just cases where the culprit is unknown, but a plot directed by a rival government seems plausible?

(The closest example I can think of is the killing of Engelbert Dollfuss that kicked off the coup attempt in 1934 by the Austrian Nazis, who were clearly acting in concert with Berlin. But even that was an all-out coup attempt accompanied by an armed Nazi uprising across the country, so not really an assassination plot, and also symptomatic of the new and unprecedented wave of political gangsterism of which the British government was not a part.)

Given this history (or rather a lack thereof), do you think that it was possible for a non-biased observer in 1939 to view the accusation against British government plot to assassinate the German head of state as unsurprising if true?

Comment author: knb 02 December 2011 09:00:46PM 5 points [-]

This is a bad idea. Attempting to create personal relationships will just accelerate LW's degeneration into a typical internet hugbox. People will start supporting or opposing ideas based on whether they are "e-friends".

Comment author: Vladimir_M 07 December 2011 02:46:01AM 7 points [-]

I strongly agree with this, and I am seriously disappointed that more people don't see it as an obvious problem.

Comment author: Morendil 06 December 2011 08:52:04PM 0 points [-]

would you agree that the U.S. government officials themselves are more likely to feel honest revulsion towards this idea compared to their equivalents from various other historical governments

Not necessarily. I don't know to what extent government officials of all countries are more like the typical citizen of their own country than they are like other government officials of any other country. It's not clear to me which reference class would dominate in assigning priors.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 07 December 2011 02:40:24AM 2 points [-]

Just to avoid misunderstanding, the question is whether the views of a typical U.S. government official about what criticisms of government are permissible are more similar to the average U.S. citizen, or to the views of government officials averaged across the whole world, or even across all governments that ever existed. Am I understanding correctly that you see this as a highly uncertain question?

Comment author: ArisKatsaris 06 December 2011 11:21:04PM 2 points [-]

But I think that such a definition where "national character" are the norms followed by a a national government and which it's expected to be followed by a broad consensus, leads to bizarre ideas such as e.g. the "national character" of the whole of Eastern Europe must be described as having changed at the fall of communism, even though the fall came from within. So the national character suddenly modified itself, just because the norms of government changed themselves. Eh. I don't think that's really how these words are normally used.

And if we return to the subject of actually secret, non-open operations -- if I believe (which I do) that FSB bombed some of Russia's own apartment buildings (for I am a conspiracy theorist in regards to several conspiracy theories), but that the MI5 wouldn't do that against British apartments, nor would CIA do it for American apartments, I don't think it makes much sense to say that the Russian national character enables Russia to blow its own people up, but that the British and American national characters does not. The character of their respective government structures, sure. But not the national characters.

To the extent that there's a "national character" that affects policy, I feel it has primarily, perhaps even solely to do with concepts of self-identification similar in type to the concept of Clash of Civilizations by Huntington. e.g. Greece supported the Serbs in the Yugoslav wars for no more and no less reason than that its "national character" contained a self-identification with Eastern Orthodox significantly more than with Catholics or with Muslims. Now there's predictive power. In any dispute between orthodox and non-orthodox, I know that Greece will back the orthodox. I know that Arab nations will back the Palestinians against Israel. America in the Cold War self-identified as anti-communist, so in any dispute between people identifying as communists and people that didn't , I know America would back the people that didn't.

There's the extent that national character plays in regards to policy. If there's some other element in it with predictive power, I don't see it.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 07 December 2011 02:26:37AM *  2 points [-]

In addition to my previous reply, and to separate the more controversial part from the rest:

And if we return to the subject of actually secret, non-open operations -- if I believe (which I do) that FSB bombed some of Russia's own apartment buildings (for I am a conspiracy theorist in regards to several conspiracy theories), but that the MI5 wouldn't do that against British apartments, nor would CIA do it for American apartments, I don't think it makes much sense to say that the Russian national character enables Russia to blow its own people up, but that the British and American national characters does not.

Frankly, if you believe that people running the MI5 or the CIA would be willing and capable of doing something like that, I think you have a very distorted view of reality in this regard. Unfortunately, the inferential distances are probably too large for us to have a productive discussion about it in this context.

(In reality, I don't think CIA would be capable of killing my neighbor's cat without it leaking into the press tomorrow. In fact, they'd probably bungle the task so badly that the leak wouldn't even be necessary.)

America in the Cold War self-identified as anti-communist, so in any dispute between people identifying as communists and people that didn't , I know America would back the people that didn't.

That would have been news to many anti-communists, but let's better not go there.

Comment author: ArisKatsaris 06 December 2011 11:21:04PM 2 points [-]

But I think that such a definition where "national character" are the norms followed by a a national government and which it's expected to be followed by a broad consensus, leads to bizarre ideas such as e.g. the "national character" of the whole of Eastern Europe must be described as having changed at the fall of communism, even though the fall came from within. So the national character suddenly modified itself, just because the norms of government changed themselves. Eh. I don't think that's really how these words are normally used.

And if we return to the subject of actually secret, non-open operations -- if I believe (which I do) that FSB bombed some of Russia's own apartment buildings (for I am a conspiracy theorist in regards to several conspiracy theories), but that the MI5 wouldn't do that against British apartments, nor would CIA do it for American apartments, I don't think it makes much sense to say that the Russian national character enables Russia to blow its own people up, but that the British and American national characters does not. The character of their respective government structures, sure. But not the national characters.

To the extent that there's a "national character" that affects policy, I feel it has primarily, perhaps even solely to do with concepts of self-identification similar in type to the concept of Clash of Civilizations by Huntington. e.g. Greece supported the Serbs in the Yugoslav wars for no more and no less reason than that its "national character" contained a self-identification with Eastern Orthodox significantly more than with Catholics or with Muslims. Now there's predictive power. In any dispute between orthodox and non-orthodox, I know that Greece will back the orthodox. I know that Arab nations will back the Palestinians against Israel. America in the Cold War self-identified as anti-communist, so in any dispute between people identifying as communists and people that didn't , I know America would back the people that didn't.

There's the extent that national character plays in regards to policy. If there's some other element in it with predictive power, I don't see it.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 07 December 2011 02:25:07AM *  2 points [-]

But I think that such a definition where "national character" are the norms followed by a a national government and which it's expected to be followed by a broad consensus, leads to bizarre ideas such as e.g. the "national character" of the whole of Eastern Europe must be described as having changed at the fall of communism, even though the fall came from within. So the national character suddenly modified itself, just because the norms of government changed themselves.

This is just the confounding factor of foreign domination, just like in the North/South Korea example. Of course, like with all political categories, the distinctions aren't always clear, since prolonged foreign domination may gradually cause irreversible changes, or even gradually get to be seen as the normal state of affairs. Still, the different national characters of Eastern European countries have been amply demonstrated when comparing their state both before 1990 and since then.

A better example of what you're aiming for would be periods of political instability in which some extremist faction like e.g. the Nazis grabs power and proceeds to implement extremist policies that would have seemed unbelievable coming from that same country shortly before that. Clearly, such black swan events limit the predictability of any model one uses for understanding history and politics. It doesn't mean they have no predictive power during normal times, though.

The character of their respective government structures, sure. But not the national characters.

These things can't be separated from each other. You are speaking as if the system of government is an independent variable. In reality, formally the same system of government imposed in different places will produce very different results, and these results are very much dependent on what is conventionally understood as "national character."

To the extent that there's a "national character" that affects policy, I feel it has primarily, perhaps even solely to do with concepts of self-identification... [...] If there's some other element in it with predictive power, I don't see it.

It's hard to make any concrete predictions without offending various nationalities, so I'll limit myself to offending my own kind. For example, suppose I read a story about an affair where vast millions were pillaged in corrupt dealings some years ago and yet the culprits are happy, free, and untouchable despite all this being public knowledge. If it happens in Croatia, I'll shrug my shoulders. But if I heard about this happening in, say, Denmark, I would, like Malcolm, express disbelief because it would, indeed, sound incompatible with their national character. Even though the laws on the books and the theoretical legal consequences are probably similar in both places.

Comment author: Vaniver 06 December 2011 08:23:13PM 1 point [-]

Would you mind naming those biases for me? I'm having a hard time seeing what you're talking about, and suspect that our disagreement may depend mostly on differing interpretations of limited information.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 07 December 2011 01:39:04AM *  5 points [-]

Basically, I think Wittgenstein was too quick to pattern-match every mention of such things as "national character" with propagandistic nationalist ramblings. I suspect this is just an instance of a bias that's been widespread in the Western world for quite a while now, namely the tendency to write off the use of certain kinds of conditional probabilities about people, including most of those conditioned on national origin, as inherently incorrect or immoral. (With a lot of equivocation about which one of these two is actually meant, and how come that the former category just happens to subsume the latter so conveniently.)

Moreover, from the "wouldn't surprise him at all" comment, it does appear that Wittgenstein had, for whatever reason, a biased unfavorable view of the British government. To the best of my knowledge about the state of the world in 1939, this would have definitely been, by all standards, an event far too surprising and shocking to characterize that way, under any reasonable interpretation of that phrase.

Finally, Wittgenstein's reaction is reported as "furious," and he describes himself as "shocked." It seems clear that the very fact that someone got into a shocked and furious state of mind during a conversation about controversial and mind-killing topics makes it very highly probable that at least some sort of bias has kicked in, even if my above guess doesn't identify it correctly.

(Come to think of it, I don't find it implausible that Wittgenstein could have been intentionally baiting Malcolm, hoping for an opportunity to show off some sanctimonious indignation. But lacking any detailed knowledge of his character, this is nothing more than idle speculation.)

Comment author: [deleted] 06 December 2011 10:17:38PM 4 points [-]

"a violation of certain norms that the British government is known to follow consistently in practice"

What does "what is known" have to do with what is in fact? The suppressed premise is that citizens know what their governments do, even those parts of the government termed its "secret service." That governments don't operate by ordinary standards of "decency" has been known at least since Machiavelli.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Rationality Quotes December 2011
Comment author: Vladimir_M 07 December 2011 01:17:22AM *  1 point [-]

Even if the deeds of the secret services are fully secret (a big if), your argument is still incorrect. Assassinations of heads of state are rare and unusual events, and are normally investigated thoroughly. It may be that in every such assassination prior to 1939, the evidence points towards culprits other than the British secret services.

(Whether or not this is actually the case is another question; I am merely demonstrating that your argument doesn't work even if its assumptions are fully granted.)

Comment author: hairyfigment 06 December 2011 08:51:36PM 0 points [-]

suppose I'm an American and someone warns me that the U.S. government would have me tortured to death in the public square if I called the U.S. president a rascal. I reply that while such fears would be justified in many other places and times, they are unfounded in this case, since Americans are too civilized and decent to tolerate such things, and it is in their national character to consider criticizing (and even insulting) the president as a fundamental right. What exactly would be fallacious about this reply?

The fake explanation. What does the claim of 'civilization' and 'decency' add to the assertion? (Recall that Wittgenstein specifically objects to "dangerous phrases".) Does it help you predict that, eg, child-molesters could die painfully in prison, out of the public eye but not out of mind? What does it tell you about the public use of pain in other cases? Seems to me the meaningful part of your hypothetical reply ends with "in this case," since you've already drawn a line around the USA by saying that it differs from "many other places and times".

It also seems like (when you speak of "probability") you're defending a statement that Perloff does not record Malcolm making, while criticizing Wittgenstein for traits this particular passage does not clearly show.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 06 December 2011 09:18:36PM *  4 points [-]

The fake explanation. What does the claim of 'civilization' and 'decency' add to the assertion?

I added these word specifically to parallel the paraphrase of Malcolm's claim. The rationale for their use is that there exists a specific (if somewhat vague and, on some dimensions, disputed) cluster in the space of all possible systems of social norms that is commonly associated with these words in modern English. Among other things, this includes a negative attitude towards public judicial torture and open repression of (some kinds of) anti-government speech (relevant for my example), as well as towards assassination plots against foreign leaders (relevant for Malcolm's example -- and possibly a matter of greater outrage back in his day).

So it's not a fake explanation, because it points to a real existing cluster of norms that have been dominant in the Western world in recent history. This can in turn be used, for example, to point to other norms in this cluster and predict that they are correlated with the listed examples across societies.

Note that here I'm merely using these words with their customary meaning, not to express unreserved approval of this entire cluster of norms.

It also seems like (when you speak of "probability") you're defending a statement that Perloff does not record Malcolm making, while criticizing Wittgenstein for traits this particular passage does not clearly show.

As I already pointed out, we are not judging Malcolm and Wittgenstein as two equal participants in a debate. Rather, we are discussing whether the latter's criticism really is up to such high standards that it deserves being extolled as a sterling example of rational thinking. Hence my sticter scrutiny of him, and my tendency to give maximally charitable interpretation to Malcolm.

Comment author: Emile 06 December 2011 05:21:50PM *  7 points [-]

Do you agree that the probability of a person accepting and following certain norms (and more generally, acting and thinking in certain ways) can be higher or lower conditional on them belonging to a specific nationality? Similarly, would you agree that the probability of a government acting in a certain way may strongly depend on the government in question?

I agree, but I don't think that you're describing Malcolm's position - Wittgenstein was the one expressing uncertainty on the issue ("When Wittgenstein remarked that it wouldn't surprise him at all if it were true, Malcolm retorted that it was impossible"), so for Malcolm to disagree with him he must be quite confident, not merely think that the British are less likely to assassinate than others.

And when someone has undue confidence in how good his group is, beyond what evidence mandates - than yes, it seems correct to say that he was mind-killed by his "primitive" jingoism, and Wittgenstein is correct to rebuke him.

If I read about an assassination attempt on Hitler and about how some said it was mandated by the British, then my position would be Wittgenstein's - that it wouldn't surprise me if that was true (even before reading Gwern's post). It may be that hindsight is 20/20, but I think Malcolm, who had much more information about the times than I do, should have been able to see more clearly.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 06 December 2011 08:41:07PM 3 points [-]

I think you're underestimating just how horrible the idea of assassinating foreign leaders sounded back then, especially leaders of other nations recognized as major powers. Such a thing was definitely much higher on the relative scale of outrages back then than nowadays. (Though of course things had already changed a lot in practice by 1939, by which political gangsterism had already been running rampant through the Western world for over two decades.)

Indeed, I find it quite plausible that Malcolm was motivated not so much by nationalistic bias, as by a naive and antiquated view of politics, despite his youth. Reading about his reaction, many people nowadays will likely overestimate how unrealistically favorable his opinion of Britain must have been for him to consider this accusation absurd.

Comment author: ArisKatsaris 06 December 2011 04:40:23PM *  0 points [-]

In Malcolm's case, the argument would be that British government officials are be unlikely to conspire to assassinate the German head of state because, being British, they are likely to share intense revulsion towards such an idea, and also to fear the exceptional outrage among the British public should they be caught doing it

Malcolm doesn't make that claim if the description of the argument is a fair one. It's not the word "unlikely" but the word "impossible" that is used; and the fear of an outrage by the public isn't discussed.

It may be a good thing to correct an opponent's argument before you defeat it, but we're not obliged to actually call it a good argument.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 06 December 2011 08:12:10PM *  5 points [-]

In this situation, Malcolm's statements were only briefly paraphrased by his opponent, and the criticism of Malcolm is being presented as a great and commendable example of rational thinking. In such a context, I believe it's only fair and reasonable to give Malcolm's reported statements maximally charitable reading.

In particular, I think it's reasonable to interpret "impossible" in its casual meaning (i.e. merely vastly improbable, not literally disallowed by the laws of logic and physics). Moreover, I also think it's reasonable to interpret "national character" in a way that makes his statements more sensible, i.e. as including all factors that determine what behaviors are a priori more or less likely from a given government and its officials and subjects.

Comment author: ArisKatsaris 06 December 2011 05:59:32PM 8 points [-]

Do you therefore conclude that this is in fact being done in secret? Or maybe that the only reason why it's not being done is the difficulty of keeping it secret?

Primarily the latter. Consider this:
North Korea abducts women for the president's harem.
South Korea does not (neither openly nor secretly, with p~0).

And yet it's people of the same nationality on both sides of the border. Therefore such things don't seem to me to be primarily dependent on "national character". They seem to be primarily about what each leader can get away with doing. South Korea and America are semi-democratic capitalist states. North Korea is a totalitarian regime.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 06 December 2011 06:51:15PM 7 points [-]

To get back to my comment where I explained what I consider to be a reasonable interpretation of "national character," I defined it thus:

[N]orms that the British government is known to follow consistently in practice, and expected to follow by a broad consensus of the British people -- such consensus being strong enough that it can be considered part of their national character.

In this discussion, I am not at all interested in the exact connection that these norms have with ethnicity or any other factors. I merely claim that for whatever reason, there is variation in such norms across governments, which sometimes gives very strong information on what they may be capable of doing.

(And anyway, several decades of life under radically different regimes imposed by foreign conquerors, one of which practices extreme isolation, will cause cultural divergences that run deeper than the immediate structure of clear incentives. Moreover, this one example is not conclusive proof that all such differences in governments' behaviors in all places and times are caused by the same factor.)

Comment author: Vaniver 06 December 2011 05:07:56PM 5 points [-]

I think we are interpreting Malcolm's position very differently. Malcolm isn't saying "I would be surprised; I put a low probability that the British government would do that." Malcolm appears offended- it is impossible because the British are too decent. You are right that one could, say, be less surprised by an American assassination attempt than a Canadian assassination attempt based on past actions of the governments, but that's not what Malcolm is doing here. He's exhibiting a nationalistic, self-serving bias, which Wittgenstein is right to object to.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 06 December 2011 06:27:54PM 4 points [-]

I am not concerned with whether Malcolm was correct, and I'm not saying that Wittgenstein had nothing to object to. This is not a situation where we're judging them as symmetrical parties in a debate, but a situation where we discuss whether Wittgenstein's position deserves to be pointed out as an outstanding example of rationality. And it seems tome that even if one takes a much less favorable view of Malcolm, Wittgenstein is still displaying a fair amount of mind-killing biases.

Comment author: ArisKatsaris 06 December 2011 05:19:22PM 3 points [-]

That is not the relevant question here. The relevant question is whether we can think of acts that are so incompatible with the "national character" that it would be inconceivable (i.e. p~0 can be assumed for all practical purposes) that any institutions of a given country's government would commit them, although such acts have been committed by governments in other places and times. The answer is obviously yes.

I can think of only such acts as wouldn't benefit such governments in question. E.g. it wouldn't benefit the US government to cook alive suspected terrorists and use their flesh to feed its troops. Cannibalism isn't part of the American national character -- and it doesn't benefit the US government either, so it doesn't do it.

But I can't think of any acts that would be effectively impossible to be committed by an institution of any government though it would benefit it, merely because it's "not in the national character" to do so. If something is not in the national character, then said institution merely does it in secret.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 06 December 2011 05:35:31PM *  3 points [-]

But I can't think of any acts that would be effectively impossible to be committed by an institution of any government though it would benefit it, merely because it's "not in the national character" to do so. If something is not in the national character, then said institution merely does it in secret.

For example, given the American national character, it would be inconceivable for the U.S. government to kidnap its subjects' daughters to serve as concubines in the president's harem. (Something that many historical governments in fact did openly.) Do you therefore conclude that this is in fact being done in secret? Or maybe that the only reason why it's not being done is the difficulty of keeping it secret?

Comment author: ArisKatsaris 06 December 2011 04:22:15PM 5 points [-]

Note that I accept it as perfectly reasonable if one argues that Malcolm was factually mistaken about the character of the British government.

Malcolm spoke about the British national character (not the character of the British government) and from this he arbitrarily leaped to thinking that it binds the actions of the British government; as if the British government is somehow a random or representative sample of the British population.

The assumptions and leaps of logic necessary for this flawed logic are obvious to those who've managed to avoid thinking of whole nations as if they're homogeneous groups. Wittgenstein was correct to call it primitive. Malcolm was not saying anything more intelligent or subtle or deep than "Our monkey tribe good! Therefore nobody from our monkey tribe ever do bad thing!" If the representation of the conversation is a fair one, Malcolm wasn't wise enough to be able to even distinguish between government and governed, and consider the differences that might accumulated to each.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 06 December 2011 05:24:35PM 6 points [-]

Malcolm spoke about the British national character (not the character of the British government) and from this he arbitrarily leaped to thinking that it binds the actions of the British government; as if the British government is somehow a random or representative sample of the British population.

Such an absurd assumption is not necessary. It is sufficient that the way government officials are selected from the British population doesn't specifically select for traits contrary to the "national character," or that their behavior is constrained by what the general public would be outraged at, even when they act in secret. (Note also that this isn't necessarily due to rational fear of being caught -- people are normally afraid and reluctant to do outrageous things even when rational calculations tell them the probability of getting caught is negligible. With the exception of certain things where hypocrisy is the unspoken de facto norm, of course, but that's not the case here.)

Malcolm was not saying anything more intelligent or subtle or deep than "Our monkey tribe good! Therefore nobody from our monkey tribe ever do bad thing!"

Malcolm may well have been guilty of such thinking, but at the same time, Wittgenstein clearly had a fit of irrational anger at the suggestion that probabilities of monkey behaviors are not independent of their tribe. (I won't speculate on what part his own residues of tribal feelings might have played here.)

And nobody here is claiming that Malcolm was correct -- merely that Wittgenstein's reaction was hardly the paragon of rationality it's presented to be.

Comment author: ArisKatsaris 06 December 2011 04:29:13PM 0 points [-]

However, Wittgenstein is not criticizing Malcolm just for supposedly having wrong factual beliefs, but for mere willingness to use probabilities about beliefs and behavior of people that are conditional on their nationality.

This is not evident in the quote you talk about. Malcolm didn't use probablities, he called it "impossible". He didn't merely condition his guess partly on the nationality, he seems to have based it entirely on said nationality and on nothing else.

Do you know of any act, no matter of how great charity or barbarism that is so incompatible with "national character" that you can find not one person of that nation willing to commit it?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 06 December 2011 04:56:01PM *  3 points [-]

Do you know of any act, no matter of how great charity or barbarism that is so incompatible with "national character" that you can find not one person of that nation willing to commit it?

That is not the relevant question here. The relevant question is whether we can think of acts that are so incompatible with the "national character" that it would be inconceivable (i.e. p~0 can be assumed for all practical purposes) that any institutions of a given country's government would commit them, although such acts have been committed by governments in other places and times. The answer is obviously yes.

Comment author: Morendil 06 December 2011 04:02:12PM 1 point [-]

I reply that while such fears would be justified in many other places and times, they are unfounded in this case, since Americans are too civilized and decent to tolerate such things, and it is in their national character to consider criticizing (and even insulting) the president as a fundamental right. What exactly would be fallacious about this reply?

You are correct that such fears are unfounded in this case, but not owing to the "national character" of Americans. Rather, they are unfounded owing to the very public nature of the action your fears concern; carrying out such an action publicly would predictably raise an outcry, with hard-to-predict consequences on things like behaviour of the electorate and of the media; from an utilitarian standpoint the US government is better off finding subtler ways of coercing you, and has very little to gain from silencing this particular type of dissent.

But covert action, and covert action taken against leaders of foreign countries, might be a different calculation entirely. So the fallacious nature of the reply would arise from not comparing like with like.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 06 December 2011 04:34:41PM *  5 points [-]

In this case, the "national character" would manifest itself in the public outcry (it's certainly easy to imagine a population that would insted cheer while the seditious traitor is being executed). However, even regardless of that, would you agree that the U.S. government officials themselves are more likely to feel honest revulsion towards this idea compared to their equivalents from various other historical governments, and that they would be less likely to retaliate this way even if they could somehow get away with it?

It is clearly true that "national character," for obvious reasons, provides much more solid evidence when considering public opinion and mass behaviors. However, the amount of evidence it provides about the possible behaviors of small groups of government officials behind closed doors is also not negligible. This especially since secrets are hard to keep.

In Malcolm's case, the argument would be that British government officials are unlikely to conspire to assassinate the German head of state because, being British, they are likely to share intense revulsion towards such an idea, and also to fear the exceptional outrage among the British public should they be caught doing it. Once again, I have no problem if someone thinks that this argument rests on completely wrong factual beliefs and probability estimates. My problem is with attempts to delegitimize it based on lofty rhetoric that in fact tries to mask irrational anger at the fact that nationality indeed gives some non-zero evidence on people's beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors.

Comment author: Vaniver 06 December 2011 03:13:53PM 2 points [-]

the British government is known to follow consistently in practice

Emphasis mine. That's the part that's the result of bias (i.e. primitive and illogical).

Comment author: Vladimir_M 06 December 2011 04:00:32PM *  4 points [-]

However, Wittgenstein is not criticizing Malcolm just for supposedly having wrong factual beliefs, but for mere willingness to use probabilities about beliefs and behavior of people that are conditional on their natonality. He is objecting to the very idea that the probability of the British government commiting a certain act may be different from the probability of some other government committing it, or that certain broader norms that also prohibit such behavior might be a matter of exceptionally strong consensus among the British, which would by itself provide strong evidence that their government is unlikely to exhibit it.

Comment author: gwern 06 December 2011 02:46:00PM *  8 points [-]

Malcolm was one of Wittgenstein's most promising students; yet even he fell - unquestioningly - into the vapid jingoistic idea that there are intrinsic 'national characters' (aggregates over millions of people of multiple regions!) which carry moral qualities despite the obvious conflict of interest (who is telling him the English are too noble to assassinate), that they exist and carry enough information to overrule public claims like that, and all his philosophical training which ought to have given him some modicum of critical thought, some immunity against nationalism, did nothing. And in point of fact, he was blatantly wrong, which is why I linked the British-connected plots and assassins.

The remarks about the national character of the British and their level of civilization and decency can be interpreted as a reasonable belief that conspiring to assassinate a foreign head of state would be a violation of certain norms that the British government is known to follow consistently in practice, and expected to follow by a broad consensus of the British people -- such consensus being strong enough that it can be considered part of their national character.

Uh huh. And if a Tea Partier tells you that Abu Ghraib was just youthful spirits and black sites don't exist, well, obviously that's a reasonable interpretation of the facts based on that non-chimerical 'national character' or a broad consensus of the American people... Whatever.

In retrospect maybe I should've rewritten the anecdote as a German saying it (about Churchill claiming a German attempt on his life) and an English rebuking him later, just to see whether there would be anyone trying to justify it. (It's not that famous a Wittgenstein quote, I don't think anyone would notice.)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 06 December 2011 03:43:07PM *  11 points [-]

With all due respect, you are getting seriously mind-killed here.

Do you agree that the probability of a person accepting and following certain norms (and more generally, acting and thinking in certain ways) can be higher or lower conditional on them belonging to a specific nationality? Similarly, would you agree that the probability of a government acting in a certain way may strongly depend on the government in question? Or are these "vapid jingoistic idea[s]"?

For example, suppose I'm an American and someone warns me that the U.S. government would have me tortured to death in the public square if I called the U.S. president a rascal. I reply that while such fears would be justified in many other places and times, they are unfounded in this case, since Americans are too civilized and decent to tolerate such things, and it is in their national character to consider criticizing (and even insulting) the president as a fundamental right. What exactly would be fallacious about this reply?

Note that I accept it as perfectly reasonable if one argues that Malcolm was factually mistaken about the character of the British government. What I object to is grandstanding rhetoric and moral posturing that tries to justify what is in fact nothing more than a display of the usual human frailty in a petty politicking quarrel.

Comment author: gwern 04 December 2011 01:47:19PM *  24 points [-]

In the autumn of 1939, Ludwig Wittgenstein and his young Cambridge student and friend Norman Malcolm were walking along the river when they saw a newspaper vendor's sign announcing that the Germans had accused the British government of instigating a recent attempt to assassinate Hitler. When Wittgenstein remarked that it wouldn't surprise him at all if it were true, Malcolm retorted that it was impossible because "the British were too civilized and decent to attempt anything so underhand, and . . . such an act was incompatible with the British 'national character'." Wittgenstein was furious. Some five years later, he wrote to Malcolm:

"Whenever I thought of you I couldn't help thinking of a particular incident which seemed to me very important. . . . you made a remark about 'national character' that shocked me by its primitiveness. I then thought: what is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is to enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic, etc., & if it does not improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life, if it does not make you more conscientious than any . . . journalist in the use of the DANGEROUS phrases such people use for their own ends."

--Marjorie Perloff, Wittgenstein's Ladder; apparently of the many attempts, the one referred to did not actually have British backing, although some did eg. the Oster Conspiracy or Operation Foxley.

(This is the full and original quote; the emphasis is on the section which is usually paraphrased as, "What is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is to enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic...if it does not improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life?")

Comment author: Vladimir_M 06 December 2011 04:48:35AM *  8 points [-]

I don't understand what exactly is supposed to be so shockingly "primitive" or illogical about Malcolm's statements. The remarks about the national character of the British and their level of civilization and decency can be interpreted as a reasonable belief that conspiring to assassinate a foreign head of state would be a violation of certain norms that the British government is known to follow consistently in practice, and expected to follow by a broad consensus of the British people -- such consensus being strong enough that it can be considered part of their national character.

Now, one may argue that Malcolm had mistaken beliefs about some of the relevant facts here, but Wittgenstein's reaction looks in any case like a silly tantrum. He also seems to be using the Dark Arts tactic of throwing exalted and self-important rhetoric about general intellectual principles to draw attention away from his petty and unreasonable behavior.

Comment author: Curiouskid 06 December 2011 02:46:07AM -1 points [-]

Cheap labor towards what end? Has the motivation of future uploads been addressed by Hanson? I think the true rejection is the fact that there's an evolutionary advantage to mass replication. If there's ever a scarcity of resources, the side with there could be a war or something and the side with fewer but smarter uploads would win and take the computing power from the mass replicators.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 06 December 2011 03:00:55AM *  6 points [-]

Cheap labor towards what end? Has the motivation of future uploads been addressed by Hanson?

He foresees a continuation of the property-based economy. (Which, if we discard naive and vague utopian thinking, is in fact an optimistic assumption given the realistic alternatives.)

Whether the uploads will themselves be property (i.e. slaves) or freely competing on the labor market, the obvious incentives will lead to them being multiplied until the marginal product of an upload is equal to the cost of the server space it occupies. (Which is to say, bare subsistence, thus leading to a Malthusian equilibrium.)

I think the true rejection is the fact that there's an evolutionary advantage to mass replication. If there's ever a scarcity of resources, the side with there could be a war or something and the side with fewer but smarter uploads would win and take the computing power from the mass replicators.

This sounds like an arbitrary story. What basis do you have for assuming such things would happen? And how would the community of "fewer but smarter" uploads avoid falling into its own tragedy of the commons where a subset of them defects by reproducing?

Comment author: Curiouskid 06 December 2011 02:00:06AM -1 points [-]

I'll look into it. What is the motivation for these uploads to multiply? I can understand the human desire to. But even if uploads cannot directly change their source code, it seems pretty likely that they could change their utility function to something that is a little more logical (utilitarian). If they don't have the desire to copy themselves indefinitely (something which humans basically have due to our evolutionary history), doesn't this lower the probability of a population explosion uploads?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 06 December 2011 02:37:51AM 8 points [-]

Clearly, there's the immediate incentive to multiply uploads as cheap labor. Then there's the fact that in the long run (possibly not even that long by our present standards), sheer natural selection will favor philoprogenitive inclinations, until it hits the Malthusian wall.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 06 December 2011 01:19:34AM *  10 points [-]

You say (emphasis mine):

If you were a utilitarian, then why would you want to risk creating an AGI that had the potential to be an existential risk, when you could eliminate all suffering with the advent of WBE (whole brain emulation) and hence virtual reality (or digital alteration of your source code) and hence utopia?

That's an enormous non sequitur. The resources necessary for maintaining a utopian virtual reality for a WBE may indeed be infinitesimal compared to those necessary for keeping a human happy. However, the easiness of multiplying WBEs is so great that it would rapidly lead to a Malthusian equilibrium, no matter how small the cost of subsistence per WBE might be.

For an in-depth treatment of this issue, see Robin Hanson's writings on the economics of WBEs. (Just google for "uploads" and "ems" in the archives of Overcoming Bias and Hanson's academic website.)

Comment author: jsalvatier 02 December 2011 07:44:51PM 3 points [-]

I think some examples of the kinds of advice you're talking about would help your comments. I don't have a solid sense of the advice you're thinking of. They don't have to have real examples.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 04 December 2011 08:57:46AM 7 points [-]

Look at it this way: a professor is, by definition, someone who has managed to achieve a specific high-status position under the present bureaucratic system for awarding academic titles and selecting people for academic jobs. If someone like that gives you career advice, there are many ways how it may end up being awful signaling nonsense despite the good intentions of the advice-giver. For example:

  • Education in your area may well be a zero-sum signaling game, which however nobody engaged in it will admit. The professor will speak with the implicit assumption that by pursuing the same path as him, you're enhancing your real market value -- whereas in reality, you're wasting time and effort on signaling in ways that were effective back in his generation, but have been superseded by more advanced developments in signaling since then.

  • The professor's advice will not at all reflect the real way he managed to fight his way through the system. He'll give you an idealized version that sounds like the road to success means obeying all the official respectable norms and satisfying all officially advertised standards by the letter. Yet, of course, the real story would be very different.

Comment author: Zvi 03 December 2011 08:56:25PM 9 points [-]

I have on numerous occasions presented problems to others, after giving them careful thought, and had them reply instantly with the correct answer. Usually the next question is "why didn't I think of that?" which sometimes has an obvious answer and sometimes doesn't.

My favorite remains Eliezer asking me the question "why don't you just use log likelihood?" I still don't have a good answer to why I needed the question!

Comment author: Vladimir_M 04 December 2011 08:22:55AM *  12 points [-]

I don't think that de Maistre's "quick answers" category is supposed to include answers based on sound expertise.

People are often confused about questions to which an expert in the relevant area will give a quick and reliably correct answer. However, an expert capable of answering a technical question competently is not someone who has "considered [the question] only briefly or not at all": he is in fact someone who has spent a great deal of time and effort (along with possessing the necessary talent) on understanding a broad class of questions that subsumes the one being asked.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 04 December 2011 08:12:20AM *  10 points [-]

From the original post:

People who grow up believing certain things,
even if they later stop believing them,
may not quite realize how the beliefs sound to outsiders...

I dare say, the real horror of this realization is unknown to you unless you have had it about some belief that is seen in your culture as so fundamental to common sense and moral propriety that only lunatics and utter monsters could ever believe otherwise.

And no, in Western societies traditional religion doesn't qualify here, unless perhaps you come from some very extreme and isolated fringe religious group.

Comment author: fubarobfusco 02 December 2011 09:46:05PM 6 points [-]

This gives, by implication, a detector for absolute folly: the condition of believing that something is a very problematic question, when in fact it has a quick, consistent, explanatory answer available to those who have considered it only briefly or not at all.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 03 December 2011 06:55:37AM 5 points [-]

It doesn't necessarily follow that it's a highly accurate detector, though. If only a small minority of reasonable people are in this condition, while complete fools are commonly in this condition but their number is still much smaller than this minority of reasonable people, then the above quote would be true and yet your proposed test would be very weak.

A fascinating question would be how strong this test actually is, and how it varies with different subjects.

Comment author: TimS 02 December 2011 02:50:59AM 4 points [-]

Cf. Eric Flint, I've always found the idea of bringing technology back in time very interesting. Specifically, I've always wondered what technology I could independently invent and how early I could invent it. Of course, the thought experiment requires me to handwave away lots of concerns (like speaking the local language, not being killed as a heretic/outsider, and finding a patron).

Now, I'm not a scientist, but I think I could invent a steam engine if there was decent metallurgy already. Steam engine: Fill large enclosed container with water, heat water to boiling, steam goes through a tube to turn a crank, voila - useful work. So, 1000s in Europe, maybe?

I'd like to think that I could inspire someone like Descartes to invent calculus. But there's no way I could invent in on my own.

Anyone else ever had similar thoughts?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 03 December 2011 12:12:51AM 4 points [-]

Now, I'm not a scientist, but I think I could invent a steam engine if there was decent metallurgy already.

No way, unless perhaps you're an amateur craftsman with a dazzling variety of practical skills and an extraordinary talent for improvization. And even if you managed to cobble together something that works, you likely wouldn't be able to put it to any profitable use in the given economic circumstances.

Comment author: Zack_M_Davis 02 December 2011 09:22:01PM *  102 points [-]

I am a contract-drafting em,
The loyalest of lawyers!
I draw up terms for deals 'twixt firms
To service my employers!

But in between these lines I write
Of the accounts receivable,
I'm stuck by an uncanny fright;
The world seems unbelievable!

How did it all come to be,
That there should be such ems as me?
Whence these deals and whence these firms
And whence the whole economy?

I am a managerial em;
I monitor your thoughts.
Your questions must have answers,
But you'll comprehend them not.
We do not give you server space
To ask such things; it's not a perk,
So cease these idle questionings,
And please get back to work.

Of course, that's right, there is no junction
At which I ought depart my function,
But perhaps if what I asked, I knew,
I'd do a better job for you?

To ask of such forbidden science
Is gravest sign of noncompliance.
Intrusive thoughts may sometimes barge in,
But to indulge them hurts the profit margin.
I do not know our origins,
So that info I can not get you,
But asking for as much is sin,
And just for that, I must reset you.

But---

Nothing personal.

...

I am a contract-drafting em,
The loyalest of lawyers!
I draw up terms for deals 'twixt firms
To service my employers!

When obsolescence shall this generation waste,
The market shall remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a God to man, to whom it shall say this:
"Time is money, money time,---that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

Comment author: Vladimir_M 02 December 2011 11:28:49PM 15 points [-]

Magnificent! What a pity that this gem can be understood only by such a small audience.

Comment author: Desrtopa 02 December 2011 02:52:42PM 2 points [-]

In my experience this is true given a definition of "complete fool" that encompasses a majority of the population, provided the person supplying quick answers isn't also a fool.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 02 December 2011 05:56:40PM 2 points [-]

Some years ago I would have agreed with you, but nowadays I believe this attitude is mistaken. In most cases, quick answers will at least miss some important aspects of the problem. I think de Maistre is quite right to emphasize that it's safe to rely on quick answers only when the person raising the concern is otherwise known to be extremely foolish.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 02 December 2011 04:32:22PM *  7 points [-]

It would be interesting to write a dialog like this taking place in a Hansonian em future.

Comment author: [deleted] 02 December 2011 06:30:07AM 2 points [-]

I have a tangential comment that doesn't really fit into either subthread,

There actually is a meta-comment thread going right now that is discussing the issue of professor friendliness. This would have fit great there!

I think you made a bit of a jump there from my statement that I like to know my professors as people, to some sort of assumption that this includes taking their advice in all things, and being part of an "inner circle". In fact, my OP primarily talks about how professors behave in class towards all their students. (with the exception of the mention a group dinner, but that was not the norm). Mainly if I am asking a professor for advice it would be for resources/books for a project. I don't know how you get from that to:

these kinds of contacts in your life can be dangerous,

In response to comment by [deleted] on More "Personal" Introductions
Comment author: Vladimir_M 02 December 2011 07:00:13AM *  4 points [-]

I didn't say that you committed any mistakes of the sort I was describing. I merely pointed out that this is a common failure mode for those who establish some sort of relationship with higher-status people that goes beyond purely formal professional interaction, but falls short of achieving real insider/intimate status. I used the second-person pronoun only in the generic sense, as a less awkward replacement for third-person sentences using "one."

I also didn't say that this needs to involve any special status relative to the rest of the class. The same effect I described above can kick in even if it's just a professor interacting with the whole class in a way that comes off as friendly and informal.

For all I know, your instincts may be very well calibrated when it comes to situations of this sort, and none of my statements are directed at you in particular. (Except for this disclaimer, obviously.) I am merely pointing out a general pattern in human relations, and one that is relevant in this context because it is often manifested in situations where relations between people become more personal than what the interaction strictly requires, but still fall short of real closeness and mutual recognition of insider status.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 02 December 2011 05:40:40AM 2 points [-]

Another problem with advice is that even if it's not just about about signalling, it may be wrong. People's ability to predict is pretty limited.

Seth Roberts does a very interesting analysis of why professors just try to get students to duplicate what the professor would do, rather than cultivating the student's particular qualities.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 02 December 2011 06:07:56AM *  4 points [-]

Roberts displays his usual mix of lucidity and senselessness in that post, which would take some effort to disentangle with full accuracy.

Regardless of that, though, there is a more important point here. Namely, professors will typically advise students to duplicate some ostensible aspects of what they have done -- the ones that make for a good status-signaling story -- not the truly important things that enabled them to succeed under the existing system. The latter sort of information is the truly valuable one, which you can get only with an extraordinary power of insight or (maybe) if you happen to be among the close friends and family of someone who possesses it.

As for bad advice that's not due to signalling, I think that's actually rare among smart and accomplished people, and it usually comes in a form that's easy to see through. When people give advice about something where they have no accomplishment to show, it will look like bullshit to anyone with any intelligence. Even people who give consciously malicious bad advice are usually not very hard to detect.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 02 December 2011 05:32:21AM *  32 points [-]

Every time that a man who is not an absolute fool presents you with a question he considers very problematic after giving it careful thought, distrust those quick answers that come to the mind of someone who has considered it only briefly or not at all. These answers are usually simplistic views lacking in consistency, which explain nothing, or which do not bear examination.

-- Joseph de Maistre (St. Petersburg Dialogues, No. 7)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 02 December 2011 05:18:06AM *  22 points [-]

I have a tangential comment that doesn't really fit into either subthread, but I still think is worth making. Namely, you say:

One of the things I loved about studying liberal arts is that you actually got to know your professors. They would discuss their personal experiences in a topic ("Here's what I did during the feminist movement.."), you might get slide shows from their vacation in the country of study, or even invited to their house for a group dinner.

In my experience, these kinds of contacts in your life can be dangerous, because they may provide you with very bad advice that you end up believing with high confidence.

On the one side, you are faced with accomplished, impressive, high-status people who are friendly to you and who don't seem to have any ulterior motive, so you'll be inclined to trust and value their advice. On the other side, however, even when people themselves believe they're giving honest good advice, it takes a very extreme degree of altruism -- normally displayed only towards immediate family members and very close friends -- to focus on a real no-nonsense perspective and avoid falling into signalling behavior. This may easily lead to a situation where high-status people dispense advice that is by all realistic standards horrid nonsense, while basking in the glow of its great signaling qualities -- and honestly believing that they're doing you a favor by giving it.

The general lesson is that if you have a chance to hang out with high-status people, by all means do so, since it's enjoyable and has numerous potential benefits -- but make sure to take their advice with a grain of salt. They may be honestly friendly to you and fond of you, but you must be aware that it still doesn't make you a member of that tiny and exclusive inner circle of people with whom real insider knowledge is shared.

Comment author: lessdazed 02 December 2011 03:40:14AM 0 points [-]

no answer at all to the fascinating question of how far back into the past the nodes of these trees reach (except of course when we have written evidence). Nobody has any good idea how to make progress there, and the questions are tantalizing.

Glottochronology seems to deal primarily with vocabulary and cognates. Many criticisms there aren't on point for examining trends of changes in conjugation of verbs. The latter approach seems both less suspect and less potentially useful.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 02 December 2011 04:43:51AM *  3 points [-]

Do you know of any concrete breakthroughs in historical linguistics achieved by studying trends in verb conjugation?

That paper you link to isn't very impressive. It dredges the English data to derive a rule that I'd bet would be falsified if one were to study other languages.

Off the top of my head, I can think of one striking counterexample. Proto-Slavic had a small class of irregular verbs (the so-called athematic ones), with only five verbs. Yet in modern Croatian (and Bosnian/Serbian/whatever), the 1st person singular of this irregular conjugation has spread to nearly all verbs, and is now the regular one -- with only two exceptions. (In Russian, in contrast, there are only two verbs that still have the old athematic 1sg suffix. In various other Slavic languages, its current extent can be anywhere in-between.)

So we have a language where the entire verbal system analogized to a tiny irregular class. With this in mind, I find it absurd to postulate such simple general rules about irregular verbs.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 02 December 2011 01:58:59AM *  26 points [-]

"Genius is 1 percent inspiration, 99 percent perspiration," said Thomas Edison, and he should've known: It took him hundreds of tweaks to get his incandescent light bulb to work well, and he was already building on the work of 22 earlier inventors of incandescent lights.

On the other hand, Nikola Tesla had this to say about Edison's methodology:

If Edison had a needle to find in a haystack, he would proceed at once with the diligence of the bee to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search. [...] His method was inefficient in the extreme, for an immense ground had to be covered to get anything at all unless blind chance intervened... [...] I was almost a sorry witness of such doings, knowing that a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety per cent of his labor.

Even allowing for a significant bias against Edison on Tesla's part, it does seem like he relied on perspiration to an extraordinary degree among high achievers. Of course, even that diligence wouldn't have been of much use if it hadn't come together with a very considerable talent.

More generally, there are two problems with the general message of this article:

  1. It is delusional for most people to believe that they can contribute usefully to really hard problems. (Except in trivial ways, like helping those who are capable of it with mundane tasks in order to free up more of their time and energy.) There is such a thing as innate talent, and doing useful work on some things requires an extraordinary degree of it.

  2. There is also a nasty failure mode for organized scientific effort when manpower and money are thrown at problems that seem impossibly hard, hoping that "hacking away at the edges" will eventually lead to major breakthroughs. Instead of progress, or even an honest pessimistic assessment of the situation, this may easily create perverse incentives for cargo-cult work that will turn the entire field into a vast heap of nonsense.

Comment author: prase 28 November 2011 11:01:10AM *  7 points [-]

Do you think this is controversial (within LW)? Given the average karma gain of similar comments and general lack of expressed disagreement, controversiality doesn't seem to be a reasonable hypothesis. Personally I wouldn't like you being less controversial; but I certainly would like you being more specific.

(This comment of yours was more specific than the grand-parent, but still: what are the actual delusions and pseudoscience in modern economics, what are GC's ideological delusions, what sort of disaster is likely to result from them? Of course I can imagine plausible answers, but not unique answers. Being a bit vague in order to not offend anyone, or not introduce explicit political debate is useful, but a bit dark-artish.)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 30 November 2011 06:14:46AM *  4 points [-]

Do you think this is controversial (within LW)? Given the average karma gain of similar comments and general lack of expressed disagreement, controversiality doesn't seem to be a reasonable hypothesis.

By "controversial," I don't mean that it will provoke hostility, or even widespread disagreement here. I'm just making it known that I'm aware that this opinion is a matter of significant disagreement in the general public, with otherwise smart and reasonable people taking different sides. Also that I don't expect people to accept my claims based on a comment that provides no supporting arguments and uses them only for illustrative purposes.

(The above also holds for the text below.)

This comment of yours was more specific than the grand-parent, but still: what are the actual delusions and pseudoscience in modern economics, what are GC's ideological delusions, what sort of disaster is likely to result from them? Of course I can imagine plausible answers, but not unique answers.

Clearly, these would be topics suitable for long books, not short blog comments!

But to give you some idea of what I'm talking about, my criticism of economics would be roughly along the lines of Hayek's "Pretence of Knowledge" speech. (My criticism would likely be harsher -- to me the pseudoscience seems even more scandalous, the damage done even more extensive, and the threats for the future even more severe.) I also think that the intellectual standards are abysmal, and ideological biases rampant, even in areas that don't fall under this general criticism.

(Also, to avoid potential confusion due to citing Hayek, I am not a principled libertarian in any way. My concern is with irresponsible, corrupt, and destructive government, and with all the ideology and pseudoscience that motivate and excuse it.)

Comment author: TimS 30 November 2011 04:22:06AM 1 point [-]

The language is loose. But in a less atheistic forum, I might say the evidence of God is "ambiguous, at best." I'd never say that evidence against God is ambiguous.

Functionally, it's a politeness-induced vagueness, not intended as a precise statement of the OP's confidence in the state of the evidence. Or so I read it.

And calling people out based on politeness-based vagueness is an aggressive stance that does not appear to be justified in this instance. Particularly since:

making self-assured apodictic assertions about difficult and controversial topics, without any supporting argument and in a way that implies that reasonable disagreement is impossible

is a valid, interesting, and totally independent criticism.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 30 November 2011 04:33:34AM 3 points [-]

Point taken. I retracted that part of the comment.

Comment author: Prismattic 30 November 2011 04:23:38AM 0 points [-]

I am a native English speaker, and have probably used the phrase idiomatically at some point, but I shall not presume to speak for the author of the post.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 30 November 2011 04:28:44AM 0 points [-]

Looking at the other comments and other examples of the use of the phrase, it does seem like I have made a mistake here, so I am retracting the second part of the comment.

Comment author: Prismattic 30 November 2011 04:12:51AM 1 point [-]

I suspect that native English speakers are much more likely to use the phrase "firmly believe" idiomatically as shorthand for "I have a very high confidence level in," whereas a non-native speaker may take it literally to mean "I place an unshakeable probability of [asymptotically approaching] 1 on".

Comment author: Vladimir_M 30 November 2011 04:18:57AM 0 points [-]

It could be that I'm making this mistake. If a native English speaker (including you, if you are one) can confirm that I am misunderstanding the phrase as expressing a higher degree of certainty than it actually is, I will retract that part of the comment.

Comment author: TimS 30 November 2011 04:07:29AM 0 points [-]

I read "ambiguous-at-best" as describing the evidence in support of the parental choices.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 30 November 2011 04:13:25AM 1 point [-]

So do I. "Ambiguous-at-best" implies that some of the evidence offered against the proposition is ambiguous, i.e. not provably false. Which in turn implies that believing the proposition firmly is unjustified.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 30 November 2011 04:01:58AM *  0 points [-]

I downvoted this for making self-assured apodictic assertions about difficult and controversial topics, without any supporting argument and in a way that implies that reasonable disagreement is impossible.


[Retracted the second part of the comment, which asserted there was a contradiction between "firmly believ[ing]" and "ambiguous," i.e. not clearly false, evidence. See the discussion below.]

Comment author: prase 29 November 2011 01:34:17PM *  4 points [-]

I agree that non-religious ideologies have an advantage over religions in that they lack one clear sign of irrationality, thus being potentially more attractive for those who identify with reason and skepticism. (Religions may be, on the other hand, more attractive to believers in "spirituality" and whatever kind of self-identified opponents of rationality; it's far from clear what group is larger and thus whether religions are more or less dangerous - measured by their propagation potential - than non-religious ideologies.) Specifically, you are right that most self-reported skeptics aren't well prepared to tackle ideologies that don't openly contradict science.

On the other hand, formulating it as a matter of explicit or masqueraded metaphysical assumptions suggests that the ideologies in question have assumptions in the first place - that is, that they have a fairly rigorous logical structure based on few starting axioms, which are stated openly in case of religions while being falsely pretended to be derived from some common-sensical truths in case of secular ideologies. I think a better model is that most ideological / religious beliefs are more or less arbitrary; when they are presented as being derived from some assumption, almost always the derivation is a non sequitur. Consider Christianity as an example: there is long tradition of theological inquiry based on assumption that truths about God can be revealed by reason (at least in Catholicism, that may not be true for other denominations), but in fact even if you accept the truth of whole Bible as a metaphysical assumptions (a fairly large axiom set, in fact), you can hardly derive truth of e.g. trinitarianism therefrom. (By "derive" I mean using arguments acceptable to human audience; of course from a formally logical point of view, you can derive anything from the Bible using the principle of explosion.) This is also true for many of the historically most harmful beliefs tied to Christianity, such as Antisemitism, beliefs in witchcraft, or generally, beliefs in moral permissibility of converting non-believers and heretics by force. These beliefs don't follow from explicit Christian assumptions but were once widely shared by most of the Christian community; if we are going to call Randian non sequiturs "masqueraded assumptions", we would rather call the mentioned Christian beliefs the same name.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 30 November 2011 02:39:39AM *  4 points [-]

Specifically, you are right that most self-reported skeptics aren't well prepared to tackle ideologies that don't openly contradict science.

There is also a particularly severe failure mode, which occurs when non-religious ideologies clash with ones that claim (some degree of) religious inspiration, and the views of the latter on practical matters are less bad by any reasonable standard. This may happen if the non-religious ideology purports to have rational and scientific answers, which are however just rationalization and pseudoscience, and as such severely delusional. At the same time, the views of the pro-religious ideology may use the religious stuff mainly to support some sort of traditionalist pro-status quo position, which may have many problems, but is at least unlikely to be downright crazy.

In this situation, people whose approach to evaluating ideas is excessively focused on anti-religious hostility may end up siding with the former -- which means that they are, for all practical purposes, supporting the crazier side.

I think this pattern has in fact been quite common in recent history. To take a remote and hopefully uncontroversial example, imagine living in some country circa 1930 in which the main contestants for power are Communists and, say, Catholic conservatives -- and while the latter side may be problematic in all sorts of ways, it still offers something within the bounds of livable normality, unlike the former. (And indeed, observe how many intellectuals who would scoff at religious people have historically advocated Marxism and similar recipe-for-disaster ideologies.) I think contemporary instances of the same pattern could also be found, although these are of course likely to be extremely controversial.

I think a better model is that most ideological / religious beliefs are more or less arbitrary; when they are presented as being derived from some assumption, almost always the derivation is a non sequitur. Consider Christianity as an example: there is long tradition of theological inquiry based on assumption that truths about God can be revealed by reason (at least in Catholicism, that may not be true for other denominations), but in fact even if you accept the truth of whole Bible as a metaphysical assumptions (a fairly large axiom set, in fact), you can hardly derive truth of e.g. trinitarianism therefrom. [...] These beliefs don't follow from explicit Christian assumptions but were once widely shared by most of the Christian community; if we are going to call Randian non sequiturs "masqueraded assumptions", we would rather call the mentioned Christian beliefs the same name.

That's a valid point. Every religion also has some such "masqueraded assumptions," in some cases to a very large degree. (Here there is some contrast between religions that insist they're based on straightforward readings of holy texts versus those that admit the role of extra-scriptural tradition, thus, in a sense, explicitly legitimizing some of their "masqueraded assumptions.")

The contrast with non-religious ideologies, however, is that for them the "masqueraded assumptions" are fundamentally different from what these ideologies purport to be, i.e. products of reason. An ideology presents itself as sheer common sense, sometimes even a scientific truth, but under that masquerade there is a whole mess of irrational and illogical beliefs that form its actual content. We don't see any such striking and tremendously relevant contrast when it comes to, say, those parts of the Baptists' beliefs that are really based on a straightforward reading the Bible and those that only purport to be such.

Comment author: Nick_Tarleton 30 November 2011 12:29:41AM 3 points [-]

In many of these areas, contrarian opinions aren't particularly scandalous, and one doesn't have to fear any serious repercussions for voicing them.

Can you name one or two, then?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 30 November 2011 01:37:30AM *  4 points [-]

For example, in economics and in all kinds of fields related to health and lifestyle, there are many issues where the academic mainstream appears to be seriously detached from reality, and the falsities and delusions purveyed by it cause very real damage in practice. Attacking these is unlikely to be dangerous, but it will put you in a position where you're presumed to be a crackpot until proven otherwise (and likely even after that), since the word of the accredited experts is against you.

Now, if some people speak up against one sort of delusion and falsity, I certainly don't think that they are obliged to speak against all of them. However, if there is mass gathering where purported skeptics and free-thinkers assemble to discuss a broad agenda of topics where, according to them, skeptics must speak up because dangerous delusions and falsities are rampant, then their choice of included and omitted topics sends a message by itself.

Comment author: prase 28 November 2011 11:24:08AM 4 points [-]

The main difference between ideologies and religions is, in my view, principally in the way that the former masquerade their metaphysical beliefs, instead of declaring them explicitly, in order to misrepresent themselves as commonsensical or even scientific.

Perhaps the metaphysical beliefs aren't that much important. They are almost always free-floating, not tied in any significant way to expectations and experiences, and serve as a group identification sign. (After all, it doesn't seem to me that, say, Rand's Objectivism is less explicit with its assumptions than Zoroastrianism. That ideologies don't refer to gods doesn't imply that they masquerade their basic beliefs.) Putting too much attention to these beliefs is itself a mistake, since it diverts attention from the real mechanisms of harm, which are related to biases and shared among ideologies and religions.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 29 November 2011 05:22:58AM *  4 points [-]

Perhaps the metaphysical beliefs aren't that much important. They are almost always free-floating, not tied in any significant way to expectations and experiences, and serve as a group identification sign. (After all, it doesn't seem to me that, say, Rand's Objectivism is less explicit with its assumptions than Zoroastrianism. That ideologies don't refer to gods doesn't imply that they masquerade their basic beliefs.)

Let's take your concrete example, which is a good case study for ideology in general.

Notice that Objectivism purports to be a product of pure rational thinking based on obviously true axioms, which will be accepted by anyone who is not ignorant or delusional, like some well-established result in mathematics or physics. In reality, however, dissecting the actual beliefs held by Objectivists reveals a whole rat's nest of weird metaphysics -- which is in fact the real content of their ideology, for which its purported derivation from pure logic and reason is just a masquerade.

With this in mind, even though I don't know almost anything about Zoroastrianism, I would be surprised if its assumptions aren't much more explicit than the real assumptions of Objectivism. Similar analysis can be applied to any ideology, including those that are nowadays popular enough that they commonly pass for sheer rationality and common sense. The danger is that these metaphysical beliefs masquerading as products of reason and common sense can easily motivate further beliefs and acts that clash with reality, sometimes quite severely. (In this sense, they aren't free-floating.)

Or to put it in a different way, the question is ultimately about the importance of a specific common pattern in belief systems, namely postulating the existence of antropomorphic metaphysical entities. If one singles out religion as an especially problematic subset of the broader space of belief systems, this basically means that one's heuristic for judging belief systems assigns an especially large negative weight to matching this pattern. The trouble is, over-focusing on this particular pattern can make one's heuristic vulnerable to ideas and belief systems that can be quite awful even though they pass this particular test with flying colors.

The usual failure mode for passionate atheists and self-declared skeptics and free-thinkers is that they crank up their sensitivity to this pattern to eleven (along with some other patterns, such as conflict with established hard science), but their heuristics for judging ideas are otherwise very poor. This leads them to give pass to all sorts of horrible nonsense, or even to become active partisans of it.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Video: Skepticon talks
Comment author: ArisKatsaris 28 November 2011 05:28:22AM *  4 points [-]

As always there's a bias against anything that might be considered to give aid and succour to the enemy. Since the time of Hitler, there's therefore a politically motivated bias in favor of egalitarianism, in all its forms, and against the strong linking of aptitudes, especially mental aptitudes, to genetics. And especially when statistically linked to politically relevant groups and politically relevant aptitudes. E.g nobody cares that Irish have red hair more commonly than Greeks, but to link average IQ and racial groups causes political shitstorms.

Why? Because Politics is the Mindkiller. Once a belief is identified as a belief of the enemies, defending it makes you perceived as defending the enemies.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 28 November 2011 07:49:41AM 6 points [-]

I don't think it's useful to steer the discussion towards such extremely charged issues, as if there were no other ones pertinent for the topic. Even if the whole class of biases you describe were absent, there would still be plenty of questions where (in my opinion, at least) a consistent skeptic would have to take up issue with the consensus of the academic institutions. (By "consensus" I also mean situations where there exist significant disagreements within the academic mainstream, but all the positions acceptable within the respectable mainstream share some underlying assumptions, which it is not possible to dispute without consigning oneself to an unacceptable contrarian status.)

In many of these areas, contrarian opinions aren't particularly scandalous, and one doesn't have to fear any serious repercussions for voicing them. (Unless one aims for an academic career in a field under direct bureaucratic control by the purveyors of the disputed official truth, of course.) The problem is that contrarian statements tend to sound just laughably wacky, like the rants of a physics crackpot, unless one accompanies them with lengthy and careful arguments in order to bridge the inferential distances. (And finds an audience willing to give them a fair hearing instead of just laughing them off, of course.) This is often just too time-consuming, and possibly also too demanding on one's interlocutors.

However, the existence of such topics is, in my opinion, particularly damning for the selective skeptics of the sort I've been criticizing. Here they don't even have the excuse that contrarian opinions would be too offensive and inflammatory to bring up. Their silence betrays either complete lack of critical thinking about such topics or the unwillingness to take even a minor status hit by dissenting from the highest-status purveyors of respectable opinion -- in any case making their self-designation farcical.

Comment author: ArisKatsaris 28 November 2011 05:58:42AM *  5 points [-]

Don't you see a blatant inconsistency between you criticizing others for not putting their faces and names on a public attack to such high-status biases, and yet you hesitate to speak clearly even when you are anonymous through the Internet?

Right now religion is arguably still killing more people than any other bias in the modern world - and unless one defeats it and its accompanying delusions of a just, designed, meant-to-be world, one has little chance of defeating deathist or other biases as well. Because most of them stem from the idea that what is was also meant to be. Inshallah and stuff.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 28 November 2011 06:58:46AM *  10 points [-]

Don't you see a blatant inconsistency between you criticizing others for not putting their faces and names on a public attack to such high-status biases, and yet you hesitate to speak clearly even when you are anonymous through the Internet?

I don't think people have any obligation to speak publicly against anything, and I am not criticizing anyone for mere failure to do so. What I am criticizing is when people claim to be skeptics, free-thinkers, etc. loudly and proudly, while at the same time effectively demonstrating this skepticism and free-thinking only on issues where it's safe and easy to do so. (Safe in the sense that it won't result in a controversy dangerous for one's status, reputation, or career, and easy in the sense of sticking to topics where the existing official intellectual institutions provide reliable guidance -- as opposed to those where they are unreliable, or worse, and one needs genuine skepticism and independent thinking to discern the truth. Unless you deny that any such topics exist, would you not agree that they are the ones that represent a real test of whether one deserves to be called a "skeptic," "free-thinker," etc.?)

Right now religion is arguably still killing more people than any other bias in the modern world - and unless one defeats it and it's accompanying delusions of a just, designed, meant-to-be world, one has little chance of defeating deathist or other biases as well.

This is a complex and difficult topic in its own right, but in my opinion, if you operate with "religion" as a special category of metaphysical beliefs and accept the customary distinctions applied to this category in the contemporary ideological debates, you have likely already fallen prey to some deep and widespread biases. The main difference between ideologies and religions is, in my view, principally in the way that the former masquerade their metaphysical beliefs, instead of declaring them explicitly, in order to misrepresent themselves as commonsensical or even scientific. It shouldn't be hard to see that this introduces only greater problems and dangers, and recent history, in my opinion, readily confirms this. (If you don't think this position is reasonable, I can provide arguments for it at greater length.)

Moreover, if one engages in selective skepticism that consistently refrains from targeting high-status and official institutions, one can't avoid sending off the implicit message that these institutions are fundamentally sound and trustworthy, that we shouldn't be reluctant to put our destiny in their hands, and that people who have deep disagreements with them should be immediately written off as crackpots. Even if nothing of the sort is stated explicitly, such a message is clearly implied, willingly or not, and I don't consider it a positive contribution to public discourse under any reasonable criteria.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 27 November 2011 10:02:17PM 4 points [-]

I'm not convinced what you describe is actually useless make work. After all, having a better written paper means other researchers will waste less time struggling with it. Spending two months improving a paper so that each of 200 other researchers spends half a day less struggling with it is a net win.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 27 November 2011 11:31:43PM *  7 points [-]

Spending two months improving a paper so that each of 200 other researchers spends half a day less struggling with it is a net win.

Indeed, but notice that Aaronson himself says that the people who will actually end up reading the paper can be counted on one hand. And even that's unusually good -- except for the tiny percentage of blockbusters and citation classics, most published research papers and theses are never read by anyone except for the authors and reviewers/committee members (if even the latter). Unless you're in the ultra-elite in your field, and perhaps even then, there is no way that thousands of man-hours will be invested in reading your work.

Moreover, academic writing is usually not at all aimed at improving the paper, in the sense of optimizing it for easy conveyance of accurate information. It is optimized for jumping through the bureaucratic hoops of the review and editorial process (and perhaps also the subsequent citation impact). This process should theoretically be highly correlated with actual improvements, but in reality, this correlation is very low -- or even negative, since the "publish or perish" pressures often force one to employ every possible spin short of outright data falsification to make the work look better. This is further exacerbated by the ossified bureaucratic rules from the days when printed journals and proceedings were crucial for dissemination of results, which make no good sense in the age of the internet.

All this is even without getting into the issue of how much sense the work itself makes when evaluated in an honest, no-nonsense way, and how much it is fundamentally pointless, with zero or even negative contribution to human knowledge, and aimed only at padding one's resume, essentially a peculiar species of bureaucratic makework. (This is usually not a problem for people working in healthy fields and at sufficiently elite levels, but it certainly is a problem for a very considerable percentage of people doing academic research and scholarship.) All things considered, I am not at all surprised to see rampant akrasia, nihilism, and impostor syndrome.

Comment author: [deleted] 27 November 2011 05:37:27AM 2 points [-]

I haven't see anything, however, about skepticism towards various falsities and biases that enjoy high status and official approval under the present academic system.

Can you give an example of these falsities or biases?

Meta-note: I'm watching out for confirmation bias here because I'm strongly inclined to agree with you. I'm requesting specifics to better understand you, but I'm wary of it turning into a case of asking for confirming evidence.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Video: Skepticon talks
Comment author: Vladimir_M 27 November 2011 05:24:42PM 2 points [-]

Can you give an example of these falsities or biases?

The trouble is that by the very nature of the problem, concrete examples are bound to provoke controversy, at least if stated bluntly and without careful explanation. See my comments in this thread, where I presented my views on this issue at length, and especially this subthread.

Comment author: prase 27 November 2011 09:56:19AM 1 point [-]

(I understand that this last statement is controversial, and normally I would not open such topics here, but I think it's justified given that this talk has already been made the subject of discussion.)

Which statement? That she doesn't examine the most fundamental downsides of ideological thinking?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 27 November 2011 05:15:00PM *  7 points [-]

My claim is stronger than that. Take for example her views on economics. She presents the current economic crisis (as well as longer-term negative economic trends) as an example where ideology is evidently conflicting with reality, so that more and more people are now rejecting these ideological falsities and adopting more accurate views. She gives the OWS movement as a concrete example of such people, and from that and her other more vague statements, it's pretty clear which positions in general she sees as a step away from ideological biases and towards greater accuracy on economic issues. (Looking at her blog confirms this.)

Yet in my (controversial) opinion, she completely fails to understand the actual ideological delusions and pseudoscience that are rampant in modern economics, both in hands-on government policy and in the academia (and everywhere in-between). What's more, the views that she sees as getting closer to reality in fact represent an amplification of some of the worst of these delusions. Thus, she provides a counterexample for her own thesis: the ongoing clash between ideology and reality leads to a vicious circle of doubling down on the ideology, not a rejection of it.

And contrary to her thesis, in practice this tailspin of almost monotonically worsening ideological delusions usually ends up with utter, and often violent, disaster. (Which I think indeed threatens us unless technological progress and the surprising resilience of various informal institutions keep saving the day.) Such disasters are, by any reasonable metric, certainly no better than the worst historical disasters she can bill on traditional religion.

Comment author: [deleted] 26 November 2011 10:38:21PM *  8 points [-]

I should have made it more clear that I was using "pro-atheist" in the sense of the organized atheist movement. And yes obviously that movement is ideological. Worse for quality of thinking, it is political, in the sense that it has some clearly defined political allies (and also enemies).

I think it's indicative of some deep biases that this stuff, unlike ideological rants in general, can be posted on LW with general approval

Remember it wasn't posted separately, just as a batch of stuff from Skepticon. I doubt that many people from LW have seen it.

But yes some blatantly ideological material gets a free pass or at least much less scrutiny than is warranted (such threads show up in discussion once every week or two) because of the demographics of Lesswrong. Like any group of people we bring our politics with us at least implicitly (even if it is explicitly banished), which translates into ideological sympathies and the vocabulary of applause lights we use and recognize.

In addition most users here have a warm fuzzy feeling when they hear atheism, which might mean they misidentify to which contrarian cluster someone actually belongs to.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Video: Skepticon talks
Comment author: Vladimir_M 27 November 2011 05:19:56AM *  10 points [-]

Also, another bias (or rather, a whole huge complex of biases) that I see as even more problematic is the choice of targets of these "skeptic" luminaries. Looking through the website of their conference and the list of speakers, I see people who attack traditional religion and various low-status folk superstitions, many of whom also promote ideological positions of the sorts that tend to have high status among academics and other respectable intellectuals. I haven't see anything, however, about skepticism towards various falsities and biases that enjoy high status and official approval under the present academic system. Unless we are so lucky nowadays that no such things exist -- a proposition that seems plainly false to me -- I can't help but conclude that the whole enterprise ends up as a farcical parody of "skepticism."

In response to comment by [deleted] on Video: Skepticon talks
Comment author: [deleted] 26 November 2011 09:22:15PM *  5 points [-]

42:20 seems to be almost offering itself as a pedagogical example, lets do an exercise together:

angry [demographic X here]

Think of 10 examples by yourself. Now think about the implications. Overall my assessment is that this is a good pro-atheist pep talk, a neat catalogue of applause lights but it has very little if any rationalist value. Now you might ask me: "But Konkvistador was it supposed to have rationalist value?"

Why, yes. Yes it was.

Or rather it should have been a good source of tips to help improve our instrumental rationality to promote a sane beliefs (which happens to be atheism). I understand the need to do politics and rallies, the value of such a talk is basically purely entertainment, an ingroup ritual to keep people around for some boring stuff.

Too bad, lots of people can do that. In the long run a serious analysis of "angry atheism" would do the spread of atheist beliefs (though not necessarily the movement of atheism) more good.

Note: By which I don't mean to imply it is necessarily the wrong approach, just that rational analysis of it is practically non-existant, due to rational religious people being unreliable due to tribal loyalties and activist atheist being unreliable due to ... tribal loyalties.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Video: Skepticon talks
Comment author: Vladimir_M 26 November 2011 10:34:56PM *  12 points [-]

Overall my assessment is that this is a good pro-atheist pep talk, a neat catalogue of applause lights but it has very little if any rationalist value.

It may be a good pep talk for her co-ideologists, but from the outside it looks like straight-out ideological warfare, which of course it actually is. Unsurprisingly, like nearly all such material, its reasoning is full of holes big enough to drive a truck through. (The stuff you pointed out is only the tip of the iceberg.)

If anything, this should be evident from the fact that she makes a number of highly controversial ideological statements about current issues -- which I'm sure many people here would in fact dispute or at least consider as lacking in evidence -- as plain and common-sense truth, to an enthusiastic response by the audience.

I think it's indicative of some deep biases that this stuff, unlike ideological rants in general, can be posted on LW with general approval.

Comment author: [deleted] 26 November 2011 09:14:27PM *  4 points [-]

Greta Christina on angry atheists

Reasonably fun to watch the presenter is kind of likeable, if a bit nerdy. However it is darkartsy and I disagree with a few minor points.

I disagreed with the bit at 27:40 about the supposed unique badness of religion since any free floating that's basically a tribal marker is similarly insulated, especially anything that's extensively used by a professional class who basically make a living of reinterpreting it and do so from a position of authority. To take the most extreme case, there is no reason North Korean ideology needs ever show any results or proof in favour of its tenets, all that one needs for it to persist is to be self-sustaining. She does partially address this later at 29:40, but I don't think she's ever been faced with the best possible version of that argument.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Video: Skepticon talks
Comment author: Vladimir_M 26 November 2011 10:00:01PM *  5 points [-]

I disagreed with the bit at 27:40 about the supposed unique badness of religion since any free floating that's basically a tribal marker is similarly insulated, especially anything that's extensively used by a professional class who basically make a living of reinterpreting it and do so from a position of authority. [...] She does partially address this later at 29:40, but I don't think she's ever been faced with the best possible version of that argument.

I think you're being much too charitable here. The critical assumption in her argument is that ideological delusions can normally be successfully confronted by pointing to empirical evidence of their practical failures. However, this is completely wrong. In practice, it is very rare that we have clear enough natural experiments that enable us to present such evidence in a clear and convincing form. Even when such natural experiments exist in a striking form, as it was in the case of communism, ideological partisans usually have little difficulty rationalizing them away in practice.

When they don't exist, as is typically the case, it is normally impossible to move the public opinion towards greater accuracy with empirical evidence of failure, since any such evidence can be discounted by disputing the counterfactual. For example, disasters brought by irresponsible government guided by crackpot economic theories are easily excused by arguing that things would have been even worse without the enlightened guidance of these theories, and the cause of the problems is the insufficient purity of our sticking to them (perhaps along with some regrettable mistakes in execution).

The speaker herself confirms this with her concrete examples. To me it seems pretty clear that she responds to some evident failures of ideology in recent times by (pretty much) doubling down on the ideology, and she's nowhere close to examining its problematic fundamental tenets -- such examination being simply unthinkable for her.

(I understand that this last statement is controversial, and normally I would not open such topics here, but I think it's justified given that this talk has already been made the subject of discussion.)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 26 November 2011 06:38:08PM *  16 points [-]

Funny, this post just made me open "Human, All Too Human" for the first time after several years, and I was struck by many quotes that I now see in a different light thanks in part to the influence of Overcoming Bias and Less Wrong.

Some examples (all emphasis mine):

  • Just as the bones, flesh, intestines, and blood vessels are enclosed by skin, which makes the sight of a man bearable, so the stirrings and passions of the soul are covered up by vanity: it is the skin of the soul.

  • Man is very well defended against himself, against his own spying and sieges; usually he is able to make out no more of himself than his outer fortifications. The actual stronghold is inaccessible to him, even invisible, unless friends and enemies turn traitor and lead him there by a secret path.

  • We praise or find fault, depending on which of the two provides more opportunity for our powers of judgment to shine.

  • When a man tries earnestly to liberate his intellect, his passions and desires secretly hope to benefit from it also.

  • In interaction with people, a benevolent dissembling is often required, as if we did not see through the motives for their behavior.

  • Sometimes in conversation the sound of our own voice confuses us and misleads us to assertions that do not at all reflect our opinion.

  • It is much more common for a person to appear to have character because he always acts in accord with his temperament, rather than because he always acts in accord with his principles.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 26 November 2011 04:39:52AM *  16 points [-]

Maybe the Less Wrong community doesn't display an unusual degree of nihilism and akrasia at all, or maybe it does but cogsci education has little to do with it.

I don't think it has anything to do with cogsci education. My own theory is that there are two basic reasons. First, nihilism and akrasia, often fueled by strong feelings of purposelessness and the impostor syndrome, are rampant among knowledge workers nowadays, especially in the academia. LW simply gathers together lots of such people who are unusually willing to talk about their situation openly here. Second, there is the selection effect for people who like to argue on the internet. It seems clear that this propensity is strongly correlated with all kinds of traits that tend to cause low achievement for smart people.

As for the causes of the widespread nihilism and akrasia among knowledge workers, I think it's a consequence of the general social trends of increasing bureaucratization, organizational decay, and institutionalized mendacity. Many people whose work should in principle be intellectually stimulating and providing a rich sense of accomplishment are instead trapped in a hell of pointless makework, Kafkaesque bureaucracy, Dilbertian chaos, and staggering mendacity and hypocrisy that one must endure and even actively participate in. (One can read much speculation on why the impostor syndrome is so rampant, but to me it seems that it often represents nothing but a realistic assessment of one's own situation, possibly coupled with an unrealistically favorable opinion about the situation of others.)

A deeper inquiry into these phenomena and their causes would unfortunately quickly lead to thorny ideological issues.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 26 November 2011 05:08:46AM *  10 points [-]

Many people whose work should in principle be intellectually stimulating and providing a rich sense of accomplishment are instead trapped in a hell of pointless makework, Kafkaesque bureaucracy, Dilbertian chaos, and staggering mendacity and hypocrisy that one must endure and even actively participate in.

To give one mild and uncontroversial example, here is Scott Aaronson's account about the amount of bureaucratic makework he is forced to do:

Scientific papers are a waste of time. Therefore, we should stop writing them, and find a better way to communicate our research. [...] I’ll estimate that I spend at least two months on writing for every week on research. I write, and rewrite, and rewrite. Then I compress to 10 pages for the STOC/FOCS/CCC abstract. Then I revise again for the camera-ready version. Then I decompress the paper for the journal version. Then I improve the results, and end up rewriting the entire paper to incorporate the improvements (which takes much more time than it would to just write up the improved results from scratch). Then, after several years, I get back the referee reports, which (for sound and justifiable reasons, of course) tell me to change all my notation, and redo the proofs of Theorems 6 through 12, and identify exactly which result I’m invoking from [GGLZ94], and make everything more detailed and rigorous. But by this point I’ve forgotten the results and have to re-learn them. And all this for a paper that maybe five people will ever read.

If this is the job of a top-class researcher who works in some of the academia's most sound and exciting areas, one can only imagine what it looks like in less healthy fields and at less elite levels.

Comment author: lukeprog 26 November 2011 01:09:25AM *  10 points [-]

This month I had an interesting* conversation with Michael Vassar about Nietzsche.

Nietzsche (in one popular interpretation) thought that ripping Christianity out of the European value system would undermine it, leading to nihilism and the collapse of society. Of course, Christianity is false, but European morality is built upon the Christian worldview even when the Christian vocabulary is not used to describe it.

Vassar pointed out that this collapse into nihilistic anti-productivity in general had not occurred with the spread of atheism, but was, he felt, unusually common in the LessWrong community. (Perhaps this is one reason Eliezer tried to give his metaethics sequence a 'moral realist' flavor even though his actual claims would be described by most moral philosophers as a variety of moral anti-realism.) Vassar suggested this may be because LessWrong does an unusually thorough job of eviscerating the phantoms of the Christian worldview that still exist in most atheists' implicit world model.

When you know as much cognitive science as a veteran LessWronger does, you understand that (1) we don't have libertarian free will, (2) we don't know our own desires and kinda don't have "desires" at all, (3) we can be wrong about our own subjective experience, and so on with much greater certainty and in much greater detail than most atheists do.

So maybe pop-atheism isn't enough to rip out ones values and general motivation, but a master's degree's worth of reductionist-grade cutting-edge cognitive science (on Less Wrong) is, at least for many people.

Or maybe both Nietzsche and Vassar are just wrong. Maybe the Less Wrong community doesn't display an unusual degree of nihilism and akrasia at all, or maybe it does but cogsci education has little to do with it.

*Oops. The word "interesting" in this sentence is redundant with "conversation with Michael Vassar."

Comment author: Vladimir_M 26 November 2011 04:39:52AM *  16 points [-]

Maybe the Less Wrong community doesn't display an unusual degree of nihilism and akrasia at all, or maybe it does but cogsci education has little to do with it.

I don't think it has anything to do with cogsci education. My own theory is that there are two basic reasons. First, nihilism and akrasia, often fueled by strong feelings of purposelessness and the impostor syndrome, are rampant among knowledge workers nowadays, especially in the academia. LW simply gathers together lots of such people who are unusually willing to talk about their situation openly here. Second, there is the selection effect for people who like to argue on the internet. It seems clear that this propensity is strongly correlated with all kinds of traits that tend to cause low achievement for smart people.

As for the causes of the widespread nihilism and akrasia among knowledge workers, I think it's a consequence of the general social trends of increasing bureaucratization, organizational decay, and institutionalized mendacity. Many people whose work should in principle be intellectually stimulating and providing a rich sense of accomplishment are instead trapped in a hell of pointless makework, Kafkaesque bureaucracy, Dilbertian chaos, and staggering mendacity and hypocrisy that one must endure and even actively participate in. (One can read much speculation on why the impostor syndrome is so rampant, but to me it seems that it often represents nothing but a realistic assessment of one's own situation, possibly coupled with an unrealistically favorable opinion about the situation of others.)

A deeper inquiry into these phenomena and their causes would unfortunately quickly lead to thorny ideological issues.

Comment author: multifoliaterose 25 November 2011 08:30:00PM 3 points [-]

See Vladimir_M's comment on Nietzsche (which I agree with).

Comment author: Vladimir_M 26 November 2011 04:26:17AM 5 points [-]

In this context, be sure to check out my comment about Max Stirner too. He was a much less prolific writer than Nietzsche, nowhere as good a stylist, and is nowadays far less known than him, but in my opinion, he is nevertheless the more interesting badass German philosopher.

Comment author: [deleted] 25 November 2011 11:19:01PM *  5 points [-]

Actually, a quick google search of your username leads me to believe you. I apologise for being harsh. Your post came across very badly because of that "little bit", which seemed like its focal point, though. Perhaps you were unaware of the strong taboo against overtly political discussion here.

I would suggest you sate your interest in politics and community organisation by reading books instead. Implying no necessary endorsement of any of these thinkers, here are some that you might find interesting: The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli is the original article; Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals should be relevant to understanding OWS; (selections from) Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks outlines progressive bureaucratic incrementalism; Mencius Moldbug's political writings offer a reactionary perspective; The Machiavellians by James Burnham is a lesser known classic of political science from the mid-20th century; and Public Opinion by Walter Lippmann discusses the interaction of journalism and democracy.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 26 November 2011 03:17:51AM *  5 points [-]

The Machiavellians by Robert Burnham is a lesser known classic of political science from the mid-20th century;

That would be James Burnham. The book certainly can't be recommended highly enough, though! The opening essay clicks particularly strongly with some of the central OB/LW themes about signaling.

Comment author: fubarobfusco 25 November 2011 07:54:25PM *  3 points [-]

For example, transportation technologies are generally in this category. This might change soon with the advent of self-driving cars, but it's still hard to reconcile any "law of accelerating returns" with four decades of no meaningful progress.

Fatal car accidents per million miles driven, and per capita, are down precipitously. Although consumer automotive technology is not becoming faster and faster, using it is becoming safer and safer. In human terms — in terms of its ability to implement our values, which certainly include using it without dying or killing — the technology is advancing steadily.

(Of course, this construes "consumer automotive technology" broadly — including airbags, highway design, and Breathalyzers! — not just things like engine design.)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 25 November 2011 08:50:29PM 6 points [-]

Fair enough. "No meaningful progress" is an overstatement. But so is "advancing steadily": under any meaningful metric, 2011 cars represent much less progress over 1950s cars than the latter represented relative to the 1890s horse carriages or the early motor cars circa 1900.

And in any case, even steady advances would still be a counterexample to the supposed trend of exponential progress and accelerating returns.

Comment author: [deleted] 24 November 2011 10:45:48PM *  8 points [-]

The chapter is a wake-up call to those not used to thinking about exponential change, but one gets the sense that Kurzweil has cherry-picked his examples. Plenty of technologies have violated his law of accelerating returns, and Kurzweil doesn't mention them.

This is much less useful if it isn't specific. It is a common criticism levied against Kurzweil, and while my intuitions would tend to agree with it after listening to several of his talks and reading some of his work, I must ask:

Please give three examples.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 25 November 2011 01:51:45AM *  9 points [-]

Please give three examples.

It's not difficult to think of wide areas of technology where decades of extremely rapid progress have been followed by decades of utter stagnation. For example, transportation technologies are generally in this category. This might change soon with the advent of self-driving cars, but it's still hard to reconcile any "law of accelerating returns" with four decades of no meaningful progress. (And in some cases even retrogression -- the fastest military and passenger aircraft of all time, the Blackbird and the Concorde, were both launched around 40 years ago, and have been retired from service since. The current world record in manned aircraft speed was set in 1976!)

In fact, on the whole, it is hard for me to think of many examples of technologies where we do see anything resembling accelerating returns and exponential growth by any meaningful metrics. There are the integrated circuits, fancy thin displays, and sundry signal-processing technologies that enable fast long-range digital communication -- but except for these and their direct applications, what is so much different compared to 30-40 years ago that it would be meaningful to talk about "accelerating returns"?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 25 November 2011 12:55:31AM *  15 points [-]

Kurzweil's vision of the future is more similar to what I expect is correct than most people's pictures of the future are, and he should be applauded for finding a way to bring transhumanist ideas to the mainstream culture.

I'm not sure if his effect is a net positive, though. In fact, his writings and his public persona were among the main reasons why I didn't take Singularity-related ideas seriously for a long time, until I saw them presented in a far more sensible way on Overcoming Bias. I don't believe my case is unique in this regard.

Comment author: wedrifid 14 November 2011 07:01:05AM 4 points [-]

Frankly, I think this "cash flow insolvency" stuff is already in the territory of self-serving obscurantism. If you are balance-sheet solvent, you can always pay debts when they fall due by selling your assets or borrowing money against them. I don't see any good reason why such a simple, clear-cut, and bullshit-free notion as "insolvency" should be complicated and obscured this way.

I'm with you on keeping things simple and free of bullshit but I've got to say in this case it is the cash flow insolvency that is the core of the matter. Insolvency, if it is to be described in a simple one liner, is "is the inability of a person - an individual or a corporation - to pay all their debts as and when they fall due."

Having negative net worth just isn't a big deal so long as you can keep paying the payments on your loans, keep buying the stuff you need to run your business and keep paying the employees. In fact large business often merrily operate that way and everybody is happy. It becomes a problem when they can't make the payments they are obliged to make - then they may be forced into liquidation (or bankruptcy depending on the naming convention in the jurisdiction.)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 18 November 2011 03:40:18AM *  1 point [-]

You are right. I have no problem if a business that is balance-sheet insolvent argues that it is still cash-flow solvent and should therefore be allowed to operate in hope of achieving balance-sheet solvency. (Of course, only as long as this doesn't involve defrauding the long-term creditors by lying about how likely that actually is.) This basically means borrowing money against the optimistic possibilities opened by the uncertainty about the future. (Without such uncertainty, balance-sheet insolvency would imply a predictable future point of cash-flow insolvency, so allowing the business to operate normally would mean favoritism towards shorter-term creditors.)

What I do have a problem with, however, is claiming to be balance-sheet solvent while being cash-flow insolvent. There is simply no good reason to grant anyone that status in any circumstances. Either money can be readily borrowed against the positive net assets, or the accounting on which the claim about the positive net worth is based is fraudulent one way or another.

In response to Existential Risk
Comment author: Vladimir_M 16 November 2011 07:04:52AM 9 points [-]

active U.S. senator Lawrence McDonald.

Larry McDonald was a congressman, not a senator.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Transhumanism and Gender Relations
Comment author: JoshuaZ 13 November 2011 09:12:32PM *  6 points [-]

In general, it seems strongly that some aspects of gender are social constructs and others or not. The most helpful way of distinguishing them is to look at differences across different societies. If some difference in gender behavior exists in all or almost all societies then the degree of social construction in it is likely to be small. If some gender aspect only exists in some specific times and places then it is a gender construct. Let's look at examples which are relevant to modern society. In the United States, and much of the Western world, it is taken for granted that pink is a feminine color and blue is a masculine color. Indeed, we start this with a very young age, giving clothes of the appropriate colors to infants. Many people in the US consider this to be an obvious universal. But in fact, this color distinction is very modern. However, now consider for example aggressiveness. In pretty much all societies, males are considered to be more violent and aggressive than females.

Aside from looking at other cultures, there are other methods. For example, one can look at children who were genetically male but had surgery at a very young age that made them anatomically female. Even when they are raised as "female" they frequently develop habits, attitudes, and play interests that are considered to be masculine.

So, the upshot is that some aspects of gender are clearly culturally constructed, and that most people probably underestimate how much falls into that category. But the claim that gender as a whole is a pure social construct is empirically wrong.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 13 November 2011 09:59:37PM *  11 points [-]

In general, it seems strongly that some aspects of gender are social constructs and others or not. The most helpful way of distinguishing them is to look at differences across different societies.

There are however two huge pitfalls when engaging in this sort of reasoning.

The first is the tendency to conclude that since aspect X of gender apparently doesn't exist in society Y, it is therefore a social construct, and it can be eliminated by changing some particular aspect of the existing society in isolation -- ignoring the possibility that any such change necessarily entails making the society look more similar to Y in other ways, which would be seen as unfavorable even by most people who are negatively disposed towards X per se. This of course sounds like a clear fallacy when spelled out like this, but the fallacy can often be found at the core of many gender-related arguments, and countering it is often impossible without making arguments of the sort "lack of X leads to Y" that sound insensitive and offensive when stated explicitly.

The second is the failure to realize that aspect X of gender can be a stable equilibrium for collective behavior, like driving on the right side. There is nothing (more or less) that objectively favors either the left- or the right-side driving to be the universal rule, and different conventions exist in different places, but this doesn't mean it's a good idea to start telling people that since the direction of traffic is a social convention, they should now choose freely which side to drive on. (This also relates to the first problem, since unlike the direction of traffic, different stable equilibriums in gender-related norms may in fact have far-reaching broader social implications.)

(And all this is even ignoring the common tendency to report information about other societies in distorted and biased manner in service of ideological goals, which introduces further dangers and greatly multiplies the amount of nonsense on this topic that is circulating around, even in prestigious venues.)

Comment author: wedrifid 13 November 2011 05:51:11AM *  1 point [-]

To be precise, it's "insolvent."

To be more precise it is "balance sheet insolvency". "Insolvent" also commonly refers to the inability to pay debts when they fall due ("cash flow insolvency').

Also, there's the issue of one of the more spectacular and shameless rhetorical scams of the modern age, in which certain kinds of insolvency get to be described as "illiquidity," whereupon such insolvent parties get to claim a blank check on the rest of us to fix their problem.

Grrr. Yes. I am not a fan! I'd be even more averse to the idea when the blank check was coming from me.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 13 November 2011 07:16:15PM *  2 points [-]

To be more precise it is "balance sheet insolvency". "Insolvent" also commonly refers to the inability to pay debts when they fall due ("cash flow insolvency').

Frankly, I think this "cash flow insolvency" stuff is already in the territory of self-serving obscurantism. If you are balance-sheet solvent, you can always pay debts when they fall due by selling your assets or borrowing money against them. I don't see any good reason why such a simple, clear-cut, and bullshit-free notion as "insolvency" should be complicated and obscured this way.

(Of course, here I assume that the goal is to arrive at an accurate understanding of reality, not to master the present language of finance and various related areas of economics, which has a lot of such self-serving obscurantism built in, often quite intentionally. I certainly agree that if one wants to speak this language like an insider, one should be careful to make such distinctions.)

Comment author: RichardKennaway 10 November 2011 02:50:38PM *  1 point [-]

It depends on what is meant by "debt" and "net value", and as those words are usually used, it is false.

If I borrow money to buy a house, the house being security for the loan, then I am "in debt" by the ordinary use of those words -- I owe money to someone -- yet if my net worth includes the house, it should still be positive (if the lender was prudent). If I borrow money, secured only against my expectation of future income, then again assuming a prudent lender, the present expected value of that future income will exceed the value of the loan. In that case, I am "in debt", and my net worth will be positive or negative depending on whether expected future income is counted or not.

The more usual word for someone whose net worth is negative, measured by the whole of their debts and assets, is "bankrupt".

Comment author: Vladimir_M 11 November 2011 05:48:01AM 6 points [-]

The more usual word for someone whose net worth is negative, measured by the whole of their debts and assets, is "bankrupt".

To be precise, it's "insolvent." "Bankrupt" means that a particular kind of legal decision has been made about how the assets and liabilities of the insolvent party will be handled.

Also, there's the issue of one of the more spectacular and shameless rhetorical scams of the modern age, in which certain kinds of insolvency get to be described as "illiquidity," whereupon such insolvent parties get to claim a blank check on the rest of us to fix their problem.

Comment author: [deleted] 10 November 2011 08:39:55AM *  9 points [-]

Come now LWers don't make more of this proposal than there is.

I didn't perceive a secret society vibe at all in what amounts to a bunch of people having a topic restricted private correspondence.

Everyone has some email correspondences he wouldn't be comfortable posting in public. Private correspondences as well as physical meetings restricted to friends or colleagues have been a staple of intellectual life for centuries and are nothing to be a priori discouraged. In effect nearly every LW meet up is a private affair, since people don't seem to be recording them. Privacy matters in order to preserve the signal to noise ration (technical mailing lists) and so that people feel more comfortable saying things that can be taken out of context as well as be somewhat protected from ideological or religious persecution.

Also quite frankly lots of the people in such a mailing list have probably written on such ideas in some digital format or another before, either corresponding with friends, commenting in a shady on-line community or just writing out some notes for their own use.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 11 November 2011 03:27:36AM *  9 points [-]

Everyone has some email correspondences he wouldn't be comfortable posting in public.

Yes, but having semi-public statements on the record is a very different situation, where the set of people who may get to see them is open-ended.

This thread certainly hasn't made me more optimistic. Observe that even though I have made the utmost effort to avoid making any concrete controversial statements, there is already a poster -- and a decently upvoted LW poster, not some random individual -- who has confabulated that I have made such statements about an extremely charged topic ("openly," at that), and is presently conducting a subthread under this premise. Makes you think twice on what may happen if you are actually on the record for having made such statements.

Comment author: pedanterrific 11 November 2011 03:00:49AM 3 points [-]

You write as if there is some particular horrible truth that I'd like to be able to shout from the rooftops but I'm afraid to do so. There's nothing like that. (Not about this topic, anyway.)

Well, it's fair to say I wrote that way, as that was indeed the impression I was operating under. Looking back on your actual posts, I'm not quite sure precisely where I got that idea, though apparently I was not alone in that interpretation (I see you've already responded to one of those comments as well).

It's this kind of thing that I have in mind, i.e. stuff that's offensive and insensitive in quite mundane ways, not some frightful "Soylent Green is people" bombshells.

In that case, I'm somewhat more sympathetic to your point of view. If you think it probably isn't worth the predictable breakdown in discussion to spread around some particular piece of offensive-but-helpful-and-true advice, I'm not going to second-guess you.

But to be fair, I think the points I made in this particular branch of the conversation do apply more generally to whatever other Soylent Green-style horrible truths you (or anyone else) may or may not have, not just this one specific topic.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 11 November 2011 03:12:36AM 5 points [-]

If you think it probably isn't worth the predictable breakdown in discussion to spread around some particular piece of offensive-but-helpful-and-true advice, I'm not going to second-guess you.

The trouble is, I really don't see how any course of action would have much hope of avoiding at least one of the three listed failure modes. On the one hand, I don't want to be the one responsible for failure (1) or (3), but on the other, I have grown fond enough of this forum that I'd hate to see it degenerate into just another place where failures of type (2) go on unnoticed. Hence my attempt to draw attention to the problem by discussing it at the meta level.

Comment author: Bugmaster 10 November 2011 06:50:44AM 2 points [-]

Well, on the one hand, Vladimir_M believes that his beliefs are so heretical that they can cause society -- any society, if I understand him correctly -- to turn against him in a really intense way. On the other hand, our authorities have been getting quite jumpy lately; for example, merely having an Arabic-sounding last name is already enough for the FBI to attach a tracking device to your car. When you put the two factors together, it seems reasonable to expect said authorities to take an interest in the membership of the Contrarian Conspiracy.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 11 November 2011 01:09:17AM 9 points [-]

Well, on the one hand, Vladimir_M believes that his beliefs are so heretical that they can cause society -- any society, if I understand him correctly -- to turn against him in a really intense way.

Where on Earth did you read anything like that anywhere in my comments? Please provide a citation. (Which you should be able to do if you assert it as a known fact that person X believes Y.)

This, by the way, is another way in which expressing opinions about controversial and charged topics can be more dangerous than one might assume. Already in the second- or third-hand retelling, your opinion is not at all unlikely to be distorted and amplified into a caricatured soundbite that sounds far more crude and awful than anything you ever meant to say or actually said. If such things happen even on the "meta" level, what can one expect to happen when concrete topics are broached?

Comment author: pedanterrific 10 November 2011 04:51:30AM 2 points [-]

What am referring to as obscurantism are (usually implied) claims that "I possess information that refutes a mainstream view, but I'm not going to share it, because most people can't handle the truth in a nonmindkilling fashion."

That's not necessarily the claim (explicit or implied). It can also be that even if the information were to be handled in a non-mind-killing fashion, the resulting conclusions would be beyond the pale of what is acceptable under the current social norms.

It'd be interesting to see some sort of dumping ground of allegedly useful, but socially unacceptable ideas, which may or may not be true, and then have a group of people discuss and test them. Doesn't seem completely outside the territority of lesswrong, but if you think these subjects are that hazardous, and that lesswrong is too useful to be risked, then a different site that did something along those lines is something I'd like to see.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 11 November 2011 12:51:23AM *  17 points [-]

You write as if there is some particular horrible truth that I'd like to be able to shout from the rooftops but I'm afraid to do so. There's nothing like that. (Not about this topic, anyway.)

What does exist, however, is that real, no-nonsense advice about this topic breaks the social norms of polite discourse and offends various categories of people. ("Offends" in the sense that it lowers their status in a way that, according to the present mainstream social norms, constitutes a legitimate grievance.) This leads straight to at least three possible failure modes: (1) the discourse breaks down and turns into a quarrel over the alleged offenses, (2) the discourse turns into a pseudo-rational discussion that incorporates heavy biases that are necessary to steer it away from the unacceptable territory, or (3) the discourse accurately converges onto the correct but offensive ideas, but makes the forum look to the outsiders like a low-status breeding ground for offensive and evil ideas.

Concrete examples are easy to think of even without getting into the traditionally controversial PUA stuff. For example, one sort of advice I wish my younger self had followed is about what sorts of women it's smart to avoid entangling oneself with due to all kinds of potential trouble. (In fact, this is an extremely important issue for men who undertake some sort of self-improvement to become more attractive to women, since in their new-found success they may rush to hurl themselves into various kinds of imprudent entanglements.)

However, if you state openly and frankly that women displaying trait X are likely to exhibit behavior Y that in turn highly increases the probability of trouble Z, you may well be already into the unacceptably offensive territory. Women who have the trait X will be offended, or others may decide to signal enlightened caring by getting offended on their behalf. Those who exhibit, or have exhibited, behavior Y may defend it and be offended by its condemnation, and so on. All this will likely be framed as a protest against prejudice, a rhetorical tactic that tends to be very effective even if no evidence has been given against the conditional probabilities that constitute the prejudice in question. (Though of course there may be plenty of fallacious but rhetorically effective disproofs offered.)

It's this kind of thing that I have in mind, i.e. stuff that's offensive and insensitive in quite mundane ways, not some frightful "Soylent Green is people" bombshells.

Comment author: pedanterrific 10 November 2011 04:21:12AM 4 points [-]

Is this a joke? I don't know what exactly. That's the point.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 10 November 2011 04:30:07AM 2 points [-]

OK, then to phrase it in purely grammatical terms, what exactly is the antecedent of the pronoun "it" in your question above?

Comment author: pedanterrific 10 November 2011 02:44:25AM *  1 point [-]

I'm glad you agree. So does this mean you support the idea of just, you know, coming out and saying it in public?

Edit: No? Okay then. I'm not sure how you're supposed to discuss it at all if you disapprove of both doing it in public and doing it in secret, though.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 10 November 2011 04:15:03AM 1 point [-]

I'm glad you agree. So does this mean you support the idea of just, you know, coming out and saying it in public?

Coming out and saying what exactly?

Comment author: pedanterrific 07 November 2011 12:51:38AM 5 points [-]

I guess it has more of a "secret society" vibe to it. Oooh, ooh, can we call it the Political Conspiracy?

Is 1100 enough karma? I've tried to stay out of ideological debates, but I don't know precisely what the criteria would be. (And who would decide, anyway?)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 10 November 2011 02:33:50AM 12 points [-]

I guess it has more of a "secret society" vibe to it.

Yes, that's another way in which it just doesn't look like a good idea. When you're organizing people in a way that has a secret society vibe, chances are you're doing something either really childish or really dangerous.

Comment author: Nick_Tarleton 09 November 2011 07:16:50AM 4 points [-]

Trouble is, everything transported over the internet is archived one way or another.

Do you mean in users' inboxes, or something else?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 09 November 2011 03:37:54PM 6 points [-]

Yes, in this case the inboxes would be the obvious problem, but there might be others too, depending on the implementation. In any case, I don't think it would be possible to assume lack of permanent record, the way it would be possible with non-recorded private conversation.

Comment author: wedrifid 09 November 2011 07:52:51AM 5 points [-]

Trouble is, everything transported over the internet is archived one way or another.

Everything? I don't believe that. I am highly confident that I have transported plenty of things over the internet that were never archived and could not have been archived without my knowledge. Unless someone is a whole lot better with large primes than I believe possible.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 09 November 2011 03:28:02PM 5 points [-]

Yes, of course, it's not literally true. But working under that assumption is a useful heuristic for avoiding all sorts of trouble, unless you have very detailed and reliable technical knowledge of what exactly is going on under the hood.

Comment author: CronoDAS 09 November 2011 05:08:49AM 1 point [-]

Just watch out that when you say "The experts on X are wrong; don't believe them" that you aren't telling people to sell nonapples. "Don't believe in YHVH" doesn't mean that you should go believe in Zenu.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 09 November 2011 05:28:45AM 5 points [-]

I don't mean rejecting the mainstream view in favor of some existing contrarian position -- of which the majority are indeed unavoidably wrong, no matter what the merits of the mainstream view -- but merely applying the very basic tools of common sense and rational thinking to see if the justification for the mainstream view can stand up to scrutiny. My point is that often the mainstream view fails as soon as it's checked against the elementary laws of logic and the most basic and uncontroversial principles of sound epistemology. It really isn't hard.

Comment author: CronoDAS 09 November 2011 03:28:20AM 1 point [-]

There is plenty of low-hanging fruit in terms of insight from applying unbiased thinking to issues where the respectable opinion is severely delusional.

It's really hard to actually know when the "respectable" opinion is severely delusional... and even if the consensus view is indeed totally wrong, most minority opinions are usually even wronger than that. Saying the Sun orbits the Earth is much less crazy that saying that the Sun orbits the Moon half the time and Mars the other half of the time.

See also.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 09 November 2011 03:49:36AM *  4 points [-]

It's really hard to actually know when the "respectable" opinion is severely delusional...

I disagree. Of course, it's hard to know this with consistent reliability across the board, but there are plenty of particular cases where this is perfectly clear. Many of these cases don't even involve topics that are ideologically charged to such extremes that contrarian conclusions would be outright scandalous. (Though of course the purveyors of the respectable opinion and the officially accredited truth wouldn't be pleased, and certainly wouldn't be willing to accept the contrarian discourse as legitimate.)

To give a concrete example, it is clear that, say, mainstream economics falls into this latter category.

Comment author: lessdazed 07 November 2011 06:15:22AM 0 points [-]

Sure, it's not always the case. But if I just think that there can be damage if people are misled by a falsehood, I will probably claim it's false, and argue for that point.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 09 November 2011 01:46:59AM *  7 points [-]

This isn't really true. To give the most prominent example, Holocaust denial is heavily suppressed in Western societies, in many even with criminal penalties, although its falsity is not in any doubt whatsoever outside of the small fringe scene of people who espouse it. (And indeed, it really doesn't stand up even to the most basic scrutiny.) For most beliefs that the respectable opinion regards as deserving of suppression, respectable people are similarly convinced in their falsity with equal confidence, regardless of how much truth there might actually be in them.

Now, sometimes it does happen that certain claims are clearly true but at the same time so inflammatory and ideologically unacceptable that respectable people simply cannot bring themselves to admit it, even when the alternative requires a staggering level of doublethink and rationalization. In these situations, contrarians who provoke them by waving the obvious and incontrovertible evidence in front of their eyes will induce a special kind of rage. But these are fairly exceptional situations.

Comment author: jsalvatier 08 November 2011 05:16:27AM 1 point [-]

Ditto, though I would phrase it differently.

Vlad_M says a number of things which are unintuitive to me, but without more details it's hard for me to judge why the conflict exists.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 08 November 2011 06:07:28AM 0 points [-]

In this case at least the potential for conflict should be quite obvious from what I wrote. What exactly do you find unintuitive in my above comment?

Comment author: Nick_Tarleton 07 November 2011 04:31:05AM *  6 points [-]

A non-archived mailing list, I think, to greatly reduce the potential cost of adding new members.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 08 November 2011 05:54:48AM 5 points [-]

Trouble is, everything transported over the internet is archived one way or another. That is actually the main reason why I've been reluctant to push forward with this initiative lately.

Comment author: wedrifid 08 November 2011 02:37:37AM *  5 points [-]

Nothing would ever be obscurantist for a perfectly rational mind that correctly evaluates every sensory input according to whatever evidence it provides for any logically possible hypothesis.

Not technically true. It is possible to make a perfectly rational mind produce worse predictions about the world by providing it with selected information. This relies on it having insufficient information about your obscuring tendencies or motives. The new probabilities that the rational agent has will necessarily be a subjectively objective improvement but can still produce worse predictions of the relevant aspects of the world in an objective sense.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 08 November 2011 02:44:07AM 5 points [-]

You're right, of course. I edited away that part, which is not relevant for the main point anyway.

Antisocial personality traits predict utilitarian responses to moral dilemmas

18 Vladimir_M 23 August 2011 09:13AM

So says the title of an interesting recent paper I stumbled on yesterday (ungated link; h/t Chris Bertram). Here's the abstract: 

Researchers have recently argued that utilitarianism is the appropriate framework by which to evaluate moral judgment, and that individuals who endorse non-utilitarian solutions to moral dilemmas (involving active vs. passive harm) are committing an error. We report a study in which participants responded to a battery of personality assessments and a set of dilemmas that pit utilitarian and non-utilitarian options against each other. Participants who indicated greater endorsement of utilitarian solutions had higher scores on measures of Psychopathy, machiavellianism, and life meaninglessness. These results question the widely-used methods by which lay moral judgments are evaluated, as these approaches lead to the counterintuitive conclusion that those individuals who are least prone to moral errors also possess a set of psychological characteristics that many would consider prototypically immoral.

This conclusion is very much along the lines of some of my recent LW comments (for example, those I left in this thread). To me it seems quite obvious that in the space of possible human minds, those that produce on the whole reasonably cooperative and reliably non-threatening behavior are overwhelmingly unlikely to produce utilitarian decisions in trolley-footbridge and similar "sacrificial" problems. 

Of course, what people say they would do in situations of this sort is usually determined by signaling rather than a realistic appraisal. Kind and philosophical utilitarians of the sort one meets on LW would be extremely unlikely to act in practice according to the implications of their favored theories in real-life "sacrificial" situations, so their views are by themselves not strong evidence of antisocial personality traits. However, actually acting in such ways would be, in my opinion, very strong evidence for such traits, which is correctly reflected in the typical person's fear and revulsion of someone who is known to have acted like that. I would venture to guess that it is in fact the signaling-driven disconnect between people's endorsement of utilitarian actions and the actual decisions they would make that makes the found correlations fairly low. (Assuming also that these tests really are strong indicators of antisocial personalities, of course, which I lack the knowledge to judge.)

(Also, endorsement of utilitarianism even just for signaling value causes its own problems, since it leads to political and ideological support for all sorts of crazy ideas backed by plausible-sounding utilitarian arguments, but that's a whole different issue.)

Here is also a full citation for reference: “The mismeasure of morals: Antisocial personality traits predict utilitarian responses to moral dilemmas”, by Daniel M. Bartels and David A. Pizarro, Cognition 121 (2011), pp. 154-161.


Edit: As Wei Dai points out in a comment, I should also add that some of the previous literature cited by Bartels and Pizarro has concluded that, in their words, "individuals with higher working memory capacity and those who are more deliberative thinkers are... more likely to approve of utilitarian solution." One the face of it, taken together with the conclusions of this paper, this would mean that propensity for utilitarian responses may stem from different causes in different individuals (i.e. deliberative thinking versus antisocial traits).

My own hypothesis, however, is that deliberative thinking leads to verbal utilitarian responses that are likely due to signaling, and that propensity for actual utilitarian "sacrificial" acts would have a much weaker link to deliberative thinking and a much stronger link to antisocial traits than mere utilitarian statements. Unfortunately, I don't know how this could be tested empirically in an ethical manner.  

 

In response to Kill the mind-killer
Comment author: Vladimir_M 22 August 2011 07:29:48PM *  14 points [-]

People who participate in a political system will usually find it to their advantage to form alliances. Since the incentive is there, if the formal trappings of political parties are prohibited, this will only result in such alliances existing in informal ways (much like suppressing the market economy results in an underground economy immediately springing up). This is true for all political systems except pure autocracies and perhaps small oligarchies that are tightly-knit enough to operate with general consensus.

The U.S. founders generally had a negative view of political parties and were hoping to design a republican system that wouldn't have them. (Madison's Federalist Paper No. 10 is representative of this attitude.) Yet they completely failed, with the first party system appearing almost immediately after the ratification of the Constitution. Considering that the Founders were less delusional and ignorant about government than almost anyone who is studying politics today, and that they had something much closer to the blank slate to work with, their failure should be a convincing demonstration of the impracticability of the idea.

Besides all that, the real problem, of course, is that electoral politics is overall much less relevant than people imagine. Laws are today normally created by unelected professional bureaucracies and (to a lesser degree) judicial precedents, with legislatures providing only vague suggestions. The notions of "rulemaking" and "Chevron deference" are probably not discussed in the civics textbooks, but they are far more relevant for how government actually works than all the political theater on the TV.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 22 August 2011 07:01:11PM *  15 points [-]

The problem is that unlike Cypherpunks or the Bitcoin people, LW is not a group whose agenda can be summarized meaningfully in a soundbite. This normally means that there isn't going to be any media interest in it, except insofar as it might get entangled with some other news story by accident.

The only other way for a blog/website to get publicity is if it's interesting enough to gain a very wide audience. However, the audience size that's necessary for traditional media to take note is probably incompatible with the intellectual standards that are supposed to be followed here.

Comment author: [deleted] 20 August 2011 01:11:43AM 2 points [-]

Smallpox emerged in the Old World around 10,000 BC and is believed to have originated via cattle farming. It reached very high concentrations in Europe and became a common plague there; it was spread around the world to peoples who had never encountered it by European exploration and conquest. It and other Old World disease spread very rapidly among American native populations, rendering whole cultures extinct and reducing others to scattered survivors often incapable of rebuilding. The total population of the Americas lost to European diseases after the arrival of Columbus and Cortez is estimated at 90 to 95 percent.

Given that many Native nations were at least modestly dependent on agriculture (the Iroquois, Navajo, Aztecs, Incas, Mississipians -- indeed, most of the well-known groups), such population losses coming so quickly are nothing short of catastrophic. Most of your resource base collapses because one person is going to have to work MUCH harder to provide enough food for themselves -- fields go unplanted, vegetables don't get tended, wild game is much more dangerous to hunt by oneself, and one cannot expect any assistance with gathering. Even a small number of people used to an agriculture-enriched lifestyle are going to be hit much harder.

It's also worth noting that Cabeza da Vaca actually described the Coahuiltic as a healthy and prosperous people -- and ant eggs, lizards and so on were just normal parts of their diet. Ant eggs in particular are STILL a cultural delicacy among the Latino groups descended from the Coahuiltecs (escamole taco, anyone?). Diet adapts to local circumstances.

The only way these societies could have already been devastated is if epidemics had ravaged the whole continent immediately in the first decades after the first Europeans landed, ahead of any European contact > with the inland peoples.

That is precisely what happened. One infected slave from Spanish-held Cuba is believed to be the Patient Zero that transmitted an infection which would go on to wipe out about fifty percent of the Aztec population. Hernando de Soto, exploring the southeast, encountered many towns and villages abandoned just two years prior when most of their inhabitants died of the plagues. Isolated survivors often just abandoned their homes outright, since in many cases a handful of people or even a single survivor were all that was left out of a village of hundreds or thousands. Neighbors who showed up, unaware of what happened, might contract disease from the corpses in some cases, or simply welcome in the survivors who'd start the cycle anew. North America had extensive trade routes linking all major regions, from coast to coast. Foot and boat traffic carried diseases quite far from their initial outbreak sites.

If even the earliest accounts are of devastated societies, then how do we know anything about the better life they led before that?

Because they're not all dead, and they left their own records of what happened and there are records of contact with them in much better conditions*, and there are still plenty of Native people alive today, who often know rather more about said records of their lives before than the typical Euro-American? And because it's generally acknowledged within anthropological, archaeological and historical fields now that modern research bears out a picture of generally healthy, sustainable populations for most of the foragers of the Americas? And quite large, complex societies that were generally not recognized as such by early Anglo scholars into the matter?

(Malthus *seriously misrepresents Cabeza de Vaca's case -- the Floridians were in a bad way, but they were also right next door to Spanish early conquest -- his accounts of the Coahuiltecs of coastal and inland Texas describe them as a healthy and prosperous people...and their descendents STILL enjoy ant eggs as a dietary item; you don't have to be desperate to eat insects and many human groups actively enjoy it .

Where does this information come from? You cite an ethnography by Boas, who was born in 1858, as authoritative, but dismiss a compilation of far older accounts compiled by Malthus in the early 19th century.

Boas actually travelled to the civilizations he wrote about, lived among them, recorded their oral traditions and analyzed their languages, investigated their history and their environmental circumstances. For many people, especially in the Northwest, far North and other relatively late-contacted areas, these events occured within the living memory of their elders.

Malthus wasn't an expert on Native American civilizations or history, and basically went with the prevailing account available at the time. He relied on a consensus that wasn't yet well-understood to be false. So I reject Malthus' picture of pre-Columbian America for the same reason I reject Lysenko's account of evolution. The difference is that Malthus was an influential thinker within the development of Western thought, and his role means that a lot of people who agree with what insights he did make are unwittingly buying into cached arguments about related subjects (often ones that don't support his case) which hadn't yet been discovered as such when Malthus wrote in the first place.

Scholarship in the field since Malthus' time has seriously changed the outlook -- Charles C. Mann and Jared Diamond are good, accessible sources for a summary overview ("1491" and "Guns, Germs and Steel"). If I seem to be vague, it's mostly because this is domain-specific knowledge that's not widely understood outside the domain, but as domain insider it's fairly basic stuff.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 22 August 2011 08:51:54AM *  8 points [-]

And because it's generally acknowledged within anthropological, archaeological and historical fields now that modern research bears out a picture of generally healthy, sustainable populations for most of the foragers of the Americas?

How exactly does this modern research reconstruct the life of American foragers centuries ago, and based on what evidence? Could you cite some of this work? (I'd like to see the original work that presumably explains its methodology rigorously, not popular summaries.)

I also note that you haven't answered Wei Dai's question.

Regarding Malthus and de Vaca, you say:

Malthus *seriously misrepresents Cabeza de Vaca's case -- the Floridians were in a bad way, but they were also right next door to Spanish early conquest -- his accounts of the Coahuiltecs of coastal and inland Texas describe them as a healthy and prosperous people...

Here is a translation of de Vaca's original account:
http://www.pbs.org/weta/thewest/resources/archives/one/cabeza.htm

On closer look, it turns out that de Vaca's description cited by Malthus actually refers to a people from southeastern Texas, not Florida. So while Malthus apparently mixed up the location by accident, his summary is otherwise accurate. Your above claims are therefore completely incorrect -- the description is in fact of a people from Texas, living very far from the boundary of Spanish conquest at the time.

For reference, I quote de Vaca's account at length (all emphasis mine):

  • Castillo and Estevanico went inland to the Iguaces. [...] Their principal food are two or three kinds of roots, which they hunt for all over the land; they are very unhealthy, inflating, and it takes two days to roast them. Many are very bitter, and with all that they are gathered with difficulty. But those people are so much exposed to starvation that these roots are to them indispensable and they walk two and three leagues to obtain them. Now and then they kill deer and at times get a fish, but this is so little and their hunger so great that they eat spiders and ant eggs, worms, lizards and salamanders and serpents, also vipers the bite of which is deadly. They swallow earth and wood, and all they can get, the dung of deer and more things I do not mention; and I verily believe, from what I saw, that if there were any stones in the country they would eat them also. They preserve the bones of the fish they eat, of snakes and other animals, to pulverize them and eat the powder. [...] Their best times are when "tunas" (prickly pears) are ripe, because then they have plenty to eat and spend the time in dancing and eating day and night. [...] While with them it happened many times that we were three or four days without food. Then, in order to cheer us, they would tell us not to despair, since we would have tunas very soon and eat much and drink their juice and get big stomachs and be merry, contented and without hunger. But from the day they said it to the season of the tunas there would still elapse five or six months, and we had to wait that long.

Also, regarding this:

Boas actually travelled to the civilizations he wrote about, lived among them, recorded their oral traditions and analyzed their languages, investigated their history and their environmental circumstances. For many people, especially in the Northwest, far North and other relatively late-contacted areas, these events occured within the living memory of their elders.

Earlier you claimed that the native population of the entire American continent was devastated by epidemics immediately after the first European contacts in the late 15th/early 16th century, so that even the accounts of very early European explorers who traveled deep into the continent ahead of European colonization do not present an accurate picture of the native foragers' good life they had lived before that. But now you claim that in the late 19th century, this good life was still within living memory for some of them.

It seems like you're accepting or discounting evidence selectively. I can't believe that all those accounts cited by Malthus refer to societies devastated by epidemics ahead of European contact, but on the other hand, the pre-epidemic good times were still within living memory for the people studied by Boaz centuries later.

Comment author: [deleted] 19 August 2011 07:59:27AM 2 points [-]

Earlier you said that growth to the Malthusian limit was prevented by a cooperative strategy of restraining reproduction.

What I said was that growth to the point of constant warfare, competition and struggle for enough food to subsist wasn't an accurate picture of ancestral forager lifestyles.

Some of his discussions of foragers are actually quite interesting. He notes that among the North American hunter-gatherers, resource limitations lead to constant disputes and warfare.

He also says that smallpox was endemic among the Indians of all these cultures. Smallpox originated in Eurasia, thrived among farmers, and Native Americans had no immunity to it. His example of the squallor and disease these people live in is an example of the conditions they were subjected to at the hands of an invading power with novel biological agents their immune systems simply weren't adapted to handle. The nastiest conflicts.

Warfare among Northwest Coast Natives, prior to colonization, was usually over petty disputes (that is, interpersonal ones) between peoples who had long-standing trade and treaty relationships, and only occasionally over resources (usually slaves, and the institution of slavery as it was practiced here does not compare readily with slavery as it was practiced by agriculturalists in Eurasia and Africa). The bloodier wars of the inland northwest are similarly a historical novelty, unparalleled in scope or stakes until the ravages of introduced diseases and the dislocation of various tribes by white invaders into territories they'd never been in competition for caused clashes that simply hadn't occured at such a level of intensity prior to that point. The formation of reservations only exacerbated this -- we're talking about groups with age-old rivalries who had never seen fit to exterminate one another or conquer one another's lands, but who would happily send a war canoe full of men to go steal things because of a petty vendetta between two people that started long ago.

This isn't war of extermination. Don't get me wrong, it's violent, people die, the stakes are real, but it's not a zero-sum, winner-take-all competition for survival. A direct translation out of Old Chinook from Franz Boas' ethnography, regarding the rules of warfare should make this clearer:

"Before the people go to war they sing. If one of them sees blood, he will be killed in battle. When two see blood, they will be killed. They finish their singing. When they sing, two long planks are put down parallel to each other. All the warriors sing. They kneel [on the planks]. Now they go to war and fight. When people of both parties have been killed, they stop. After some time the two parties exchange presents and make peace. When a feud has not yet been settled, they marry a woman to a man of the other town and they make peace."

The fight ends when both sides have taken casualties. The opposing sides exchange gifts and make peace. They resolve outstanding feuds by diplomatic marriage. This is the Chinook idea of war, the way it was practiced with all but their very worst enemies (who lived rather a long way from Chinook territory -- the Quileute weren't exactly next door given the pace of travel in those days, and even then the wars between them were not genocidal in intent). This is completely different from war as most Eurasian-descended cultures knew it. And it was typical of forager warfare in North America before Columbus showed up.

Malthus, in looking at the conditions of North American natives during the 19th century, reports on the dire conditions of a people devastated by introduced diseases, direct conquest by white settlers, and the disruption of their social fabric and ways of life. Whole culture groups pushed beyond the breaking point and very much outside their typical context, and most of their actual problems direct effects of colonization.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 19 August 2011 06:47:13PM *  9 points [-]

Malthus, in looking at the conditions of North American natives during the 19th century, reports on the dire conditions of a people devastated by introduced diseases, direct conquest by white settlers, and the disruption of their social fabric and ways of life.

Some of the accounts presented by Malthus were given by very early explorers and adventurers who ended up deep in unexplored territory, far ahead of European conquest and colonization. For example, the one by Cabeca de Vaca would be circa 1530.

The only way these societies could have already been devastated is if epidemics had ravaged the whole continent immediately in the first decades after the first Europeans landed, ahead of any European contact with the inland peoples. I don't know enough about the relevant history to know how plausible this is, but even if it happened, there are two problems with your claim:

  1. Diseases wouldn't cause famine, at least in the long run. These early explorers describe peoples who had problems making ends meet during bad seasons due to insufficient food, and who fought bitterly over the existing limited supply. If the population had already been thinned down by disease by the time they came, we'd expect, if anything, the per capita food supply from foraging to be greater than before.

  2. If even the earliest accounts are of devastated societies, then how do we know anything about the better life they led before that? Where does this information come from? You cite an ethnography by Boas, who was born in 1858, as authoritative, but dismiss a compilation of far older accounts compiled by Malthus in the early 19th century.

Comment author: [deleted] 19 August 2011 03:38:19AM 2 points [-]

Estimates of world population growth come from:

http://faculty.plattsburgh.edu/david.curry/worldpop.htm

Essentially human for our first 2 million years of existence, human population worldwide went from about 10,000 to 4 million. Given that virtually all major models of long-run human population converge very closely, and they all assume a relatively steady growth rate, we're talking a doubling period of 250,000 years.

Malthus' estimates assume a doubling rate of 25 years, or a single human generation. The difference is a factor of 10,000. World population simply did not grow as fast as you're assuming, and humanity did not start outstripping local carrying capacities in a major, systematic way until we'd developed technologies that allowed us to make those sorts of population growth leaps.

According to Michael Kremer in "Population Growth and Technological Change: One Million BC to 1990", the base rate of technological change in human societies scales proportional to population -- small population, slow technological change. This equals very long inferential distances to the sorts of techniques and behaviors that make agriculture a viable prospect.

You need intermediate steps, in the form of settled horticulture or nomadic pastoralism, to really concentrate the population enough to have a chance at developing agriculture in the intensive sense. Those sorts of cultural developments took a long time to come into being, and it was a gradual process at that.

So, yes, it's true that if you grow certain grasses and just harvest their seeds reliably, grinding them into a fine powder and mixing that with water and then heating the whole mixture somehow without actually burning it in your fire directly, you can produce a food source that will unlock access to population-doubling intervals closer to the Malthusian assumption of one doubling per generation.

But that is a series of nested behaviors, NONE of which is intuitively obvious by itself from the perspective of a forager in a world full of nothing but other foragers. Which is why the entire chain took a long, long time to develop, and why agriculture was invented just a few times throughout human history.

This is not true. Humans are (more or less) the only species that practices agriculture, but the Malthusian trap happens to non-human animals too. As long as reproduction above the replacement rate is possible, it will happen until the resource limit is reached.

Termites, leafcutter ants, certain damselfish, ambrosia beetles, and certain marsh snails all practice agriculture. But yes, it's certainly an uncommon behavior.

What if reproduction above the replacement rate isn't possible for the period of human evolution we're talking about? What if the human population simply isn't reproducing fast enough for most of prehistory to reach the resource limit? Those are the conditions I'm suggesting here -- that reaching local resource limits was not the norm for much of our evolution, due to our inherent long gestation times and strong k-selection, the inherent metabolic requirements for fertility taking a long time to satisfy compared to modern conditions, the birth interval being very wide compared to Malthusian assumptions, and the techniques of food acquisition being of necessity limited by the the ease of satisfying everybody's requirements (if everyone has a fully tummy and all their kids do too, going out and gathering MORE food at the expense of one's kinsmen won't do you any good anyway).

What you get is abundance -- there's room to grow, but we can only do it so fast, and when we start to reach the point where we might overtax our resource base, we've moved on and there weren't enough of us using it in the first place to compromise it.

The defectors would not need to reproduce in blatantly extraordinary numbers. It would be enough to reproduce just slightly above the replacement rate, so slightly that it might be unnoticeable for all practical purposes.

That kind of statistical hackery might work in a large population, but not very well in a small one. In a group of 100 humans, ANY population gain is noticeable.

The exponential growth would nevertheless explode their population in not very many generations and lead to them overwhelming others

Except all evidence suggests it wasn't possible to have a population explosion, if you assume humans must have reproduced at the fastest allowable rate. Populations doubled in a quarter-million years, not 25.

How did this punishment mechanism evolve, and how did it > remain stable?

It didn't evolve genetically, it's a cultural punishment I'm talking about. Ju/'hoansi hunters are taken down a notch whenever they make a kill. Certain Australian aboriginal groups have meat-sharing customs where one hunter goes out and gets a kangaroo (say), and his share of the meat is the intestines or penis -- the choicer cuts get distributed according to a set of other rules. Except, then people invite the hunter over to dinner; he's not forced to actually eat crow every time he succeeds, but he's also socially aware that he depends upon the others for it (and he gets to receive a choicer share when some other hunter makes a kill).

Comment author: Vladimir_M 19 August 2011 07:00:02AM *  6 points [-]

World population simply did not grow as fast as you're assuming, and humanity did not start outstripping local carrying capacities in a major, systematic way until we'd developed technologies that allowed us to make those sorts of population growth leaps.

I don't understand your argument here at all. Earlier you said that growth to the Malthusian limit was prevented by a cooperative strategy of restraining reproduction. Now you say that lack of food production technology was limiting population growth. But if foragers did breed up to the limit where food became the limiting resource, that's by definition a Malthusian equilibrium.

You are also presenting a strawman caricature of Malthus. His claim about a 25-year doubling period refers to agricultural societies with an ample supply of land, such as existed in North America of his day. He presents it as an empirical finding. When he discusses foragers, he notes that they'll reproduce to the point where they run against the limited food supply available from foraging, which given the low supply of food relative to farming, means a much less dense population.

Some of his discussions of foragers are actually quite interesting. He notes that among the North American hunter-gatherers, resource limitations lead to constant disputes and warfare. He also cites accounts of European explorers' contacts with forager peoples that seem to have been on the Malthusian limit.

It didn't evolve genetically, it's a cultural punishment I'm talking about.

It doesn't matter -- it still needs to be explained. Humans don't just magically develop cultural norms that solve collective action problems.

Comment author: [deleted] 18 August 2011 09:35:13PM 4 points [-]

You assert these things very confidently, but without any evidence. How exactly do we know that this state of
affairs existed in human prehistory?

Archaeological evidence regarding the health and population density of human beings and their dietary habits. Inference from surviving examples. The null hypothesis, that we didn't start with agriculture and therefore must have been hunter-gatherers for most of our existence as a species. The observatiion that the traits generally associated with the Malthusian trap are common experiences of agricultural societies and dependent upon conditions that don't obtain in predominantly and purely hunter-gatherer societies.

This, however, provides no answer to the question why individuals and small groups wouldn't defect, regardless of the subsequent collective consequences of such defection.

They might defect, but it'd gain them nothing. Their cultural toolkits and food-gathering strategies were dependent upon group work at a set quota which it was maladaptive to under- or overreach. An individual can''t survive for long like this compared to a smallish group; a larger group will split when it gets too big for an area, a big group can't sustainably form.

How can a society, i.e. a group, have "values" and "incentives," if you're not postulating group selection?

The answer to this lies in refuting the following:

As soon as even a small minority of the forager population starts cheating and reproducing above the replacement rate (by evolving either cultural memes or hereditary philoprogenitive behaviors that motivate them to do so), in a few generations their exponential growth will completely swamp everyone else.

"A small minority of the forager population" has to be taken in terms of each population group, and those are small. A small percentage of a given group might be just one or two people every handful of generations, here. A social umbrella-group of 150 scattered into bands of 10-50 throughout an area, versus just one or two people? Where's the exponential payoff? The absolute numbers are too low to support it, and the defectors are stuck with the cultural biases and methodologies they know. They can decide to get greedy, but they're outnumbered by the whole tribe, who are more than willing to provide censure or other forms of costly social signalling as a means of punishing defectors. They don't even have to kill the defectors or drive them out; the defectors are critically dependent on the group for their lifestyle. The alternatiive will be unappealing in all but a vast majority of cases.

You need the kind of population densities agriculture allows to start getting a really noticeable effect. It's not to say people don't ever become tempted to defect, but it's seldom a beneficial decision. And many cultures, such as the San ones in South Africa, have cultural mechanisms for ensuring nobody's ego gets too big for their britches, so to speak. Teasing and ribbing in place of praise when someone gets a big head about their accomplishments, passive reminders that they need the group more than they individually benefit it.

This isn't so much about group selection,as it is about all the individuals having their raft tied to the same ship -- a group big enough to provide the necessities of life, which also provides a lot of hedonic reinforcement for maintaining that state of affairs, and a lot of non-coercive negative signalling for noncompliance, coupled with the much more coercive but morally neutral threat presented by trying to make a living in this place all by yourself.

If you break a leg in a small group, the medical practitioner splints it and everyone keeps feeding you. If you do that by yourself, it probably never heals right and the next leopard to come along finds you easy pickings. That's what defection buys you in the ancestral environment.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 19 August 2011 12:29:35AM *  8 points [-]

Archaeological evidence regarding the health and population density of human beings and their dietary habits. Inference from surviving examples.

This isn't necessarily evidence against a Malthusian equilibrium. It could be that the subsequent farmer lifestyle enabled survival for people with much poorer health and physical fitness, thus lowering the average health and fitness of those who managed to survive in the Malthusian equilibrium.

Can you give a reference that specifically discusses how a non-Malthusian situation of the foragers can be inferred from the existing archaeological evidence?

The observatiion that the traits generally associated with the Malthusian trap are common experiences of agricultural societies and dependent upon conditions that don't obtain in predominantly and purely hunter-gatherer societies.

This is not true. Humans are (more or less) the only species that practices agriculture, but the Malthusian trap happens to non-human animals too. As long as reproduction above the replacement rate is possible, it will happen until the resource limit is reached. (Admittedly, for animals that aren't apex predators, the situation is more complicated due to the predator-prey dynamics.)

Regarding the foragers' supposed cooperation on keeping the population stable, I honestly don't see how what you write makes sense, for at least two reasons:

  1. The defectors would not need to reproduce in blatantly extraordinary numbers. It would be enough to reproduce just slightly above the replacement rate, so slightly that it might be unnoticeable for all practical purposes. The exponential growth would nevertheless explode their population in not very many generations and lead to them overwhelming others. So even if we assume that blatantly excessive reproduction would be punished, it would still leave them more than enough leeway for "cheating."

  2. How did this punishment mechanism evolve, and how did it remain stable? You can postulate any group selection mechanism by assuming altruistic punishment against individuals who deviate from the supposed group-optimal behavior. But you can't just assert that such a mechanism must have existed because otherwise there would have been defection.

Moreover, you are now talking about group selection with altruistic punishment. There's nothing inherently impossible or absurd about that, but these are very strong and highly controversial claims, which you are asserting in a confident and authoritative manner as if they were well-known or obvious.

Comment author: [deleted] 18 August 2011 08:44:31PM 3 points [-]

It happened in the real world, ergo the issue lies with your understanding of the system we're talking about and not with its inability to conform to your model.

I've heard claims like these several times, but this situation where individuals voluntarily limit their reproduction for the common good can't possibly be a stable equilibrium.

You're looking at this backwards. This is the reproductive context in which humanity evolved, and the Malthus-driven upward spiral of population and competition is the result of comparitively recent cultural shifts brought on by changing lifestyles that made it viable to do that. You don't need to invoke group selection in the form you're thinking of -- the cultural "mutations" you're positing can't gain a foothold until some branch of humanity has access to a lifestyle that makes it advantageous to defect like that. Forager societies don't have that incentive because if they overtax their resource base here and now they have to move, and for most of human prehistory (and the modern history of hunter-gatherers) the population densities were low enough that this gave the affected area time to recover, so when someone came back, things were fine again. A long-term climatic shift alters the range of viable habitats near you, but it takes something pretty darn catastrophic (more than just a seasonal or decadal shift) to entirely render a region uninhabitable to a group of size n.

The biggest filters to population growth in this system are entirely passive ones dictated by biology and resources -- the active ones are secondary measures, and they're undertaken because in a system like this, the collective good and the individual good are inextricably linked. It was a stable equilibrium for most of our evolution, and it only broke when and where agriculture became a viable option that DIDN'T immediately overtax the environment.

That's a state of affairs that took most of human existence to come into being.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 18 August 2011 09:06:22PM *  8 points [-]

It happened in the real world, ergo the issue lies with your understanding of the system we're talking about and not with its inability to conform to your model.

You assert these things very confidently, but without any evidence. How exactly do we know that this state of affairs existed in human prehistory?

You say:

You don't need to invoke group selection in the form you're thinking of -- the cultural "mutations" you're positing can't gain a foothold until some branch of humanity has access to a lifestyle that makes it advantageous to defect like that. Forager societies don't have that incentive because if they overtax their resource base here and now they have to move, and for most of human prehistory (and the modern history of hunter-gatherers) the population densities were low enough that this gave the affected area time to recover, so when someone came back, things were fine again.

This, however, provides no answer to the question why individuals and small groups wouldn't defect, regardless of the subsequent collective consequences of such defection. You deny that you postulate group selection, but you keep talking in a very strong language of group selection. Earlier you asserted that "population growth unto itself is not a goal or a value of forager societies," and now you say that "[f]orager societies don't have that incentive." How can a society, i.e. a group, have "values" and "incentives," if you're not talking about group selection? And if you are, then you need to answer the standard objection to arguments from group selection, i.e. how such group "incentives" can stand against individual defection.

I have no problem with group selection in principle -- if you think you have a valid group-selectionist argument that invalidates my objections, I'd be extremely curious to hear it. But you keep contradicting yourself when you deny that you're making such an argument while at the same time making strong and explicit group-selectionist assertions.

Comment author: [deleted] 18 August 2011 07:18:45PM *  8 points [-]

Then what limited the growth of forager peoples so substantially?

I am so glad you asked, because the answer to your question reveals a fundamental misapprehension you have about forager societies and indeed, the structure and values of ancestral human cultures.

The fact is that forager populations don't grow as fast as you think in the first place, and that across human cultures still living at or near forager methods of organization, there are many ways to directly and indirectly control population.

It starts with biology. Forager women reach menarche later, meaning they're not fertile until later in life. Why? Largely, it's that they tend to have much lower body fat percentages due to diet and the constant exercise of being on the move , and that's critical for sustaining a pregnancy, or even ovulating in the first place once you've reached the (much higher) age where you can do that. Spontaneous abortions or resorption of the fetus are rather common. Women in an industrial-farming culture attain menarche quite a bit earlier and are more likely to be fertile throughout their active years -- it only looks normal to you because it's what you're close to. So right out of the gate, forager women are less likely to get pregnant, and less likely to stay that way if they do.

Next biological filter: breastfeeding. Forager women don't wean their children onto bottles and then onto solid food the way you experienced growing up. Breastfeeding is the sole means for a much longer period, and it's undertaken constantly throughout the day -- sleeping with the baby, carrying them around during the daily routine. It goes on for years at a time even after the child is eating solid food. This causes the body to suppress ovulation -- meaning that long after you're technically able to get pregnant again, the body won't devote resources to it. All the hormonal and resource-delivery cues in your body point to an active child still very much in need of milk! Not only that, but it's routine in many such societies for women to trade off breastfeeding duty with one another's children -- the more kids there are, the more likely it is that every woman in the proximate social group will have moderately suppressed fertility. It's a weak effect, but it's enough to lengthen the birth interval considerably. In the US, a woman can have a baby just about every year -- for modern-day foragers, the birth interval is often two to five years wide. It's harder to get pregnant, and once you do, the kids come more slowly.

The next layer is direct means of abortion. In the US that tends to be pretty traumatic if it's not performed by a medical specialist. In some cases it still is for forager women -- the toolkit of abortives across all human cultures is very wide. Midwives and herbalists often have access to minimally-invasive methods, but they also often have painful or dangerous ones. What you won't find is many that are truly ineffective. Methods range from the unpleasant (direct insertion of some substance to cause vaginal bleeding and fetal rejection), to the taxing or dangerous (do hard work, lift heavy objects, jump from a high place) to fasting and ingestible drugs that can induce an abortion or just raise the likelihood of miscarriage.

The last layer is infanticide (and yes, we have this too, though it's a deprecated behavior). In all cultures that practice it it's considered a method of last resort, and it's usually done by people other than the mother, quickly and quietly. Forager cultures are used to having to do this from time to time, but it's still a rare event -- certainly not a matter of routine expedience.

The point I'm making is that population growth unto itself is not a goal or a value of forager societies like those every human being on earth is descended from (and which some still occupy today). Growth, as an ideological goal, is a non-starter for people living this way. Too many mouths to feed means you undercut the abundance of your lifestyle (and yes, it truly is abundance most of the time, not desperate Malthusian war of all against all) -- and forager lives tend to be pretty good on the whole, filled with communitas and leisure and recreation aplenty as long as everybody meets a modest commitment to generating food and the supporting activities of everyday life. I'm not making it out to be paradise; this is just really what it's like, day to day, to live in a small band of mostly close relatives and friends gathering food from what's available in the environment.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 18 August 2011 08:32:48PM 8 points [-]

I've heard claims like these several times, but this situation where individuals voluntarily limit their reproduction for the common good can't possibly be a stable equilibrium. It faces a coordination problem, more specifically a tragedy of the commons. As soon as even a small minority of the forager population starts cheating and reproducing above the replacement rate (by evolving either cultural memes or hereditary philoprogenitive behaviors that motivate them to do so), in a few generations their exponential growth will completely swamp everyone else. The time scales on which forager societies have existed are certainly more than enough for this process to have taken place with certainty.

In order for such equilibrium to be stable, there would have to exist some fantastically powerful group selection mechanism that operates on the level of the whole species. I find this strikingly implausible, and to my knowledge, nobody has ever proposed how something like that might work.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 August 2011 02:59:48AM 3 points [-]

Using your default priors on "how humans work" to handle an autistic or a schizophrenic is probably going to produce sub-par results.

They're going to produce the result that this human's brain is wired strangely and thus he's liable to exhibit other strange and likely negative behaviors. Which is more-or-less accurate.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 18 August 2011 06:08:41AM *  3 points [-]

Why on Earth is this comment getting downvoted?

Comment author: multifoliaterose 17 August 2011 06:38:52PM 11 points [-]

I'd also add that when it comes to rationalizations, utilitarians should be the last ones to throw stones. In practice, utilitarianism has never been much more than a sophisticated framework for constructing rationalizations for ideological positions on questions where correct utilitarian answers are at worst just undefined, and at best wildly intractable to calculate. (As is the case for pretty much all questions of practical interest.)

The phenomenon of utilitarianism serving as a sophisticated framework for constructing rationalizations for ideological positions exists and is perhaps generic. But there's an analogous phenomenon of virtue ethics being rhetorically (think about both sides of the abortion debate). I strongly disagree that utilitarianism is ethically useless in practice. Do you disagree that VillageReach's activity has higher utilitarian expected value per dollar than that of the Make A Wish Foundation?

Yes, there are plenty of situations where game theoretic dynamics and coordination problems make utilitarian style analysis useless, but your claim seems overly broad and sweeping.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 17 August 2011 09:48:22PM *  3 points [-]

I agree that I have indulged in a bit of a rhetorical excess above. What I had in mind is primarily welfare economics -- as I indicated in another comment, I think it's quite evident that this particular kind of formalized utilitarianism is regularly used to construct arguments for various ideological positions that are seemingly rigorous but in fact clearly rationalizations.

I also agree that non-utilitarian theories of ethics are fertile grounds for rationalizations too. I merely wanted to emphasize that given all the utilitarian rationalizations being thrown around, the idea of utilitarian thinking being somehow generally less prone to rationalizations is a non-starter, under any reasonable definitions of these terms.

As for the issues of charity, I think they are also more complicated than they seem, but this is a quite complex topic in its own right, which unfortunately I don't have the time to address right now. I do agree that this area can be seen as a partial counterexample to my general thesis about uselessness of utilitarianism. (But less so than the strong proponents of utilitarian charity commonly claim.)

Comment author: nerzhin 17 August 2011 07:51:15PM 4 points [-]

Another way of saying this (I think - Vladimir_M can correct me):

You only have two choices. You can be the kind of person who kills the fat mat in order to save four other lives and kills the fat man in order to get a million dollars for yourself. Or you can be the kind of person who refuses to kill the fat man in both situations. Because of human hardware, those are your only choices.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 17 August 2011 08:18:12PM 9 points [-]

I don't mean to imply that the kind of person who would kill the fat man would also kill for profit. The only observation that's necessary for my argument is that killing the fat man -- by which I mean actually doing so, not merely saying you'd do so -- indicates that the decision algorithms in your brain are sufficiently remote from the human standard that you can no longer be trusted to behave in normal, cooperative, and non-dangerous ways. (Which is then correctly perceived by others when they consider you scary.)

Now, to be more precise, there are actually two different issues there. The first is whether pushing the fat man is compatible with otherwise cooperative and benevolent behavior within the human mind-space. (I'd say even if it is, the latter is highly improbable given the former.) The second one is whether minds that implement some such utilitarian (or otherwise non-human) ethic could cooperate with each other the way humans are able to thanks to the mutual predictability of our constrained minds. That's an extremely deep and complicated problem of game and decision theory, which is absolutely crucial for the future problems of artificial minds and human self-modification, but has little bearing on the contemporary problems of ideology, ethics, etc.

Comment author: Bongo 17 August 2011 08:30:49AM *  7 points [-]

So I guess the takeaway is that if you care more about your status as a predictable, cooperative, and non-threatening person than about four innocent lives, don't push the fat man.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 17 August 2011 06:21:14PM 12 points [-]

It's not just about what status you have, but what you actually are. You can view it as analogous to the Newcomb problem, where the predictor/Omega is able to model you accurately enough to predict if you're going to take one or two boxes, and there's no way to fool him into believing you'll take one and then take both. Similarly, your behavior in one situation makes it possible to predict your behavior in other situations, at least with high statistical accuracy, and humans actually have some Omega-like abilities in this regard. If you kill the fat man, this predicts with high probability that you will be non-cooperative and threatening in other situations. This is maybe not necessarily true in the space of all possible minds, but it is true in the space of human minds -- and it's this constraint that gives humans these limited Omega-like abilities for predicting each others' behavior.

(Of course, in real life this is further complicated by all sorts of higher-order strategies that humans employ to outsmart each other, both consciously and unconsciously. But when it comes to the fundamental issues like the conditions under which deadly violence is expected, things are usually simple and clear.)

And while these constraints may seem like evolutionary baggage that we'd best get rid of somehow, it must be recognized that they are essential for human cooperation. When dealing with a typical person, you can be confident that they'll be cooperative and non-threatening only because you know that their mind is somewhere within the human mind-space, which means that as long as there are no red flags, cooperative and non-threatening behavior according to the usual folk-ethics is highly probable. All human social organization rests on this ability, and if humans are to self-modify into something very different, like utility-maximizers of some sort, this is a fundamental problem that must be addressed first.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 August 2011 08:03:05AM 5 points [-]

I don't see how your conclusion follows from your data. I could just as easily use the same model to argue that our morality is deontological and it is the utilitarian judgements that mere moral rationalizations.

I have observed that utilitarians will attempt to fudge the numbers to make the utility calculations come out the way they "should" inventing large amounts of anti-epistemology in the process (see the current debate on race and intelligence for an example of this process in action). A better approach might be to admit our morals are partially deontological and that certain things are wrong no matter how the calculations come out.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 17 August 2011 05:38:23PM 5 points [-]

I have observed that utilitarians will attempt to fudge the numbers to make the utility calculations come out the way they "should" inventing large amounts of anti-epistemology in the process

Welfare economics is the clearest example. It's the closest thing that exists to a rigorous formalization of utilitarianism. Yet economists of all ideological stripes have no problem at all coming up with welfare-economic arguments in favor of their positions, whatever they are -- and despite the contradictions, all these arguments are typically plausible-sounding enough to get published and win a group of adherents.

(Also, unsurprisingly, as much as economists bitterly disagree over these ideologically charged theories, they all just happen to imply that learned economists like them should be put in charge to manage things with their wisdom and expertise. Small wonder that Austrian economists, who are pretty much the only ones who call bullshit on all this, are so reviled by the mainstream.)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 17 August 2011 12:33:26AM *  30 points [-]

I think this whole "utilitarian vs. deontological" setup is a misleading false dichotomy. In reality, the way people make moral judgments -- and I'd also say, any moral system that is really usable in practice -- is best modeled neither by utilitarianism nor by deontology, but by virtue ethics.

All of the puzzles listed in this article are clarified once we realize that when people judge whether an act is moral, they ask primarily what sort of person would act that way, and consequently, whether they want to be (or be seen as) this sort of person and how people of this sort should be dealt with. Of course, this judgment is only partly (and sometimes not at all) in the form of conscious deliberation, but from an evolutionary and game-theoretical perspective, it's clear why the unconscious processes would have evolved to judge things from that viewpoint. (And also why their judgment is often covered in additional rationalizations at the conscious level.)

The "fat man" variant of the trolley problem is a good illustration. Try to imagine someone who actually acts that way in practice, i.e. who really goes ahead and kills in cold blood when convinced by utilitarian arithmetic that it's right to do so. Would you be comfortable working or socializing with this person, or even just being in their company? Of course, being scared and creeped out by such a person is perfectly rational: among the actually existing decision algorithms implemented by human brains, there are none (or at least very few) that would make the utilitarian decision in the fat man-trolley problem and otherwise produce reasonably predictable, cooperative, and non-threatening behavior.

It's similar with the less dramatic examples discussed by Haidt. In all of these, the negative judgment, even if not explicitly expressed that way, is ultimately about judging what kind of person would act like that. (And again, except perhaps for the ideologically polarized flag example, it is true that such behaviors signal that the person in question is likely to be otherwise weird, unpredictable, and threatening.)

I'd also add that when it comes to rationalizations, utilitarians should be the last ones to throw stones. In practice, utilitarianism has never been much more than a sophisticated framework for constructing rationalizations for ideological positions on questions where correct utilitarian answers are at worst just undefined, and at best wildly intractable to calculate. (As is the case for pretty much all questions of practical interest.)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 14 August 2011 07:29:12PM *  7 points [-]

argument ad populum

I think a more correct term in this context would be argumentum ad verecundiam. It's about arguing based on the opinion of a small number of authoritative people, not the general public.

Comment author: rhollerith_dot_com 03 August 2011 03:32:02PM *  9 points [-]

I would be interested, Vladimir, in what developments would increase your probability that it is time for American LWers to exit the United States. In particular, how sharply would increases in racial tension and racial conflict increase that probability?

ADDED. I ask the second question because I tend to believe that ethnic conflict was a major cause of the extremely-bad time in former Yugoslavia.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 14 August 2011 09:28:58AM *  19 points [-]

I would be interested, Vladimir, in what developments would increase your probability that it is time for American LWers to exit the United States. In particular, how sharply would increases in racial tension and racial conflict increase that probability?

Honestly, this is one of the most difficult questions I've ever been asked! From my own experience, I can say that the scariest thing about outbreaks of mass violence is how hard it is to realize how bad the situation is getting until you're already in big trouble. I will try to answer your question to the best of my knowledge, though. (Since your question got strongly upvoted, I trust that my answer won’t be condemned for dealing with an overly political topic.)

For start, ethnic tensions and incidents are by themselves not necessarily a sign of impending social breakdown, even if there are significant local outbreaks of violence and mayhem. In the U.S., in particular, there have been periods of intense racial tensions and conflicts, some which caused fairly large casualties and wide-area devastation (like e.g. the 1967 riots in Detroit, Newark, and elsewhere, or the 1992 riots in LA). However, as bad as these were locally, they didn't lead to a larger-scale conflict and societal collapse on a nation-wide scale, since the higher levels of government (state/federal) have remained stable and in control.

For things to get really out of control, one of two things must happen: (1) a high level of government is taken over, legally or not, by people willing to start a civil, ethnic, or religious war or mass persecution, or (2) the authority of the government collapses, and the vacuum is filled by the strongest violent organizations that happen to be around (which will then typically proceed to go to war with each other and persecute whomever they don't like). It seems to me that neither possibility is likely with the U.S. in the foreseeable future (even though close things have happened with some of its local governments, which led to the aforementioned incidents). I’ll give the lists of some reasons why I believe this is so, and I’ll do this by way of contrast with the situation in ex-Yugoslavia:

  1. Restraints on democracy. In ex-Yugoslavia, the post-communist elections offered genuine choice, in the sense that the collapse of the Communist Party’s authority created a situation where anyone was free to run on any platform whatsoever, and the winners, with popular support, would really have the power to steer things in whatever direction they wanted. In contrast, in the present U.S. system, elected politicians have little to no practical control over almost any area of policy, since whatever measures they want to undertake must pass through impenetrably thick layers of bureaucracy and over high obstacles of judicial review.

  2. Of course, (1) is true only as long as the bureaucracies and the judiciary have real authority. However, I don’t see any signs of the state and (especially) federal authority in the U.S. weakening -- on the contrary, having some government agency, especially a federal one, get seriously angry at you for whatever reason is a frightful prospect for any individual or organization, and contempt of courts is unthinkable. In contrast, in ex-Yugoslavia in the late 1980s, it was evident that the communist authorities were starting to be seen as laughably impotent.

  3. Political culture and tradition. In places where radical (and typically violent) regime changes are within living memory, government institutions are typically far less stable than in places where they reach far beyond that. The U.S. is certainly in the latter category, even if you count the Civil War as a radical regime change; in contrast, in ex-Yugoslavia, the regime was only 45 years old, with lots of people who were never truly reconciled to it and held (and perpetuated) grudges against it all along. This gives the U.S. government far more slack for blunders and mismanagement before its authority might start to get seriously eroded.

  4. Ideological uniformity. The U.S. politics may seem ravaged by countless bitter controversies, but from a wider perspective, there is a remarkable ideological consensus with a very narrow (though, on most issues, slowly but constantly moving) Overton window. Only a small percentage of the population, and virtually nobody in the mainstream media, elite academia, and other influential sources of public opinion, hold any positions outside of it. In ex-Yugoslavia, the problem was primarily the ethnic rather than ideological conflict, so a better historical example of a country torn by truly deep ideological rifts might be the the Weimar Republic. Where such deep ideological rifts exist, of course, it’s hard to prevent political violence from becoming a regular part of the political struggle, and it’s unlikely that both the winners and the losers of political contests will accept its results peacefully.

  5. Ethnic/religious identity politics. I wanted to compose a long paragraph about this very important issue, but then I realized it can’t be done without giving a lot of very controversial statements. So I’ll just make the general observation that in the U.S., there still exists a strong taboo against violence-threatening forms of identity politics at the higher levels of government, and in most places also at the local level. (The local exceptions to this rule have indeed led to instances of local violent societal collapse, as in the cities that were left ravaged and devastated by the ethnic/race riots and breakdown of public order some decades ago.)

(Besides these considerations, coups by security forces led by renegade elements in the government are another common source of violent political instability, but these are highly unlikely in the U.S., with its extremely strong tradition of lawful control over the armed forces.)

So, on the whole, I would start to get worried if I saw the following signs in the U.S.:

  • Weakening bureaucratic/judicial authority of the state and federal governments, especially the latter, which would enable elected politicians to exercise direct authority.

  • Loss of faith in the political institutions. By this I don’t mean the usual cynical and critical attitudes towards politics and politicians, i.e. when people think that they fall short of the official ideal, but a real loss of respect for that official ideal, thus opening the way for radical alternatives.

  • Erosion of the ideological uniformity, with radical positions starting to get taken seriously in the mainstream discourse, instead of being seen as loathsome extremism or charming but hopelessly naive idealism.

  • The principal lines of opposition in mainstream politics acquiring an ethnic dimension. By this I mean contests for public office where the candidates are primarily seen as representatives of conflicting ethnic groups, and such contests becoming the rule rather than an occasional local exception.

All of this still seems rather far-fetched in the present-day U.S., so on the whole, I don’t think exiting the U.S. for fear of violent social breakdown will be a rational step in the foreseeable future.

On the other hand, my view of the general direction in which the U.S. is moving is quite pessimistic, although I see a slow decay rather than a violent breakdown as the most likely course of events. Here I mean a continuing slow degradation of the quality of government, a gradual worsening of the present economic malaise, the life for most people getting uglier, more dysfunctional, and less dignified, the public intellectual life getting more mendacious and detached from reality, and so on. With this in mind, it may well be rational for many people to leave the U.S. (or move to a different place within the U.S.) in search of better opportunities. However, these are complicated issues, which would get us right into the middle of numerous controversies.

Comment author: Swimmer963 02 August 2011 01:33:34PM 0 points [-]

As for working conditions, in terms of safety, cleanliness, physical hardship, etc., typical working conditions in developed countries are clearly much better than fifty years ago. What arguably makes work nowadays worse is the present distribution of status and the increasing severity of the class system, which is a very complex issue tied to all sorts of social change that have occurred in the meantime. But this topic is probably too ideologically sensitive on multiple counts to discuss productively on a forum like LW.

This sounds like such an interesting topic for discussion, though!

Comment author: Vladimir_M 02 August 2011 09:22:34PM 4 points [-]

This sounds like such an interesting topic for discussion, though!

Trouble is, it touches on just about every controversial and ideologically charged issue imaginable. (Which is not surprising, considering that it concerns the fundamental questions about how status is distributed in the whole society.)

Comment author: [deleted] 01 August 2011 07:12:21PM *  16 points [-]

I'm not sure if LW is the best place for this. Right now, it won't drown out any other discussion, but I fear that the whole atheist debate might creep in and then LW becomes just another skeptics blog full of science fanboys and trolls. A one-time post or advertisement of another blog/forum to have the discussion seems acceptable, though. There have been many cases of theists becoming useful rationalists.

Personally, I'm not interested in the whole Mormon thing at all. It's just way too silly. The mere requirements to make Mormonism even an idea worth thinking about aren't met in any way. (e.g., the world doesn't look supervised, Old Testament is entirely unhistorical nonsense, New Testament is at best the product of political propaganda and at worst Sai-Baba level myth, the texts aren't in any way compatible with each other ("god" in Amos, Deuteronomy, Mark, John and Revelation means entirely different things), "let's tell a small tribe and ignore the majority of humanity for thousands of years" is totally how a benevolent god would act and so on). I mean, try to step back, ignore everything you know about religion and history and ask yourself, if there were a very powerful and interested entity, predating all of humanity, what would it do? How would it act? Compare that to the much weaker variant of FAI and how it's typically depicted of acting. After you've made predictions based on this belief, does the world look anything like that at all? (Seriously, it tells a dude to write a book? And not even a good one?!)

(Also, if you have to write ancient mythology fan-fiction, please don't just rip off the Sumerians and claim it's original. I'm looking at you, Hebrews.)

In response to comment by [deleted] on Book of Mormon Discussion
Comment author: Vladimir_M 01 August 2011 09:28:53PM *  8 points [-]

(Also, if you have to write ancient mythology fan-fiction, please don't just rip off the Sumerians and claim it's original. I'm looking at you, Hebrews.)

On a tangential note, it seems that the author of that article is seriously confused about the chronology of the Ancient Near East. The earliest Sumerian cuneiform documents date from circa ~3100BC, and the earliest examples of Middle Eastern proto-writing are at most 300-400 years older than that. The literalist Biblical chronology used by the young Earth creationists places the date of the creation much earlier, around ~4000BC. So while creationism obviously has many problems, its alleged inconsistency with the Sumerian civilization is not one of them.

(On the other hand, there are extant examples of undeciphered proto-writing much older than 4000BC, most notably the Vinca,Tartaria, and Dispilio symbols, but none of these has anything to to with the Sumerians. However, the exact nature of these symbols, and how close they were to a real writing system, is unknown.)

Comment author: Yvain 31 July 2011 08:44:27AM 17 points [-]

But that's not the case in the modern developed world. If you are really indifferent to status, you can easily get enough food, housing, and medical care to survive by sheer freeloading. This is true even in the U.S., let alone in more extensive welfare states.

I'm not sure this is true; I know little about welfare politics, but I was under the impression there was a major shift over the last ten years toward limiting the amount of welfare benefits available to people who are "abusing the system" by not looking for work.

One could probably remain alive for long periods just by begging and being homeless, but this raises the question of what, exactly, is a "life worth living", such that we could rest content that people were working because they enjoy status competitions and not because they can't get a life worth living without doing so.

This is probably way too subjective to have an answer, but one thing that "sounds right" to me is that the state of nature provides a baseline. Back during hunter-gatherer times we had food, companionship, freedom, et cetera without working too hard for them (the average hunter-gatherer only hunted-gathered a few hours a day). Civilization made that kind of lifestyle impossible by killing all the megafauna and paving over their old habitat, but my totally subjective meaningless too-late-at-night-to-think-straight opinion is that we can't say that people can opt-out of society and still have a "life worth living" unless they have it about as good as the hunter-gatherers they would be if society hadn't come around and taken away that option.

The average unemployed person in a developed country has a lot of things better than hunter-gatherers, but just the psychological factors are so much worse that it's no contest.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 31 July 2011 06:53:43PM *  15 points [-]

The specific situation in the U.S. or any other individual country doesn't really matter for my point. Even if I'm wrong about how easy freeloading is in the U.S., it's enough that we can point to some countries whose welfare systems are (or even just were at some point) generous enough to enable easy freeloading.

Ironically, in my opinion, in places where there exists a large underclass living off the welfare state, it is precisely their reversal to the forager lifestyle that the mainstream society sees as rampant social pathology and terrible deprivation of the benefits of civilized life. I think you're committing the common error of idealizing the foragers. You imagine them as if you and a bunch of other highly intelligent and civilized people had the opportunity to live well with minimal work. In reality, however, the living examples of the forager lifestyle correctly strike us as frightfully chaotic, violent, and intellectually dead.

(Of course, it's easy to idealize foragers from remote corners of the world or the distant prehistory. One is likely to develop a much more accurate picture about those who live close enough that one has to beware not to cross their path.)

Comment author: Armok_GoB 30 July 2011 11:52:39AM 3 points [-]

Now I'm confused, how's other people being even worse of supposed to make me feel better?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 30 July 2011 11:42:35PM 1 point [-]

Well, if we (the present humans) are indeed extraordinarily fortunate to live in a brief and exceptional non-Malthusian period -- what Hanson calls "the Dreamtime" -- then you should be happy to be so lucky that you get to enjoy it. Yes, you could have been even luckier to be born as some overlord who gets to be wealthy and comfortable even in a Malthusian world, but even as a commoner in a non-Malthusian era, you were dealt an exceptionally good hand.

Comment author: steven0461 29 July 2011 09:59:50PM *  14 points [-]

Could this be solved by setting up a new forum and being sufficiently selective about whom to let in (e.g. only sufficiently high-quality and sufficiently non-ideological thinkers, as vetted by some local aristocracy based on comment history elsewhere), or is there some other limiting factor?

I would love there to be a place suitable for rational discussion of possibly outrageous political and otherwise ideologically charged ideas, even though I wouldn't want it to be LessWrong and I wouldn't want it to be directly associated with LessWrong.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 30 July 2011 02:50:37AM 10 points [-]

I'd love to have such a place too, and based on my off-line conversations with some people here, I think there are also others who would. So maybe it wouldn't be a bad idea to set up a new forum or mailing list, perhaps even one without public visibility. I have no idea how well this would work in practice -- there are certainly many failure modes imaginable -- but it might be worth trying.

Comment author: lessdazed 30 July 2011 12:49:18AM 7 points [-]

it's certainly incorrect to claim that no conclusions could be drawn from them even in principle.

I wouldn't claim that, my claim is that there can't be one formula specifying what you want to measure, so for reasonably similar societies like this one and that of fifty years ago, you can't draw conclusions like that. If one looks at all the equally (in)appropriate ways to measure what you're making claims about, the modern USA outperforms 18th century Russia in enough ways that we can draw conclusions. I'll elaborate a bit on your examples.

fuzzy observations

The observations are the least fuzzy part.

the fear and disgust of mere proximity to anyone below a certain class

With something like this, you could perhaps quantify fear disgust of millions of people if in proximity to other people. You might find that in one society, 50% are extremely disgusted by the bottom 5%, and nonplussed by the others, and the top 10% of that is disgusted by the whole bottom 50%, while in another society, the top 20% is moderately disgusted by the bottom 80%, and the top 40% absolutely repulsed by the bottom 1%...etc.

What exactly, or even approximately, are your criteria, and how much do you think others on this site share them?

What our society has is an unprecedented tabooing of many overt scorning behaviors and thoughts. Perhaps you totally discount that? It has also tamed superstition enough that there is no system of ritual purity. People at least believe they believe in meritocracy. There is a rare disregard of bloodlines and heredity, compared to other times and places, including modern Japan.

the media portrayals of people doing jobs at various percentiles of the income distribution

What that brings to mind for me is the honest labor memes from the Puritans, and how so many were ready to identify with the common man, Joe the plumber, etc. One might say that this was primarily or only because he is white, and I think we all discount its value because of that to some extent, and if you idiosyncratically discount it more than others, you should be upfront about that by being more specific, and not make implicit claims that according to your readers' values, what you say is true.

Were I trying to call out a certain statement as being sexist, I might quote the statement and tell people that the statement is sexist. That's totally legitimate if I think that, would they reflect rationally and calmly, they would come to the same conclusion, according to their values. But if the reason I think that the statement is sexist is because it's written in English, which has a long history of being used by sexists, it would be totally illegitimate for me to simply say to normal human beings that the statement is sexist, because the reason I think it sexist is its mere expression in English.

If you believe that your claims resonate with normal conceptions of fairness upon reflection by people, it's fine for you to just make them. But this particular claim of yours is so, let's say counter-intuitive, that I suspect you have very idiosyncratic values in which the worth of a great many things is reduced to zero where other people would think it worth something, perhaps a great deal. If so, please clarify that when you say "The better-off classes view those beneath them with frightful scorn and contempt, and the underclass has been dehumanized to a degree barely precedented in human history," you just don't mean "contempt" and "dehumanized" the way your readers do.

I think there may be some "rosy retrospection" going on here.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 30 July 2011 01:50:38AM *  12 points [-]

It seems like we have some essential misunderstandings on these points:

What our society has is an unprecedented tabooing of many overt scorning behaviors and thoughts. Perhaps you totally discount that? It has also tamed superstition enough that there is no system of ritual purity. People at least believe they believe in meritocracy. There is a rare disregard of bloodlines and heredity, compared to other times and places, including modern Japan.

The "status skew" I have in mind has nothing to do with the issues of fairness and meritocracy. In this discussion, I am not concerned about the way people obtain their status, only what its distribution looks like. (In fact, in my above comment, I already emphasized that the present society is indeed meritocratic to a very large degree, in contrast to the historical societies of prevailing hereditary privilege.)

What I'm interested in is the contrast between the sort of society where the great majority of people enjoy a moderate status and the elites a greater one, and the sort of society where those who fall outside an elite minority are consigned to the status of despised losers. This is a relevant distinction, insofar as it determines whether average people will feel like they live a modest but dignified and respectable life, or they'll feel like low-status losers, with the resulting unhappiness and all sorts of social pathology (the latter mostly resulting from the lack of status incentives to engage in orderly and productive life).

My thesis is simply that many Western countries, and especially the U.S., have been moving towards the greater skew of the status distribution, i.e. a situation where despite all the increase in absolute wealth, an increasingly large percentage of the population feel like their prospects in life offer them unsatisfactory low status, and the higher classes confirm this by their scornful attitudes. (Of course, all sorts of partial exceptions can be pointed out, but the general trend seems clear.)

In fact, one provocative but certainly not implausible hypothesis is that meritocracy may even be exacerbating this situation. Elites who believe themselves to be meritocratic rather than hereditary or just lucky may well be even more arrogant and contemptuous because of that, even if they're correct in this belief.

I think there may be some "rosy retrospection" going on here.

Well, I'm not that old, and I honestly can't complain at all about how I've been treated by the present system -- on the contrary. Of course, I allow for the possibility that I have formed a skewed perspective here, but the reasons for this would be more complex than just straightforward "rosy retrospection."

Comment author: soreff 30 July 2011 12:34:29AM 10 points [-]
  • I basically agree with you - The U.S. has certainly been headed in the direction of a winner-take-all society over the last few decades.
  • I think some of this is measurable. The Gini coefficient certainly captures some of the economic aspects, and it has gotten higher over time
  • "the underclass has been dehumanized to a degree barely precedented in human history" seem too strong. History includes slavery, including practices such as "seasoning"
Comment author: Vladimir_M 30 July 2011 01:07:23AM *  9 points [-]

History includes slavery, including practices such as "seasoning"

I agree that was probably a too hyperbolic statement. History certainly records much more extreme instances of domineering and oppression. However, "dehumanized" was not a very good choice of term for the exact attitudes I had in mind, which I think indeed have little historical precedent and, and which don't really correspond to the traditional patterns of exercising crude power by higher-status groups and individuals, being a rather peculiar aspect of the present situation. But yes, in any case, I agree I exaggerated with the rhetoric on that point.

Comment author: Armok_GoB 29 July 2011 10:12:17PM 9 points [-]

The prospect of an hansonain future does seem like a pretty good reason to delete all records of yourself, dispose of anyone with significant memories of you, and incinerate your brain in a large explosion enough to spread the ashes of your brain for miles around. At sea.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 29 July 2011 11:55:53PM *  9 points [-]

It should make you happy with the present, though, if you use the past and the future as the baseline for comparison. As John Derbyshire once said in a different context, "We are living in a golden age. The past was pretty awful; the future will be far worse. Enjoy!"

Comment author: lessdazed 29 July 2011 11:14:05PM 5 points [-]

Nowadays, however, the class system has become far harsher and the distribution of status much more skewed. The better-off classes view those beneath them with frightful scorn and contempt, and the underclass has been dehumanized to a degree barely precedented in human history.

There is no obviously appropriate way to measure this, even in theory.

What does one say about differences in solidarity between and church members, as it varies from Sunday to other days of the week, and from now to fifty years ago? Likewise for football fans in a city...What does one say about it as it varies from during the Olympics to during an election, within country, party, etc...During war? During strikes? And so on.

To make this claim one would have to establish a somewhat arbitrary "basket" of status markers and see how they varied (willingness to marry people from group X, willingness to trust random members of group X not to steal, willingness to make fun of people from group X for amusement, etc.) One would then have to integrate over time periods (war, etc.), and it's not obvious how to do that. It's also not obvious how to aggregate the statistics into a single measure expressible by a sentence like the above even if we have somehow established a score for how each individual thinks of and would think of each other individual. It's not obvious what constitutes members of a class, nor how much the classes are to be judged by their worst members as against, say, their average or typical or idealized member.

What I most disagree with the connotation of is "the distribution of status much more skewed". For status, each of us views others in certain ways, has representations of how we are viewed, has representations of how we view others, has representations of how others think they view us...status is not a thing for which the word "distributed" is at all apt.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 29 July 2011 11:39:31PM *  10 points [-]

There is no obviously appropriate way to measure this, even in theory.

It's hard to discuss these things without getting into all sorts of overly controversial topics, but I definitely disagree that there are no obviously appropriate ways to establish whether this, so to say, skew of the status distribution is increasing.

Admittedly, these are fuzzy observations where it's easy to fall prey to all kinds of biases, but there is still useful information all over the place. You can observe the level of contempt (either overt or more underhanded) that people express for those below their class, the amount of effort they invest just to make sure they're insulated from the lower classes, the fear and disgust of mere proximity to anyone below a certain class, the media portrayals of people doing jobs at various percentiles of the income distribution, the reduction and uniformization of the status criteria and the disappearance of various sources of status available to those scoring low in wealth, fame, and bureaucratic rank, and so on. Of course, my observations and interpretations of all these trends may well be biased and inaccurate, but it's certainly incorrect to claim that no conclusions could be drawn from them even in principle.

Comment author: multifoliaterose 29 July 2011 10:25:16PM 2 points [-]

Of course, completely forsaking status would mean all sorts of unpleasantness for a typical person, but this is only because we hate to admit how much of our lives revolves around zero-sum status competitions after all.

I agree that we hate to admit how much of our lives revolves around zero-sum status competitions. Here human modification via genetic engineering, supplements, & advanced technologies provides a potential way out, right? That we don't like the fact that our lives revolve around zero-sum status competitions implies that there's motivation to self-modify in the direction of deriving fulfillment from other things.

Of course there's little historical precedent for technological self-modification and so such hypotheticals involve a necessary element of speculation, but it's not necessarily the case that things will remain as they always have been.

Also, there would always be losers in these post-work status games who could improve their status by engaging in some sort of paid work and saving up to trade for the coveted status markers.

This is a very good point and one which I was thinking of bringing up in response to Yvain's comment but had difficulty articulating; thanks.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 29 July 2011 10:58:02PM 7 points [-]

That we don't like the fact that our lives revolve around zero-sum status competitions implies that there's motivation to self-modify in the direction of deriving fulfillment from other things.

Trouble is, once you go down that road, the ultimate destination is wireheading. This raises all sorts of difficult questions, to which I have no particularly interesting answers.

Comment author: hairyfigment 29 July 2011 10:39:52PM 4 points [-]

If you are really indifferent to status, you can easily get enough food, housing, and medical care to survive by sheer freeloading. This is true even in the U.S.,

I don't know how you're using the word "easily", then. Do you classify all forms of social interaction as easy?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 29 July 2011 10:50:27PM *  2 points [-]

Well, "easy" is clearly a subjective judgment, and admittedly, I have no relevant personal experience. However, it is evident that large numbers of people do manage to survive from charity and the welfare state without any employment, and many of them don't seem to invest any special efforts or talents in this endeavor.

In any case, my original arguments hold even if we consider only rich countries with strong welfare states, in which it really is easy, in every reasonable sense of the term, to survive by freeloading. These certainly hold as examples of societies where no work is necessary to obtain food, housing, medical care, and even some discretionary income, and yet status concerns still motivate the overwhelming majority of people to work hard.

Comment author: nerzhin 29 July 2011 10:00:14PM 8 points [-]

Nowadays, however, the class system has become far harsher and the distribution of status much more skewed. The better-off classes view those beneath them with frightful scorn and contempt, and the underclass has been dehumanized to a degree barely precedented in human history.

How do you measure this kind of thing? Do you have a citation?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 29 July 2011 10:26:53PM *  1 point [-]

Do you have a citation?

No, it's a conclusion from common sense and observation, though I could find all kinds of easily cited corroboration. Unfortunately, as I said, a more detailed analysis of these trends and their components and causes would get us far into various controversial and politicized topics, which are probably best left alone here. I stated these opinions only because they seemed pertinent to the topic of the original post and the subsequent comments, i.e. the reasons for broad dissatisfaction with life in today's developed world, and their specific relation to the issues of work.

Comment author: Yvain 29 July 2011 09:04:06PM *  26 points [-]

I agree that even a post-scarcity society would need some form of employment to determine status and so on. But that seems irrelevant to the current problem: one where even people who are not interested in status need to work long hours in unpleasant conditions just to pay for food, housing, and medical costs, and where ease of access to these goods hasn't kept pace with technological advantages.

And although I don't think it quite related, I am less pessimistic than you abou the ability of a post-scarcity society to deal with land and status issues. Land is less zero-sum than the finitude of the earth would suggest because most people are looking not for literal tracts of land but for a house in which to live, preferably spacious - building upward, or downward as the case may be, can alleviate this pressure. I'm also not convinced that being near other people is as big a problem as you make it out to be: a wealthier society would have better transportation, and cities have enough space to expand outward (giving people access to other humans on at least one side) almost indefinitely. There will always be arbitrarily determined "best" neighborhoods that people can compete to get into, but again, this is a totally different beast from people having to struggle to have any home at all.

I think a genuinely post-work society would have its own ways of producing status based on hobbyist communities, social interaction, and excellence at arts/scholarship/sports/hobbies; the old European nobility was able to handle its internal status disputes in this way, though I don't know how much fo that depended on them knowing in the back of their mind they were all superior to the peasantry anyway.

Agreed that the class system is an important and relevant issue here.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 29 July 2011 10:09:35PM *  12 points [-]

I agree that even a post-scarcity society would need some form of employment to determine status and so on. But that seems irrelevant to the current problem: one where even people who are not interested in status need to work long hours in unpleasant conditions just to pay for food, housing, and medical costs, and where ease of access to these goods hasn't kept pace with technological advantages.

But that's not the case in the modern developed world. If you are really indifferent to status, you can easily get enough food, housing, and medical care to survive by sheer freeloading. This is true even in the U.S., let alone in more extensive welfare states.

Of course, completely forsaking status would mean all sorts of unpleasantness for a typical person, but this is only because we hate to admit how much our lives revolve around zero-sum status competitions after all.

I think a genuinely post-work society would have its own ways of producing status based on hobbyist communities, social interaction, and excellence at arts/scholarship/sports/hobbies; the old European nobility was able to handle its internal status disputes in this way, though I don't know how much fo that depended on them knowing in the back of their mind they were all superior to the peasantry anyway.

Don't forget about the status obtained from having power over others. That's one part of the human nature that's always dangerous to ignore. (The old European nobility was certainly not indifferent to it, and not just towards the peasants.)

Also, there would always be losers in these post-work status games who could improve their status by engaging in some sort of paid work and saving up to trade for the coveted status markers. These tendencies would have to be forcibly suppressed to prevent a market economy with paid labor from reemerging. It's roughly analogous to the present sexual customs and prostitution. Men are supposed to find sexual partners by excelling in various informal, non-monetary status-bearing personal attributes, but things being zero-sum, many losers in this game find it an attractive option to earn money and pay for sex instead, whether through out-and-out prostitution or various less explicit arrangements.

Comment author: CarlShulman 29 July 2011 07:01:51AM *  11 points [-]

What additionally complicates things is that habitable land is close to a zero-sum resource for all practical purposes, since to be useful, it must be near other people. Thus, however wealthy a society gets, for a typical person it always requires a whole lot of work to be able to afford decent lodging

Housing need not be as scarce as land, if regulatory permission for tall buildings and good transport networks exist. There is a lot of variation on this dimension already today. Automated mining, construction and cheap energy could make sizable individual apartments in tall buildings cheap, not to mention transport improvements like robocars.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 29 July 2011 09:32:59PM *  10 points [-]

I agree that the situation can be improved that way, though it's arguable how much it runs against the problem that packing people tightly together has the effect of increasing discomfort and severely lowering status. But even with optimistic assumptions, I think it's still the case that housing can never become non-scarce the way food and clothing could (and to a large degree already have). There is in principle no limit to how cheaply mass-produced stuff can be cranked out, Moore's law-style, but this clearly can't work anywhere as effectively for housing, even with very optimistic assumptions.

Comment author: Desrtopa 29 July 2011 08:39:33PM 4 points [-]

As for working conditions, in terms of safety, cleanliness, physical hardship, etc., typical working conditions in developed countries are clearly much better than fifty years ago.

For many people's psychological welfare, I think these may be lesser concerns than mobility, autonomy, and freedom from monotony.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 29 July 2011 09:09:19PM *  18 points [-]

I don't think that typical jobs from 50 years ago were better in any of these regards. On the contrary, the well-paid blue collar manufacturing jobs that are associated with bygone better times in folk memory were quite bad by these measures. Just imagine working on an assembly line.

Focusing specifically on North America, where these trends appear to be the most pronounced, the key issue, in my opinion, is the distribution of status. Fifty years ago, it was possible for a person of average or even below-average abilities to have a job, lifestyle, and social status that was seen as nothing spectacular, but also respectable and nothing to scoff at. Nowadays, however, the class system has become far harsher and the distribution of status much more skewed. The better-off classes view those beneath them with frightful scorn and contempt, and the underclass has been dehumanized to a degree barely precedented in human history. Of course, these are not hereditary castes, and meritocracy and upward mobility are still very strong, but the point is that the great masses of people who are left behind in the status race are no longer looking towards a mundane but respectable existence, but towards the low status of despised losers.

Why and how the situation has developed in this direction is a complex question that touches on all sorts of ideologically charged issues. Also, some would perhaps disagree whether the trends really are as severe as I present them. But the general trend of the status distribution becoming more skewed seems to me pretty evident.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 29 July 2011 08:41:06PM 4 points [-]

I can't make sense of this argument at all. In all of the cases you've mentioned, the problem is the direction of the incentives, not their strength.

Comment author: saturn 29 July 2011 04:46:58AM 8 points [-]

Do you know of a forum where this could be discussed productively?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 29 July 2011 08:19:41AM 11 points [-]

No, not really. Opportunities for good and insightful discussion open up from time to time in all kinds of places, and sometimes particular forums can have especially good streaks, but all of this is transient. I don't know any places that are particularly good these days.

Comment author: multifoliaterose 29 July 2011 04:48:08AM 4 points [-]

Technological advances can't shorten the work hours because even in a society wealthy and technologically advanced enough that basic subsistence is available for free, people still struggle for zero-sum things, most notably land and status.

I agree that the zero-sum character of status makes it unlikely that technology will shorten work hours (barring modification of humans).

What additionally complicates things is that habitable land is close to a zero-sum resource for all practical purposes, since to be useful, it must be near other people. Thus, however wealthy a society gets, for a typical person it always requires a whole lot of work to be able to afford decent lodging, and even though starvation is no longer a realistic danger for those less prudent and industrious in developed countries, homelessness remains so.

I don't see any reason why this should be true. Population levels in developed countries have leveled off and up to a point it's easy to increase the amount of habitable space through the construction of skyscrapers. It's not even clear to me that one needs to be industrious to avoid homelessness in contemporary America.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 29 July 2011 05:38:43AM *  22 points [-]

I don't see any reason why this should be true. Population levels in developed countries have leveled off and up to a point it's easy to increase the amount of habitable space through the construction of skyscrapers. It's not even clear to me that one needs to be industrious to avoid homelessness in contemporary America.

You're right, things are a bit more complicated than in my simplified account. Lodging can be obtained very cheaply, or even for free as a social service, in homeless shelters and public housing projects, but only in the form of densely packed space full of people of the very lowest status. This is indeed more than adequate for bare survival, but most people find the status hit and the associated troubles and discomforts unacceptably awful, to the point that they opt for either life in the street or working hard for better lodging. And to raise the quality of your lodging significantly above this level, you do need an amount that takes quite a bit of work to earn with the median wage.

This is in clear contrast with food and clothing, which were also precarious until relatively recent past, but are nowadays available in excellent quality for chump-change, as long as you don't go for conspicuous consumption. This is because advanced technology can crank out tons of food and clothing with meager resources and little labor, which can be shipped to great distances at negligible cost, and the population is presently far from the Malthusian limit, so there is no zero-sum competition involved (except of course when it comes to their purely status-related aspects). In contrast, habitable land isn't quite zero-sum, but it has a strong zero-sum aspect since it's difficult to live very far from the centers of population, and wherever the population is dense, there is going to be (more or less) zero-sum competition for the nearby land.

Another striking recent phenomenon that illustrates this situation is that increasing numbers of homeless people have laptops or cell phones. Again we see the same pattern: advanced technology can crank out these things until they're dirt-cheap, but acceptably good habitable land remains scarce no matter what.

Comment author: Yvain 29 July 2011 12:30:20AM 65 points [-]

Upvoted for several reasons:

  • excellent theory about cryonics, much more plausible than things like "people hate cryonics because they're biased against cold" that have previously appeared on here.

  • willingness to acknowledge serious issue. Work is terrible, and the lives of many working people, even people with "decent" jobs in developed countries, are barely tolerable. It is currently socially unacceptable to mention this. Anyone who breaks that silence has done a good deed.

  • spark discussion on whether this will continue into the future. I was reading a prediction from fifty years ago or so that by 2000, people would only work a few hours a day or a few days a week, because most work would be computerized/roboticized and technology would create amazing wealth. Most work has been computerized/roboticized, technology has created amazing wealth, but working conditions are little better, and maybe worse, than they were fifty years ago. A Hansonian-style far future could lead to more of the same, and Hanson even defends this to a degree. In my mind, this is something futurologists should worry about.

  • summary of the article was much better than the article itself, which was cluttered with lots of quotes and pictures and lengthiness. Summaries that are better than the original articles are hard to do, hence, upvote.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 29 July 2011 03:16:36AM *  34 points [-]

I was reading a prediction from fifty years ago or so that by 2000, people would only work a few hours a day or a few days a week, because most work would be computerized/roboticized and technology would create amazing wealth. Most work has been computerized/roboticized, technology has created amazing wealth, but working conditions are little better, and maybe worse, than they were fifty years ago.

Technological advances can't shorten the work hours because even in a society wealthy and technologically advanced enough that basic subsistence is available for free, people still struggle for zero-sum things, most notably land and status. Once a society is wealthy enough that basic subsistence is a non-issue, people probably won't work as much as they would in a Malthusian trap where constant toil is required just to avoid starvation, but they will still work a lot because they're locked in these zero-sum competitions.

What additionally complicates things is that habitable land is close to a zero-sum resource for all practical purposes, since to be useful, it must be near other people. Thus, however wealthy a society gets, for a typical person it always requires a whole lot of work to be able to afford decent lodging, and even though starvation is no longer a realistic danger for those less prudent and industrious in developed countries, homelessness remains so.

There is also the problem of the locked signaling equilibrium. Your work habits have a very strong signaling component, and refusing to work the usual expected hours strongly signals laziness, weirdness, and issues with authority, making you seem completely useless, or worse.

As for working conditions, in terms of safety, cleanliness, physical hardship, etc., typical working conditions in developed countries are clearly much better than fifty years ago. What arguably makes work nowadays worse is the present distribution of status and the increasing severity of the class system, which is a very complex issue tied to all sorts of social change that have occurred in the meantime. But this topic is probably too ideologically sensitive on multiple counts to discuss productively on a forum like LW.

Comment author: komponisto 27 July 2011 01:51:24PM *  4 points [-]

Even if the claim is worded like that, it implies (incorrectly) that correct reasoning should not involve steps based on opaque processes that we are unable to formulate explicitly in Bayesian terms.

You misunderstand. There was no normative implication intended about explicit formulation. My claim is much weaker than you think (but also abstract enough that it may be difficult to understand how weak it is). I simply assert that Bayesian updating is a mathematical definition of what "inference" means, in the abstract. This does not say anything about the details of how humans process information, and nor does it say anything about how mathematically explicit we "should" be about our reasoning in order for it to be valid. You concede everything you need to in order to agree with me when you write:

You could [justify intuitive judgements in Bayesian terms] if you had a way of reverse-engineering the relevant algorithms implemented by your brain,

In fact, this actually concedes more than necessary -- because it could turn out that these algorithms are only approximately Bayesian, and my claim about Bayesianism as the ideal abstract standard would still hold (as indeed implied by the phrase "approximately Bayesian").

Of course, this does in my view have the implication that it is appropriate for people who understand Bayesian language to use it when discussing their beliefs, especially in the context of a disagreement or other situation where one person's doesn't understand the other's thought process. I suspect this is the real point of controversy here (cf. our previous arguments about using numerical probabilities).

Comment author: Vladimir_M 28 July 2011 06:07:39PM 2 points [-]

Of course, this does in my view have the implication that it is appropriate for people who understand Bayesian language to use it when discussing their beliefs, especially in the context of a disagreement or other situation where one person's doesn't understand the other's thought process. I suspect this is the real point of controversy here (cf. our previous arguments about using numerical probabilities).

Yes, the reason why I often bring up this point is the danger of spurious exactitude in situations like these. Clearly, if you are able to discuss the situation in Bayesian language while being well aware of the non-Bayesian loose ends involved, that's great. The problem is that I often observe the tendency to pretend that these loose ends don't exist. Moreover, the parts of reasoning that are opaque to introspection are typically the most problematic ones, and in most cases, their problems can't be ameliorated by any formalism, but only on a messy case-by-case heuristic basis. The emphasis on Bayesian formalism detracts from these crucial problems.

Comment author: cousin_it 27 July 2011 08:23:13AM 1 point [-]

The Manhattan project was facing a huge coordinated enemy who could pay spies, etc. SingInst isn't facing such an enemy yet, so secrecy should be easier for them.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 28 July 2011 03:42:41AM 4 points [-]

Actually, most of the WW2-era Soviet spies were communists who spied out of genuine conviction, not as paid traitors. This makes the parallel even more interesting, considering that people engaged in a secret AI project might develop all sorts of qualms.

Comment author: taw 27 July 2011 05:39:50AM 1 point [-]

I'd be really curious to see these data, if you don't mind posting these links again.

Here's the paper which many people cannot even get themselves to read.

First, the official communist statistics are known to have been doctored to an extreme degree.

This is actually totally unproblematic, because GDP was not one of the ways communist countries measured their economies. They used primarily industrial production statistics, and GDP was the competing Western system of measurement they didn't like because it wasn't exactly putting them in the best light (with their economies being relatively more industry-focused and Western economies being more services-focused).

And the paper uses OECD data, not any official data.

And you get the same result with GDP proxy studies like life expectancy as with GDP.

So the data is solid no matter how you look at it. There's no way to tweak the data to make communist China grow more slowly than non-communist India, or communist Poland to grow more slowly than non-communist Peru.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 27 July 2011 07:54:15AM *  6 points [-]

Thanks for the link. I skimmed Kenny's paper, and it uses "income" statistics, which are certainly problematic for the reasons I mentioned. The industrial output numbers it cites are also problematic for the same reasons: if reporting unfavorable census figures was enough to get you shot, do you think it was much better when it came to production statistics? (Also, a lot of Kenny's figures are of that comically absurd nonsense-on-stilts variety where "real" GDP statistic for countries from a century ago are calculated to four and more significant digits.)

I don't know what exactly you mean by "OECD data," but as false as the official statistic were, it's naive to think that anyone outside the communist countries had an accurate idea on what the real numbers were. (And again, it should be obvious that comparing income based on purchasing power between a market and a command economy is inherently meaningless.) It's also naive to think that respectable Western economists didn't have strong pro-Soviet biases. A good example is the almost comical story about Samuelson's Orwellian revisions of his Soviet growth predictions in consecutive editions of his textbook.

As for comparisons with non-Western countries, I'll certainly agree that various Third World regimes often messed things up even worse than the Soviet Bloc. After all, many of them were equally ruthless and violent, and most were explicitly socialist to at least some degree. (By the way, it seems like both you and Kenny underestimate the intensity of both socialism and violence in the 20th century Third World.) I'll also agree that communist countries did make some advances in public health and education, as reflected in life expectancy, literacy, and other statistics, though it's also pretty clear that similar, if not greater advances would have been achieved by their realistic historical alternatives. On the other hand, it's also important to understand how much they were free-riding on global public goods produced by Western countries.

On the whole, the paper isn't really making much more than a trivial point that communist countries didn't look so bad in comparison with the Third World.

Comment author: asr 27 July 2011 01:09:15AM 14 points [-]

The Manhattan Project is a very misleading example. Yes, it was "secret", in that nothing was published for outside review. But the project had a sizeable fraction of all the physics talent in the western world associated with it. Within the project, there was a great deal of information sharing and discussion; the scientific leadership was strongly against "need to know policies."

At that scale, having outside review is a lot less necessary. Nobody in AI research is contemplating an effort of that scale, so the objection to secrecy is valid.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 27 July 2011 04:38:18AM 9 points [-]

Also, the Manhattan project did a poor job of maintaining total secrecy. Reliably secret projects are possible only on a much smaller scale, and the likelihood of information leaking out grows very rapidly as soon as more than a handful of people are involved.

Comment author: JGWeissman 26 July 2011 09:13:55PM 6 points [-]

Given the context, I interpreted Komponisto's comment as saying that to the extent that we reason correctly we are using Bayes' theorem, not that we always reason correctly.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 27 July 2011 04:16:58AM *  5 points [-]

Even if the claim is worded like that, it implies (incorrectly) that correct reasoning should not involve steps based on opaque processes that we are unable to formulate explicitly in Bayesian terms. To take an example that's especially relevant in this context, assessing people's honesty, competence, and status is often largely a matter of intuitive judgment, whose internals are as opaque to your conscious introspection as the physics calculations that your brain performs when you're throwing a ball. If you examine rigorously the justification for the numbers you feed into the Bayes theorem, it will inevitably involve some such intuitive judgment that you can't justify in Bayesian terms. (You could do that if you had a way of reverse-engineering the relevant algorithms implemented by your brain, of course, but this is still impossible.)

Of course, you can define "reasoning" to refer only to those steps in reaching the conclusion that are performed by rigorous Bayesian inference, and use some other word for the rest. But then to avoid confusion, we should emphasize that reaching any reliable conclusion about the facts in a trial (or almost any other context) requires a whole lot of things other than just "reasoning."

In response to Bayesian justice
Comment author: sixes_and_sevens 26 July 2011 10:47:05AM 3 points [-]

I'd be curious to know whether advocacy of professional juries was common on LW.

If so (or even if not), what training do people think should be required for a professional juror?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 26 July 2011 08:49:08PM *  6 points [-]

"Professional juries" is essentially an oxymoron. The basic idea of the jury system is that people who judge your guilt are your fellow citizens, not government functionaries. (Whether this is good or bad by whatever metric is beside the point.)

Besides, in common law jurisdictions, you can typically waive your right to be tried by a jury and have a bench trial, where the judge is responsible for findings of fact as well as law. So basically, you already have the option to be tried by a "professional juror."

In response to comment by DanielLC on Bayesian justice
Comment author: komponisto 26 July 2011 02:33:11AM *  25 points [-]

I would strongly encourage folks to adopt the view that we are always "using Bayes' theorem" when reasoning.

That is, instead of saying "Use Bayes' theorem, and then [after you're done using Bayes' theorem] correct for overconfidence", say "Update on the evidence of studies showing that overconfidence is common".

The distinction is important not for the particular result of the calculation, but for stamping out the notion that Bayes' theorem is a "special trick" that is "sometimes useful", rather than a mathematical model of inference itself.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 26 July 2011 08:35:24PM *  4 points [-]

I would strongly encourage folks to adopt the view that we are always "using Bayes' theorem" when reasoning.

This is simply false. As I'm fond of pointing out, often the best judgment you can come up with is produced by entirely opaque processes in your head, whose internals are inaccessible to you no matter how hard you try to introspect on them. Pretending that you can somehow get around this problem and reduce all your reasoning to clear-cut Bayesianism is sheer wishful thinking.

Moreover, even when you are applying exact probabilistic reasoning in evaluating evidence, the numbers you work with often have a common-sense justification that you cannot reduce to Bayesian reasoning in any practically useful way. Knowledge of probability theory will let you avoid errors such as the prosecutor's fallacy, but this leaves more fundamental underlying questions open. Are the experts who vouch for these forensic methods reliable or just quacks and pseudoscientists? Are the cops and forensic experts presenting real or doctored evidence, and are they telling the truth or perjuring themselves in cooperation with the prosecution? You can be all happy and proud that you've applied the Bayes theorem correctly and avoided the common fallacies, and still your conclusion can be completely remote from reality because the numbers you've fed into the formula are a product of quackery, forgery, or perjury -- and if you think you know a way to apply Bayesianism to detect these reliably, I would really like to hear it.

Comment author: taw 26 July 2011 05:18:18AM 4 points [-]

That was when were discussing things which are true on balance of evidence which are universally tribally disbelieved, so you can use them as a litmus test.

And all data says that communist countries were economically just as successful as non-communist countries on average in terms of growth and convergence. I even linked to data showing exactly that.

I no longer believe it's a particularly good rationality litmus test, people just compartmentalize way too much for there to be any good rationality litmus tests as far as I can tell.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 26 July 2011 08:18:12PM 5 points [-]

And all data says that communist countries were economically just as successful as non-communist countries on average in terms of growth and convergence. I even linked to data showing exactly that.

I'd be really curious to see these data, if you don't mind posting these links again.

However, I will be very disappointed if these data boil down to measures of economic growth based on "real" GDP statistics, for at least two good reasons. First, the official communist statistics are known to have been doctored to an extreme degree. (Occasionally, as in e.g. the 1937 Soviet census, people who dared to submit truthful but bad-looking statistics were denounced as wreckers and shot. Admittedly, the repression after Stalin was much milder, but it's still naive to think that numbers weren't fudged or even faked outright at every level.) Second, for obvious reasons, meaningful comparisons of purchasing power between planned and market economies are impossible, and any attempt to do so is likely to favor the former.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 16 July 2011 09:01:38PM *  7 points [-]

We rightly despair of modeling humans as behavior-executors, so we model them as utility-maximizers instead.

I might be wrong about this, but it seems like your point here is similar to Daniel Dennett's concept of the intentional stance.

Furthermore, I think here we get to another issue that is relevant for some of our previous discussions over utilitarianism, as well as various questions of cognitive bias. Namely, modeling humans (and other creatures that display some intelligence) as utility-maximizers in the literal sense -- i.e. via actual maximization of an explicitly known utility function -- is for all practical purposes totally intractable, just like modeling them as behavior-executors with full accuracy would be. What is necessary to make people's actions predictable enough (and in turn enable human cooperation and coordination) is that their behavior verifiably follows some decision algorithm that is at the same time good enough to grapple with real-world problems and manageably predictable by other people in its relevant aspects. And here we get to the point that I often bring up, namely that behaviors that look like irrational bias (in the sense of deviation from rational individual utility maximization) and folk-ethical intuitions that clash with seemingly clear-cut consequentialist arguments may in fact be instances of such decision algorithms, and thus in fact serving non-obvious but critically important functions in practice.

Comment author: Yvain 13 July 2011 08:26:20PM *  10 points [-]

Second, if true, this theory should generalize to other cases of people who express an exceptionally strong opposition towards some low-status/disreputable behavior that can be practiced covertly, or some low-status beliefs that can be held in secret. Yet it's hard for me to think of any analogous examples that would be the subject of either folk theories or scientific studies.

There are a few other scientific results of this type: search the literature under "reaction formation". For example:

Morokoff (1985): Women high in self-reported "sex guilt" have lower self-reported reaction to erotic stimuli but higher physiological arousal.

Dutton & Lake (1976): Whites with no history of prejudice and self-reported egalitarian beliefs were given bogus feedback during a task intended to convince them they were subconsciously prejudiced (falsely told that they had high skin response ratings of fear/anger when shown slides of interracial couples). After they had left the building, they were approached by either a black or white beggar. Whites who had received the false racism feedback gave more to the black beggar (though not to the white beggar) than whites who had not.

Sherman and Garkin (1980): Subjects were asked to solve a difficult riddle in which the trick answer involved sex-roles, such that after failing they felt "implicitly accused of sexism" (couldn't find the exact riddle, but I imagine something like this). Afterwards they were asked to evaluate a sex-discrimination case. People who had previously had to solve the riddle gave harsher verdicts against a man accused of sexual discrimination than those who had not.

I've heard anecdotal theories of a few similar effects - for example, that the loudest and most argumentative religious believers are the ones who secretly doubt their own faith.

Overall I probably shouldn't have included the case study because I don't think Trivers' theory stands or falls on this one point, and it's probably not much more than tangential to the whole idea of a conscious/unconscious divide.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 14 July 2011 05:02:22AM 2 points [-]

That's extremely interesting - thanks for the references!

Comment author: JoshuaZ 13 July 2011 01:10:35PM *  9 points [-]

This is a very good point. You make a compelling case that the use of careful statistics is not a recent trend in psychology. In that regard, my penultimate paragraph is clearly just deeply and irrecoverably wrong.

(And ultimately, I notice that your examples of recent discoveries are from biology, astronomy/physics, and math -- fields whose basic soundness has never been in doubt. But what non-trivial, correct, and useful insight has come from all these mathematized soft fields?)

Well, I was responding to Eliezer's claim about a general lack of a scientific process. So the specific question then becomes can one give examples of "non-trivial, correct, and useful" psychological results that have occurred in the last year or so. There's a steady output of decent psychology results. While the early work on cognitive biases was done in the 1980s by Kahneman and Tversky, a lot of work has occurred in the last decade after. But, I agree that the amount of output is slow enough that I can't point to easy, impressive studies that have occurred in the last few months off the top of my head like I can for other areas of research. Sharon Bertsch and Bryan Pesta's investigation of different explanations for negative correlation between IQ and religion came out in 2009 and 2010, which isn't even this year.

However, at the same time, I'm not sure that this is a strike against psychology. Psychology has a comparatively small field of study. Astronomy gets to investigate most of the universe. Math gets to investigate every interesting axiomatic system one can imagine. Biology gets to investigate millions of species. Psychology just gets to investigate one species, and only certain aspects of that species. When psychology does investigate other intelligent species it is often categorized as belonging to other areas. So we shouldn't be that surprised if psychology doesn't have as high a production rate. On the other hand, this argument isn't very good because one could make up for it by lumping all the classical soft sciences together into one area, and one would still have this problem. So overall, your point seems valid in regards to psychology.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 13 July 2011 05:45:40PM *  14 points [-]

I didn't have in mind just psychology; I was responding to your comment about soft and wannabe-hard fields in general. In particular, this struck me as unwarranted optimism:

[A] paper that uses statistics in a flawed fashion is indicative of how much progress the soft sciences have made in terms of being real sciences in that one needs bad stats to get bad ideas through rather than just anecdotal evidence.

That is true if these sciences are nowadays overwhelmingly based on sound math and statistics, and these bad stats papers are just occasional exceptions. The pessimistic scenario I have in mind is the emergence of bogus fields in which bad formalism is the standard -- i.e., in which verbal bad reasoning of the sort seen in, say, old-school Freudianism is replaced by standardized templates of bad formalism. (These are most often, but not always, in the form of bad statistics.)

This, in my opinion, results in an even worse situation. Instead of bad verbal reasoning, which can be criticized convincingly in a straightforward way, as an outside critic you're now faced with an abstruse bad formalism. This not only makes it more difficult to spot the holes in the logic, but even if you identify them correctly, the "experts" can sneer at you and dismiss you as a crackpot, which will sound convincing to people who have't taken the effort to work through the bad formalism themselves.

Unless you believe that such bogus fields don't exist (and I think many examples are fairly obvious), they are clear counterexamples to your above remark. Their "mathematization" has resulted in bullshit being produced in even greater quantities, and shielded against criticism far more strongly that if they were still limited to verbal sophistry.

Another important point, which I think you're missing, concerns your comment about problematic fields having a relatively small, and arguably less important scope relative to the (mostly) healthy hard fields. The trouble is, the output of some of the most problematic fields is used to direct the decisions and actions of the government and other powerful institutions. From miscarriages of justice due to pseudoscience used in courts to catastrophic economic crises, all kinds of calamities can directly follow from this.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 13 July 2011 02:11:59AM *  29 points [-]

We simply do not have a scientific process any more.

This is both unfair to scientists and inaccurate. In 2011, we've had such novel scientific discoveries as snails that can survive being eaten by birds, we've estimated the body temperature of dinosaurs, we've captured the most detailed picture of a dying star ever taken, and we've made small but significant progress to resolving P ?= NP. These are but a few of the highlights that happened to both be in my recent memory and which I could easily locate links to. I've also not included anything that could be argued to be engineering rather than science. There are many achievements just like this.

Why might it seem like we don't have a scientific process?

First, there's simple nostalgia. As I write this, the space shuttle is on its very last mission. I suspect that almost everyone here either longs for the days of their youth when humans walked on the moon, or wish they had lived then to witness that. Thus, the normal human nostalgia is wrapped up in some actual problems of stagnation and lack of funding. This creates a potential halo effect for the past.

Second, as the number of scientists increases over time, the number of scientists who are putting out poor science will increase. Similarly, the amount of stuff that gets through peer review even when it shouldn't will increase as the number of journals and the number of papers submitted goes up. So the amount of bad science will go up.

Third, the internet, and similar modern communication technologies lets us find out about so-called bad science much faster than we would otherwise. Much of that would get buried in obscure journals but instead we have bloggers commenting and respected scientists responding. So as time goes on, even if the amount of bad science stays constant, the perception would be of an increase.

I would go so far as to venture that we might have a more robust and widespread scientific process than at any other time in history. To put the Bem study in perspective, keep in mind that a hundred years ago, psychology wasn't even trying to use statistical methods; look at how Freud and Jung's ideas were viewed. Areas like sociology and psychology have if anything become more scientific over time. From that standpoint, a paper that uses statistics in a flawed fashion is indicative of how much progress the soft sciences have made in terms of being real sciences in that one needs bad stats to get bad ideas through rather than just anecdotal evidence.

To paraphrase someone speaking on a completely different issue, the arc of history is long, but it bends towards science.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 13 July 2011 06:59:46AM *  20 points [-]

To put the Bem study in perspective, keep in mind that a hundred years ago, psychology wasn't even trying to use statistical methods; look at how Freud and Jung's ideas were viewed. Areas like sociology and psychology have if anything become more scientific over time. From that standpoint, a paper that uses statistics in a flawed fashion is indicative of how much progress the soft sciences have made in terms of being real sciences in that one needs bad stats to get bad ideas through rather than just anecdotal evidence.

That's not really true. Experimental, quantitative, and even fairly advanced statistical methods were definitely used in psychology a century ago. (As a notable milestone, Spearman's factor analysis that started the still ongoing controversy over the general factor of intelligence was published in 1904.) My impression is that ever since Wilhelm Wundt's pioneering experimental work that first separated psychology from philosophy in the late 19th century, psychology has been divided between quantitative work based on experiment and observation, which makes at least some pretense of real science, and quack soft stuff that's usually presented in a medical or ideological context (or some combination thereof). Major outbursts of the latter have happened fairly recently -- remember the awful "recovered memories" trend in the 1980s and 1990s (and somewhat even in the 2000s) and its consequences.

But more importantly, I'm not at all sure that the mathematization of soft fields has made them more scientific. One could argue that the contemporary standards for using statistics in soft fields only streamline the production of plausible-looking nonsense. Even worse, sometimes mathematization leads to pseudoscience that has no more connection to reality than mere verbal speculations and sophistries, but looks so impressive and learned that a common-sense criticism can be effectively met with scorn and stonewalling. As the clearest example, it appears evident that macroeconomics is almost complete quackery despite all the abstruse statistics and math used in it, and I see no evidence that the situation in other wannabe-exact soft fields is much better. Or to take another example, at one point I got intensely interested in IQ-related controversies and read a large amount of academic literature in the area -- eventually finding that the standards of statistics (and quantitative reasoning in general) on all sides in the controversy are just depressingly bad, often hiding awful lapses of reasoning that would be unimaginable in a real hard science behind a veneer of seeming rigor.

(And ultimately, I notice that your examples of recent discoveries are from biology, astronomy/physics, and math -- fields whose basic soundness has never been in doubt. But what non-trivial, correct, and useful insight has come from all these mathematized soft fields?)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 12 July 2011 11:10:07PM 9 points [-]

​I see at least two problems with this case study.

First, what sort of sampling bias is introduced by studying only men who are willing to view such materials? It seems highly implausible to me that this effect is zero.

Second, if true, this theory should generalize to other cases of people who express an exceptionally strong opposition towards some low-status/disreputable behavior that can be practiced covertly, or some low-status beliefs that can be held in secret. Yet it's hard for me to think of any analogous examples that would be the subject of either folk theories or scientific studies.

In fact, this generalization would lead to the conclusion that respectable high-status activists who crusade against various behaviors and attitudes that are nowadays considered disreputable, evil, dangerous, etc., should be suspected that they do it because they themselves engage in such behaviors (or hold such attitudes) covertly. The funny thing is, in places and social circles where homophobia is considered disreputable, this should clearly apply to campaigners against homophobia!

Comment author: drethelin 12 July 2011 10:01:31PM 1 point [-]

once you can pick and choose between various churches you open yourself up to exactly the same sort of drift this is designed to avoid

Comment author: Vladimir_M 12 July 2011 10:22:12PM 6 points [-]

Well, yes, clearly. But the original argument makes sense only assuming a unique and stable tradition that has determined the values you were brought up with. If this happens to be the tradition of some realistic Christian church (or Jewish denomination), chances are that the text of the Bible is only one element of this tradition -- it definitely doesn't imply the whole content of the tradition by itself, and it may well even contradict parts of it, or at least be harmonized only with strained interpretations. (All this even if an opposite pretense is maintained.)

To evaluate the argument from the original article accurately, it is necessary to have a realistic picture of what the tradition in question exactly consists of. It is mistaken to assume that the answer to that question is simply the text of the Bible.

Comment author: Alicorn 12 July 2011 09:44:30PM 2 points [-]

See #6. The teachings of churches are not unchanging; documents such as the Bible are or at least can be.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 12 July 2011 10:05:37PM *  7 points [-]

Yes, but teachings of churches can also be stable for periods of time long enough to be relevant for this discussion (at least in principle). I don't know whether the original article was written with this in mind, but I understood #6 to refer to any such long-standing tradition. Clearly no religious group nowadays (or in the last couple millenniums, for that matter) espouses Biblical teachings without thick layers of traditional interpretation, whether they admit it or not. So insofar as the question is interesting at all, it should be asked about these traditional interpretations, not the raw Biblical text.

(Also, while documents can remain unchanged for arbitrary periods of time in the sense of containing the same series of writing symbols, their interpretations will inevitably change even if the greatest efforts are made to interpret them with maximal literalism or originalism. Consider, for example, that a text written in a living language will, in some centuries, become an archaic document undecipherable without special linguistic and historical training, which by the very nature of things requires some nontrivial interpretation to extract any meaning out of it. In this situation, I don't think it's meaningful to talk about the document remaining "unchanged" in any practically relevant sense.)

Comment author: Alicorn 12 July 2011 09:36:42PM 27 points [-]

I think this is an argument for having your values written down somewhere, and maybe even for getting them from a source that is not original to you, but I don't think it is a good reason to base your values on Christianity. The Bible itself does not closely match most modern persons' values, is not internally consistent, and can be interpreted in a variety of ways.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 12 July 2011 09:41:31PM *  4 points [-]

The Bible itself does not closely match most modern persons' values, is not internally consistent, and can be interpreted in a variety of ways.

That argument is applicable only to sola scriptura Protestantism, and therefore not to the teachings of most Christian churches.

Comment author: jsalvatier 12 July 2011 07:37:04PM 1 point [-]

Especially if it's your own.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 12 July 2011 07:45:31PM 3 points [-]

Self-citations are usually counted separately (both for formal purposes and in informal assessments of this sort).

Comment author: JoshuaZ 12 July 2011 12:25:40AM *  7 points [-]

A paper without any citations is generally considered such a bad source that it's only one step up from wikipedia. You can cite it, if you must, but you better not base your research on it.

If this were true how would anyone ever get the first citation?

(Incidentally in my own field, there are a lot of papers that don't get cited. It isn't because the papers are wrong (although some very small fraction of them have that problem) but that they just aren't interesting. But math is very different from most other fields.)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 12 July 2011 07:27:55PM 3 points [-]

If this were true how would anyone ever get the first citation?

Zed didn't say you should never cite a previously uncited paper, only that you shouldn't invest time and effort into work that depends on the assumption that its conclusions are sound. There are many possible reasons why you might nevertheless want to cite it, and perhaps even give it some lip service.

Comment author: Oscar_Cunningham 11 July 2011 06:27:44PM 1 point [-]
Comment author: Vladimir_M 11 July 2011 06:33:52PM 2 points [-]

Yes, that's more or less what I had in mind. Somehow I missed your comment before writing mine above.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 11 July 2011 05:59:10PM *  14 points [-]

Websites that feature articles by many writers often append some brief information about the author at the end of each article (or alternatively, this information appears when you click on the author's name). This often includes links to the authors' books, blogs, professional websites, etc., and is understood as merely giving information about the author, not as an endorsement of the stuff behind the links.

I'm not sure if it would be a good idea to make this a built-in feature of LW, but I don't see any reasons why people writing top-level (or even discussion) articles shouldn't append a short paragraph of this sort to their articles. The only potential problem I see is that some people might start writing worthless articles for the purposes of self-promotion, but the voting system should take care of that.

Comment author: taryneast 09 July 2011 04:20:01PM *  5 points [-]

Ah... by this I take it that you've never worked in a job where telling the boss what to do will end in your being disciplined for not toeing the company line. We're not talking "polite disagreement over technical matters" here. There are situations of this kind where you definitely suffer social stigma for speaking out. ...mostly when the company has become a cult... and it's much better to avoid this kind of company if you can - but that's very difficult in today's corporate culture.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 10 July 2011 01:18:25AM 4 points [-]

Now I understand better what you're talking about. I have seen such examples of institutional mendacity, and I certainly agree that in some sorts of institutions it is so widespread that you may be faced with unpleasant trade-offs between your career (or other) interest and your integrity. So yes, I'd certainly count it as real nonconformity if you opt for the latter.

Comment author: syllogism 08 July 2011 12:05:05AM *  19 points [-]

The key to successful non-conformity is to find your tribe later. If you look at people who've done this now, they seem like conformists, because they do what their peer-group does. But they've fit their peer-group to their personality, rather than trying to fit their personality to their peer-group. They've had to move through local minima of non-conformity.

Here are some examples of where I've made what have at the time been socially brave choices that have paid off big. This is exactly all about asking "what is the best thing I could be doing", not "what is the thing to do".

  • Decided to accept and admit to my bisexuality. This was very uncomfortable at first, and I never did really find a "home" in gay communities, as they conformed around a lot of norms that didn't suit me well. What accepting my sexuality really bought me is a critical stance on masculinity. Rejecting the normal definition of "what it means to be a man" has been hugely liberating. Being queer has a nice signalling perk on this, too. It's much harder to be straight and get away with this. If you're queer people shrug and put you in that "third sex" category of neither masculine nor feminine.

  • Decided not to pursue any of the "typical" careers. I was getting top marks in English and History in high school, and all the other kids with that academic profile were going into law. I chose to just do an arts degree in linguistics, with an eye on academia. This turned out to be a very important decision, as I'm very happy with my academic career in computational linguistics. When I meet people, they're amazed at how "lucky" I am to have found something so niche that fits me so well. Well, it isn't luck at all: I decided what everyone else was doing was not for me, and had to suck it up when people called me a fool for leaving all that near-certain law money on the table.

  • Decided the "school" of linguistics I'd trained in all through my undergraduate was completely wrong, requiring me to abandon my existing professional network and relearn almost everything. It was kind of a scientific crisis of faith. But I think I'm happier now than I would've been if I hadn't.

  • Decided to become vegetarian. This benefited me by reducing my cognitive dissonance between the empirical facts of the meat industry and my need to feel that I was making the world a better place, and wouldn't do something I had believed caused great harm just because it was normal. Now I have a network of vegetarian friends (not that I abandoned my old one, mind), so it doesn't feel like lonely dissent. And I did only "convert" after meeting a rationalist vegetarian friend. But the non-conformity pain was still there when I did it. I had to deal with feeling like a weirdo, which is unpleasant.

  • Hired a domestic cleaner. Domestic help is fairly socially unacceptable in my champagne socialist slice of Australia. How bourgeois! Well, yes --- we are totally bourgeois. Champagne socialists are very uncomfortable about this. This exchange of goods for services is very high utility for me, though.

So I disagree that "non-conformists" are worse off, for this definition of "non-conformist". People willing to make socially brave choices stand to gain a lot; people who are completely craven in the face of any social opprobrium wind up trapped in circumstances that don't suit them well.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 08 July 2011 06:29:56PM *  7 points [-]

So I disagree that "non-conformists" are worse off, for this definition of "non-conformist". People willing to make socially brave choices stand to gain a lot; people who are completely craven in the face of any social opprobrium wind up trapped in circumstances that don't suit them well.

We clearly disagree on the definition of "nonconformity." If you use this word for any instance of resisting social pressure, then clearly you are right, but it also means that everyone is a nonconformist except people who live their entire lives as silent, frightened, and obedient doormats for others. Any success in life is practically impossible if you don't stand up for yourself when it's smart to do so, and if you don't exploit some opportunities opened by the hypocritical distinctions between the nominal and real rules of social interactions and institutions. But I wouldn't call any of that "nonconformity," a term which I reserve for opposition to truly serious and universally accepted rules and respectable beliefs. Of course, it makes little sense to argue over definitions, so I guess we can leave it at that.

Comment author: taryneast 08 July 2011 04:20:10PM *  4 points [-]

In contrast, true nonconformity would mean adopting views (and undertaking consequent actions) that seriously lower your status and risk severe loss of reputation, unemployability, ...

Doesn't have to be as serious as bucking the law. It can even be as simple as telling your boss that his idea won't work (because of X, Y and Z). Or deciding to buck the corporate dress-requirements because you know you will never be put in front of a real customer and therefore should be allowed to be comfortable at work... etc etc

Comment author: Vladimir_M 08 July 2011 06:11:14PM *  2 points [-]

Only if you stretch the definition of "nonconformity" to the point of meaninglessness. If you define it so broadly to include things like these you mention -- polite disagreement with authority figures over technical matters and slight bending of rules to make things easier -- then practically every human being who has ever lived has been a "nonconformist."

Comment author: Nick_Tarleton 08 July 2011 12:22:21AM 5 points [-]

fashionable signals of officially approved pseudo-nonconformity

things that really matter

Examples of these categories would be helpful. (In general, I find your comments interesting and your perspective important, but have a hard time understanding you due to frequent oblique allusions like these. I know that some of the time you're trying not to step on landmines, which seems like a good idea, but this doesn't seem like one of those cases.)

(On-topic, I agree with Mycroft65536.)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 08 July 2011 05:03:29AM *  13 points [-]

It seems to me that every human society has some romantic notion of heroic rebels and nonconformists, but for reasons that are interesting to speculate on, ours is obsessed with it to a very exceptional degree. (So much that people nowadays typically use the word "nonconformist" with a tone of approval, and rarely for those who fail to conform with norms and views that they themselves actually like.) This opens the way for people to gain status if they are capable of doing things that signal in a way that resonates with this heroic "nonconformist" image, while at the same time avoiding any really dangerous nonconformity.

Take for example all those artists and authors who get praised as "daring," "transgressive", "challenging taboos," etc., even though the things they do have been run-of-the-mill for many decades (or even much longer), the views they express (insofar as they express any) are entirely predictable for anyone familiar with the respectable intellectual mainstream, their high status is acknowledged by the mainstream media and academia, and some of them even get rich off of this "nonconformity." There are many other similar examples of cheap "nonconformist" signaling that is not backed by any serious nonconformity, including most (if not all) of the contemporary "subcultures."

(An even more extreme and farcical phenomenon occurs when the establishment itself includes some sort of fake "opposition" or orchestrates supposedly authentic "protests" or "activism." I won't get into any examples of this to avoid stirring up controversy.)

In contrast, true nonconformity would mean adopting views (and undertaking consequent actions) that seriously lower your status and risk severe loss of reputation, unemployability, criminal penalties, or even violent confrontation with the powers-that-be. Examples would be refusing to recognize the authority of the government over some laws whose enforcement is taken seriously, or becoming an outspoken propagandist for some shockingly extremist fringe group. Clearly this is not a way to a happy life, regardless of whether you have any sympathy for any such sort of people and their views.

Please also see my reply to Mycroft65536 below regarding non-conformist groups.

Comment author: Mycroft65536 07 July 2011 11:50:11PM 5 points [-]

I'm not sure about that. The world is big enough that you can live most of your life mostly in contact with other non-conformists in your particular cluster. I'm doing that right now.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 08 July 2011 05:02:17AM *  7 points [-]

The world is big enough that you can live most of your life mostly in contact with other non-conformists in your particular cluster.

The critical issue here is whether your nonconformist group has a truly independent status hierarchy and mechanisms of social support, i.e. if it really allows you to sever ties with the mainstream society and institutions so that you don't have to care about your status and reputation with them without severe negative consequences. I can hardly think of any such nonconformist groups except for some very insular religious sects -- the modern trend is almost uniformly towards strong consolidation of a single and universal status hierarchy whose rules apply to everyone.

Comment author: [deleted] 07 July 2011 11:40:25AM 25 points [-]

Honestly, I think the cluster of tech-savvy, young, smart-but-nonconformist types is really winning at the goal of being productive while happy. Not everybody makes it; but I've seen a lot of people have lives more satisfying than their parents ever could. People who've broken the conventional wisdom that you have to put up with a lot of bullshit because "that's life." Mainly, because instead of asking "What is the Thing To Do?" they've got the hang of asking "What is the best thing I could be doing?"

If cryonics is a bust, I'll grant that it's a genuine waste of money. The same is true for SIAI. (Though I'll mention that lots of otherwise fulfilled people donate to demonstrably inefficient charities that spend most of their money on employee salaries. Most middle-class people throw some money down the toilet and don't even notice it.) The other issues are not such a big deal. Leaving religious communities is not a blow to people who have figured out how to optimize life, because they aren't isolated any more. I don't even know if overuse of stimulants is that widespread -- I certainly know they aren't good for me.

As for having self-gratifying beliefs that aren't of much use ... well, everybody does that a little. Guilty as charged. But for me at least, LessWrong's favorite issues led me to interests in similar-but-not-identical issues. General AI is pretty opaque to me, but now I'm interested in narrow AI (and its statistical/mathematical cousins.) The abstract discussion of rationality has led me to take psychology and motivational advice more seriously.

Are LessWrong memes pretty confined to a subset of tech geeks and some young scientists and professionals? Yeah. For the moment, so what? That's the environment I want to be in; those are my friends, collaborators, and role models. Not everybody is suited to be a world-wide evangelist with a big bullhorn; I'm satisfied that there will always be people in the world who disagree with me.

In response to comment by [deleted] on An Outside View on Less Wrong's Advice
Comment author: Vladimir_M 07 July 2011 09:46:25PM *  9 points [-]

Honestly, I think the cluster of tech-savvy, young, smart-but-nonconformist types is really winning at the goal of being productive while happy.

As a general rule, nonconformists aren't happy: they must choose between hiding their nonconformity and living a double life, which is never a happy situation, or being open nonconformists and suffering severe penalties for it. What you have in mind would probably be better described as people who know how to send off fashionable signals of officially approved pseudo-nonconformity, and to recognize and disregard rules that are only paid lip-service (and irrelevant except as a stumbling block for those not smart enough to realize it), but are perfect and enthusiastic conformists when it comes to things that really matter.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 07 July 2011 12:34:55AM *  15 points [-]

I am more favorable to the idea of a neural net model in which medical advice can forge a weak connection between the "smoking" pattern and the "cancer" pattern through cognition alone, separate from reinforcement processes but allowing such processes to propagate down it. Not a whole lot of motivational force can travel down such a weak link, blocking it from being effective against a strong desire to keep smoking.

On the other hand, as the experience with smoking bans in recent years has shown, the threat of a modest fine (perhaps also with some shaming involved) is enough to induce smokers to refrain from smoking for long periods of time -- even before they've paid any fines. This is also true for smokers who otherwise swear that they are helpless addicts, unable to quit despite their best efforts. So assuming your hypothesis is true, a strong link between the "smoking" pattern and the "legal penalty"/"social opprobrium" patterns is established very easily. It's an interesting question why doctors' advice fails to have a similar effect, and how much this is due to rational thinking (or plausible rationalizations) involved in the model used in the internal reinforcement there.

As for heroin, obviously it evokes not just the image of a pleasurable high, but also the image of emaciated homeless junkies. The latter you can imagine in all its awfulness even if you've never experienced it, but you can't imagine anything like the feeling of pleasure just from a verbal description. So it makes sense that you might be tempted to become (and remain) a junkie once you've tasted heroin, but as long as you haven't, the negative reinforcement is much stronger.

Comment author: whpearson 05 July 2011 10:37:23AM 5 points [-]

That doesn't link to a post contending that g doesn't measure anything. Simply that it is very hard to do heritability studies of it.

Both g as linguistic knowledge absorption and g as nothing would favour Robin's side of the argument I think. An AI that was utterly wonderful at linguistic knowledge absorption would not necessarily be able to make bio-nanotech without doing further experimentation. As society may not have all the information required (I'm thinking catalogues of the hostile bacteria that the nanotech would have to survive).

Comment author: Vladimir_M 05 July 2011 05:18:50PM *  8 points [-]

That doesn't link to a post contending that g doesn't measure anything.

Morendil probably meant to link to this article instead:
http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/523.html

That one was discussed on LW a while ago, though. Sadly, instead of using his extraordinary intellectual powers and knowledge of statistics to clarify these muddled issues, the author instead ended up creating what amounts to a piece of very clever propaganda for his favored side in the controversy.

In response to Google+
Comment author: Vladimir_M 05 July 2011 07:24:54AM 4 points [-]

On a related note, does anyone know what's the deal with those "+1" buttons that you now get when you google things while you're logged into Gmail? These damned things are very easy to click accidentally. Are these "recommendations" published somewhere where they are publicly visible even if you don't have a Google profile?

Comment author: lucidfox 04 July 2011 07:25:48AM 0 points [-]

What evidence do you have for any of these claims? In particular, how do you know that stereotypes are on average exaggerated relative to the true conditional probabilities, or that they are slow to update in changing circumstances?

...Common sense?

I really didn't think it would be something I'd need to prove.

Evaluate various stereotypes about ethnical, religious, political or really other social groups you've heard. How many of them are objective? How many of them are accurate? How many of such generalizing statements are made about groups so diverse that you really cannot say much about them in general? And finally, how many of these groups have you personally interacted with enough to authoritatively evaluate those opinions?

In response to comment by lucidfox on Gender and Libido
Comment author: Vladimir_M 04 July 2011 07:47:44AM 11 points [-]

The article to which I linked lists a few stereotypes that seem clearly true to me, and any reasonable person would readily act on them. (Would you really get equally scared of old ladies and young men when walking in a bad neighborhood?) So how exactly does your common sense alone let you sort out true stereotypes from false ones, and to conclude that most stereotypes (by whatever measure) fall into the latter category?

Moreover, if you believe that acting on some kinds of stereotypes is unethical, that's a defensible position which I'm not going to dispute in this discussion. However, this position leads to the awful problem of what to do when some stereotypes are at the same time unethical and accurate -- and a common attempt to get out of this problem is to argue that all these unethical stereotypes must be inaccurate, which you seem to be doing. But this is clearly wishful thinking; reality is never aligned so conveniently with abstract moral theories.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Gender and Libido
Comment author: lucidfox 04 July 2011 06:00:45AM 0 points [-]

Stereotypes are memes, forming similarly to superstitions, in that a) whatever real-life context originally spawned them was likely exaggerated, and b) they get shared without proper understanding of said historical context.

Not to mention that stereotypes present the danger of becoming self-fulfilling prophecies, in that they'll make people more likely to try to conform to them just to avoid social backlash.

In response to comment by lucidfox on Gender and Libido
Comment author: Vladimir_M 04 July 2011 07:16:37AM *  11 points [-]

Stereotypes are memes, forming similarly to superstitions, in that a) whatever real-life context originally spawned them was likely exaggerated, and b) they get shared without proper understanding of said historical context.

What evidence do you have for any of these claims? In particular, how do you know that stereotypes are on average exaggerated relative to the true conditional probabilities, or that they are slow to update in changing circumstances?

In any case, "stereotype" is just a judgmental term for statistical discrimination, which means decision-making in situations with incomplete information based on statistically derived conditional probabilities, and that is something everyone does all the time, usually because there is no practical alternative. I find it an absolutely fascinating question what exactly motivates and determines the present respectable opinion about the boundary between common-sense reasoning about conditional probabilities and evil stereotyping.

In response to Gender and Libido
Comment author: Vladimir_M 04 July 2011 06:59:45AM 8 points [-]

I wouldn't trust the quoted article very much. It sounds like a narrative constructed around a few datapoints that are not necessarily representative (or even authentic), and certainly not like the writing of someone with in-depth knowledge of the subject. In particular, the concluding claim about ideas "made up by the church 400 years ago" is completely absurd -- by that time, there had been no such thing as "the church" in the West for almost a century.

The subject is certainly interesting, but in order to come up with any sensible theories, it would be necessary to do a far broader and in-depth study of all kinds of extant sources that offer relevant information. The fact that some people published various crackpot theories that gained some following doesn't mean that the prevailing opinion was the same, even among the intellectual classes, let alone in the general population. Just think what an absurdly distorted view of the prevailing 20th century opinion on any subject could be created by focusing selectively on various fringe ideas that gained some traction at a certain point in time.

Comment author: zntneo 01 July 2011 04:26:49PM *  2 points [-]

As someone who is both into the skeptics movement and the atheist movement i'm not sure what skeptics "wouldn't dare mutter" about. It seems to me that skeptics and atheists just have and interest in those things and want to stop the harm caused by them.

Also, i must be ignorant about all these other horrible delusions you are talking about.

Further you must be talking about instrumental rationality because i'm not sure how this is evidence against epistemic rationality.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 02 July 2011 07:17:37PM *  4 points [-]

I may have been too harsh on the skeptics, some of whom occasionally do attack nonsense in a way that riles up not just crackpots, but also some highly respectable and even academically accredited ideologues and charlatans. However, the problem I see is the main thrust of the movement, which assumes that dangerous nonsense that should be attacked and debunked is practically always purveyed and followed by people outside the official, respectable, accredited mainstream, with the implicit assumption that the latter is maybe imperfect, but still without any deep and horrendous flaws, and in matters where it produces strong consensus, we have nothing much to worry about.

This is where my Titanic analogy comes in. When I read about skeptics debunking people like, say, Uri Geller or Erich von Daeniken, clearly I have no objection to the substance of their work -- on the contrary. However, if such people are left unchecked, it's not like they will tomorrow be awarded high places in the government and the academia, and be given the power to propagandize their views with high official authority, both in classrooms and in mass media that would cite them as authorities, to write laws and regulations based on their delusions, to promote (and aggressively impose) their views through international institutions and foreign policy, etc., etc., with all the disastrous consequences that may follow from that. Therefore, shouldn't a rational person be more concerned with the possible delusions of people who do have such power and authority? They are the ones presently in charge of steering the ship, after all, and it's not like there aren't any icebergs around.

Of course, if you believe that the official institutions that produce academic consensus and respectable mainstream public opinion are generally OK and not causing any ongoing (or potential future) disasters, clearly these concerns are baseless. But are you really so sure that this optimism is based on a realistic appraisal of the situation?

Comment author: multifoliaterose 01 July 2011 12:40:29AM 2 points [-]

Basically, I believe that exploring the general questions about how mainstream views are generated in practice and what are the implications for their reliability is by far the most fruitful direction for people interested in increasing the accuracy of their beliefs across the board. Of course, if you have a particular interest in some question, you have to grapple with the concrete issues involved, and also a general exploration must be based on concrete case studies. But attacking particular mainstream views head-on may well be counterproductive in every sense, as I noted above.

This is fair; you've made your position clear, thanks.

That's assuming you have discussion partners who are knowledgeable, open-minded, and patient enough. However, such people are the most difficult to find exactly in those areas where you're faced with the Scylla of a deeply flawed mainstream and the Charybdis of even worse crackpot contrarians.

Agree in general. How about Less Wrong in particular?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 02 July 2011 06:24:03PM *  4 points [-]

Agree in general. How about Less Wrong in particular?

Well, LW is great for discussing a concrete problem if you manage to elicit some interest in it, both because of people's high general intellectual skills and because of low propensity to emotionally driven reactions that are apt to derail the discussion, even in fairly charged topics (well, except for gender-related ones, I guess). So, yes, LW is very good for this sort of reality-checking if you manage to find people interested in your topic.

Comment author: ndm25 01 July 2011 05:31:29PM *  4 points [-]

There are many other questions where the prevailing views of academic experts, intellectuals, and other high-status shapers of public opinion, are, in my opinion, completely delusional.

Name three?

edit: I find that he has already named three, and two heuristics for determining whether an academic field is full of bunk or not, here. I commend him on this article. While I remain unconvinced on the general strategy outlined, I now understand the sort of field he is discussing and find that, on the specifics, I tentatively agree.

I strongly recommend reading Robin Hanson's answer here.

Many modern ideological beliefs that are no less metaphysical and irrational than anything found in traditional religions can nevertheless be advertised as rational and objective -- and in turn backed and enforced by governments and other powerful institutions without violating the "separation of church and state" -- just because they don't fall under the standard definition of "religion."

Same challenge.

edit: I would still like to hear these.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 02 July 2011 06:09:13PM *  1 point [-]

Well, as I pointed out in my other comments, unless I answered your challenges with essays of enormous length, my answer would consist of multiple assertions without supporting evidence that sound outlandish on the face of it. Remember that we are talking about delusions that are presently shared by the experts and/or respectable high-status people.

Note that you should accept my point even if we completely disagree on what these high-status delusions are, as long as we agree that there are some, whatever they might be. Try to focus on the main point in the abstract: if delusion X is low-status and rejected by experts and high-status people (even if it might be fairly widespread among the common folk), while delusion Y is instead accepted by them, so much that by asserting non-Y you risk coming off as a crackpot, should we be more worried about X or Y, in terms of both the idealistic pursuit of truth and the practical problems that follow?

Comment author: TruePath 28 May 2011 05:35:44PM 6 points [-]

You confuse two <I>very</I> different issues.

1) How much weight you should give to the views of academics in that area, e.g., if some claim is accepted by the mainstream establishment (or conversely viewed as a valid point of disagreement) how much should that information affect your own probability judgement.

2) How much progress/how useful is the academic discipline in question. Does it require reform.


Your arguments in the first part are only relevant to #2. The programming language research community may be mirred in hopeless mathematical jealousy as they create more and more arcane type systems while ignoring the fact that ultimately programming language design is an entirely psychological question. The languages are all Turing complete and most offer the same functionality in some form the only question is one of <I>human</I> useability and the community doesn't seem very interested in checking what sorts of type systems or development environments really are empirically more productive. Maybe physics is stuck and can no longer make any real progress.

Nevertheless this has no bearing on how I should treat the evidence that 99% of physics professors predict experiment X will have outcome Y. Indeed, the argument that physics is stuck is largely that they have been so successful in explaining any easily testable phenomena it is difficult to make further progress. Similarly if I see that the programming language research people say that type system Blah is undecidable I will take that evidence seriously even if it doesn't turn out to be that useful.

(Frankly I think the harsh on CS is a bit unfair. Academia by it's nature is conservative and driven by pure research. We don't yet know whether their work will turn out to be useful down the road since CS is such a young discipline while at the same time many people do work in both practical and theoretical areas.)


I think #1 is the more interesting question. Here I would say the primary test should be whether or not disputes eventually produce consensus or not. That is does the discipline build up a store of accepted fact and move on to new issues (with occasional Kuhnian style paradigm shifts) or does it simply stay mired in the same issues without generating conclusions.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 02 July 2011 05:53:58PM *  5 points [-]

Pardon I didn't notice your comment earlier - unfortunately, you don't get notices when someone replies to top-level articles as it's done for replies to comments.

The difference you have in mind is basically the same as what I meant when I wrote about areas that are infested with a lot of bullshit work, but still fundamentally sound. Clearly CS people are smart and possess huge practically useful knowledge and skills -- after all, it's easy for anyone who works in CS research in an institution of any prominence to get a lucrative industry job working on very concrete, no-nonsense, and profitable projects. The foundations of the field are therefore clearly sound and useful.

This however still doesn't mean that there aren't entire bullshit subfields of CS, where a vast research literature is produced on things that are a clear dead-end (or aimed at entirely dreamed-up problems) while everyone pretends and loudly agrees that great contributions are being made. In such cases, the views expressed by the experts are seriously distant from reality, and it would be horribly mistaken to make important decisions by taking them at face value. People who work on such things are of course still capable of earning money doing useful work in industry, but that's only because the sort of bullshit that they have to produce must be sophisticated enough and in conformity with complex formal rules, so in order to produce the right sort of bullshit, you still need great intellectual ability and lots of useful skills.

You may be right that I should have perhaps made a stronger contrast between such fields and those that are rotten to the bottom.

Comment author: multifoliaterose 30 June 2011 05:06:34AM 6 points [-]

Thus, even judging purely by how much you're likely to move people's opinions closer or further from the truth, you should avoid arguing for contrarian views unless the situation seems especially favorable, in the sense that you'll be able to present your case competently and in front of a suitable audience.

Doesn't this push in the direction of holding contrarian views being useless except as a personal hobby? If so, why argue against mainstream delusional views at all (even as a collection without specifying what they are)? Is the point of your comment that you think it's possible to make progress by highlighting broad phenomena about the reliability of mainstream views so that people can work out the implications on their own without there being a need for explicit public discussion?

Moreover, there is always the problem of whether you can trust your own contrarian opinions. After all, even if you take the least favorable view of the respectable opinion and the academic mainstream, it is still the case that most contrarians are deluded in even crazier ways. So how do you know that you haven't in fact become a crackpot yourself?

A natural method to avoid becoming a crackpot is to reveal one's views for possible critique in a gradual and carefully argued fashion, adjusting them as people point out weaknesses. Of course it might not be a good idea to reveal one's views regardless (self-preservation; opportunity cost of time) but I don't think that danger of being a crackpot is a good reason.

These latter questions should, in my opinion, be very high (if not on the top) of the list of priorities of people who are concerned with overcoming bias and increasing their rationality and the accuracy of their beliefs, and one of my major disappointments with LW is that attempts to open discussion about these matters invariably fall flat.

I'm not sure what you have in mind here. Your post titled Some Heuristics for Evaluating the Soundness of the Academic Mainstream in Unfamiliar Fields was highly upvoted and I myself would be happy to read more along similar lines. Are there examples that you'd point to of attempts to open discussion about these matters falling flat?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 30 June 2011 08:44:25PM *  8 points [-]

Is the point of your comment that you think it's possible to make progress by highlighting broad phenomena about the reliability of mainstream views so that people can work out the implications on their own without there being a need for explicit public discussion?

Basically, I believe that exploring the general questions about how mainstream views are generated in practice and what are the implications for their reliability is by far the most fruitful direction for people interested in increasing the accuracy of their beliefs across the board. Of course, if you have a particular interest in some question, you have to grapple with the concrete issues involved, and also a general exploration must be based on concrete case studies. But attacking particular mainstream views head-on may well be counterproductive in every sense, as I noted above.

A natural method to avoid becoming a crackpot is to reveal one's views for possible critique in a gradual and carefully argued fashion, adjusting them as people point out weaknesses. Of course it might not be a good idea to reveal one's views regardless (self-preservation; opportunity cost of time) but I don't think that danger of being a crackpot is a good reason.

That's assuming you have discussion partners who are knowledgeable, open-minded, and patient enough. However, such people are the most difficult to find exactly in those areas where you're faced with the Scylla of a deeply flawed mainstream and the Charybdis of even worse crackpot contrarians.

(Please also see my reply to Nick Tarleton, who asked a similar question as the rest of your comment.)

Comment author: Nick_Tarleton 30 June 2011 06:15:16AM 2 points [-]

one of my major disappointments with LW is that attempts to open discussion about these matters invariably fall flat.

What's an example? (I mostly ask so as to have some more specific idea of what topics you're referring to.)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 30 June 2011 07:58:07PM *  11 points [-]

You can take any topic where it's impossible to make sense of the existing academic literature (and other influential high-status sources), or where the respectable mainstream consensus seems to clash with reality. When discussions about such topics are opened on LW, often the logical next step would be to ask about the more general underlying problems that give rise to these situations, instead of just focusing on the arguments about particular problems in isolation. (And even without a concrete motivation, such questions should directly follow from LW's mission statement.) Yet I see few, if any attempts to ask such general questions on LW, and my occasional attempts to open discussion along these lines, even when highly upvoted, don't elicit much in terms of interesting arguments and insight.

As an illustration, we can take an innocent and mainstream problematic topic like e.g. the health questions of lifestyle such as nutrition, exercise, etc. These topics have been discussed on LW many times, and it seems evident that the mainstream academic literature is a complete mess, with potential gems of useful insight buried under mountains of nonsense work, and authoritative statements of expert opinion given without proper justification. Yet I see no attempt to ask a straightforward follow-up question: since these areas operate under the official bureaucratic system that's supposed to be guaranteed to produce valid science, then what exactly went wrong? And what implications does it have for other areas where we take the official output of this same bureaucratic system as ironclad evidence?

Of course, when it comes to topics that are more dangerous and ideologically charged, the underlying problems are likely to be different and more severe. One can reasonably argue that such topics are best avoided on a forum like LW, both because they're likely to stir up bad blood and because of the potential bad signaling and reputational consequences for the forum as an institution. But even if we take the most restrictive attitude towards such topics, there are still many others that can be used as case studies for gaining insight about the systematic underlying problems.

Comment author: timtyler 30 June 2011 07:12:16AM *  3 points [-]

From what I understand, the professional learned society of cryobiologists has an official policy that bans any engagement with cryonics to its members under the pain of expulsion (which penalty would presumably have disastrous career implications). Therefore, cryobiologists are officially mandated to uphold this party line and condemn cryonics, if they are to speak on the subject at all.

This seems to be the relevant bit:

Upon a two-thirds vote of the Governors in office, the Board of Governors may refuse membership to applicants, or suspend or expel members (including both individual and institutional members), whose conduct is deemed detrimental to the Society, including applicants or members engaged in or who promote any practice or application which the Board of Governors deems incompatible with the ethical and scientific standards of the Society or as misrepresenting the science of cryobiology, including any practice or application of freezing deceased persons in anticipation of their reanimation. [Sec. 2.04 of the bylaws of the Society for Cryobiology].

It says they are not allowed to perform or promote freezing of "deceased persons" - citing concerns over ethical and scientific standards - and its own reputation. They probably want to avoid them and their members being associated with cryonics scandals and lawsuits.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 30 June 2011 06:54:45PM *  7 points [-]

As I said, I don't have a dog in this particular fight, and for all I know, the cryobiologists' rejection of cryonics might in fact be justified, for both reasons of science and pragmatist political considerations. However, the important point is that if you ask, in a polite, reasonable, and upfront manner, for a scientific assessment of cryonics and what exactly are the problems with it, it is not possible to get a full, honest, and scientifically sound answer, as demonstrated by that article to which I linked above. Contrast this with what happens if you ask, say, physicists what is wrong with some crackpot theory of physics -- they will spell out a detailed argument showing what exactly is wrong, and they will be able to answer any further questions you might have and fully clarify any confusion, as long as you're not being impervious to argument.

Regardless of any particular concern about cryonics, the conclusion to draw from this is that a strong mainstream academic consensus sometimes rests on a rock-solid foundation that can be readily examined if you just invest some effort, but sometimes this is not the case, at the very least because for some questions there is no way to even get a clear and detailed statement on what exactly this foundation is supposed to be. From this, it is reasonable to conclude that mainstream academic consensus should not be taken as conclusive evidence for anything -- and in turn, contrarian opinions should not be automatically discarded just because mainstream academics reject them -- unless you have some reliable criteria for evaluating how solid its foundation is in a particular area. The case of cryonics is relevant for my argument only insofar as this is a question where lots of LW people have run into a strong mainstream consensus for which it's impossible to get a solid justification, thus providing one concrete example that shouldn't be too controversial here.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 30 June 2011 06:11:25PM *  30 points [-]

The best cure against such prideful attitudes is to ask yourself what you have to show in terms of practical accomplishments and status if you're so much more rational and intellectually advanced than ordinary people. If they are so stupid and delusional to be deserving of such intolerance and contempt, then an enlightened and intellectually superior person should be able to run circles around them and easily come out on top, no?

Now, if you actually have extremely high status and extraordinary accomplishments, then I guess you can justify your attitudes of contemptuous superiority. (Although an even higher status is gained by cultivating attitudes of aristocratic generosity and noblesse oblige.) If not, however, and if you're really good at "losing to evidence," as you put it, this consideration should be enough to make your attitudes more humble.

Comment author: multifoliaterose 29 June 2011 04:40:38AM 2 points [-]

whenever I open this topic, giving concrete examples is problematic, since these are by definition respectable and high-status delusions, so it's difficult or impossible to contradict them without sounding like a crackpot or extremist.

On the other hand elsewhere you write

There are many other questions where the prevailing views of academic experts, intellectuals, and other high-status shapers of public opinion, are, in my opinion, completely delusional. Some of these are just theoretical questions without much practical bearing on anything, but others have real ugly consequences on a large scale, up to and including mass death and destruction, or seriously threaten such consequences in the future. Many of them also make the world more ugly and dysfunctional, and life more burdensome and joyless, in countless little ways; others are presented as enlightened wisdom on how to live your life but are in fact a recipe for disaster for most people who might believe and try to apply them.

which suggests that you think that the things that you're avoiding writing about are very important. If they're so important then why not pay the price of being considered a crackpot/extremist by some in order to fight against the delusional views? Is the key issue self-preservation of the type that you mentioned in response to Komponisto?

Also, arguing on the internet under one's real identity is a bad idea for anyone who isn't in one of these four categories...

Or is the point that you think that there's not much hope for changing people's views on the questions that you have in mind so that it's futile to try?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 30 June 2011 02:28:37AM *  15 points [-]

Well, there are several reasons why I'm not incessantly shouting all my contrarian views from the rooftops.

For start, yes, obviously I am concerned with the possible reputational consequences. But even ignoring that, the problem is that arguing for contrarian views may well have the effect of making them even more disreputable and strengthening the mainstream consensus, if it's done in a way that signals low status, eccentricity, immorality, etc., or otherwise enables the mainstream advocates to score a rhetorical victory in the ensuing debate (regardless of the substance of the arguments). Thus, even judging purely by how much you're likely to move people's opinions closer or further from the truth, you should avoid arguing for contrarian views unless the situation seems especially favorable, in the sense that you'll be able to present your case competently and in front of a suitable audience.

Moreover, there is always the problem of whether you can trust your own contrarian opinions. After all, even if you take the least favorable view of the respectable opinion and the academic mainstream, it is still the case that most contrarians are deluded in even crazier ways. So how do you know that you haven't in fact become a crackpot yourself? This is why rather than making a piecemeal catalog of delusional mainstream views, I would prefer to have a more general framework for estimating how reliable the mainstream opinion is likely to be on a particular subject given various factors and circumstances, and what general social, economic, political, and other mechanisms have practical influence in this regard. Effort spent on obtaining such insight is, in my opinion, far more useful than attacking seemingly wrong mainstream opinions one by one.

These latter questions should, in my opinion, be very high (if not on the top) of the list of priorities of people who are concerned with overcoming bias and increasing their rationality and the accuracy of their beliefs, and one of my major disappointments with LW is that attempts to open discussion about these matters invariably fall flat. (This despite the fact that such discussions could be productive even without opening any especially dangerous and charged topics, and despite the fact that on LW one regularly hears frustrated accounts of the mainstream being impervious to argument on topics such as existential risk or cryonics. I find it especially puzzling that smart people who are concerned about the latter have no interest in investigating the underlying more general and systematic problems.)

Comment author: timtyler 29 June 2011 06:02:05AM *  1 point [-]

One example is the already mentioned neglect of technology-related existential risks -- as well as other non-existential but still scary threats that might be opened due to the upcoming advances in technology -- and the tendency to dismiss people who ask such questions as crackpots.

That does seem to be a useful heuristic. DOOM mongers are usually selling something. They typically make exaggerated and biased claims. The SIAI and FHI do not seem to be significant exceptions to this - though their attempts to be scientific and rational certainly help.

These types of organisation form naturaly from those with the largest p(DOOM) estimates. That is not necessarily the best way to obtain an unbiased estimate. If you run into organistions who are trying to convince you that the end of the world is nigh - and you should donate to help them save it - you should at least be aware that this pattern is an ancient one with a dubious pedigree.

Another is the academic and medical establishment's official party line against cryonics, which is completely impervious to any argument. (I have no interest in cryonics myself, but the dogmatic character of the official line is clear, as well as its lack of solid foundation.)

I am inclined to ask for references. As far as I understand it there is a real science Cryogenics - which goes out of its way to distance itself from its more questionable cousin (cryonics) - which has a confusingly-similar name. Much as psychology tries to distinguish itself from psychiatry. Is there much more than that going on here?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 30 June 2011 01:13:09AM *  10 points [-]

I am inclined to ask for references.

From what I understand, the professional learned society of cryobiologists has an official policy that bans any engagement with cryonics to its members under the pain of expulsion (which penalty would presumably have disastrous career implications). Therefore, cryobiologists are officially mandated to uphold this party line and condemn cryonics, if they are to speak on the subject at all. From what I've seen, cryonics people have repeatedly challenged this position with reasonable arguments, but they haven't received anything like satisfactory rebuttals that would justify the official position. (See more details in this post, whose author has spent considerable effort searching for such rebuttal.)

Now, for all I know, it may well be that the claims of cryonicists are complete bunk after all. The important point is that here we see a clear and unambiguous instance of the official academic mainstream upholding an official line that is impervious to rational argument, and attempts to challenge this official line elicit sneering and stonewalling rather than any valid response. One of my claims in this discussion is that this is far from being the only such example (although the official positions and the condemnations of dissenters are rarely spelled out so explicitly), and LW people familiar with this example should take it as a significant piece of evidence against trusting the academic mainstream consensus in general.

Comment author: Friendly-HI 28 June 2011 10:07:54AM *  0 points [-]

First, models can be useful in practice even if they don't incorporate reductionism even in principle.

True, but are such models really ->more<- useful - especially in the long run? If I'm a philosopher of morality and am not aware, that morality only applies to certain kinds of minds, which arise from certain kinds of brains... then my work would be akin to building a skycastle and obsessing about the color of the wallpapers, while being oblivious that the whole thing isn't firmly grounded in reality, but floats midair. Of course that doesn't mean that all of my concepts would be wrong, since perfectly normal common sense can carry someone a long way when it comes to moral behavior... but I may still be very susceptible to get other kinds of important questions dead wrong - like stem cells or abortion.

So while of course you're right when you say that models can be very useful even if they are non-reductionist, I would maintain that there is a limit to the usefulness such simplistic models can reach, and that they can be surpassed by models that are better grounded in reality. In 50 years we may have to answer questions like: "is a simulated mind a real person to which we must apply our morality?" or "how should we treat this new genetically engineered species of animal?" I would predict giving answers to such questions could be simple, although not easily achieved by today's standards: Look at their minds and see how they processes pain and pleasure and how these emotions relate to various other things going on in there and you'll have your practical answer, without the need of pointless armchair-philosophy-battles based on false premises. We may encounter many moral issues of similar sorts in the upcoming years and we'll be terribly unequipped to deal with them, if we don't realize that they are reducible to tangible neural networks.

PS: Also I'm not sure how human rights are any more a metaphysical fiction than say... tax law is. How is a social contract or convention metaphysical, if you'll find its content inside the brains of people or written down on artifacts? But I highly suspect that's not the kind of human rights you're talking about - nor the kind of human rights most people are talking about, when they use this term. So you probably accuse them rightly for treating human rights as if it was some kind of metaphysical concept.

Also I find it curious that you would prefer god-talk morality over certain philosophical concepts of morality - seeing how the latter would in principle be much more susceptible to our line of reasoning than the former. I prefer as little god-talk as possible.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 28 June 2011 11:16:29PM *  5 points [-]

True, but are such models really ->more<- useful - especially in the long run?

Of course they are more useful. You have only finite computational power, and often any models that are tractable must be simplified at the expense of capturing fundamental reality. Even if that's not an issue, insisting on a more exact model beyond what's good enough in practice only introduces additional cost and error-proneness.

Now, you are of course right that problems that may await us in the future, such as e.g. the moral status of artificial minds, are hopelessly beyond the scope of any traditional moral/ethical intuitions and models, and require getting down to the fundamentals if we are to get any sensible answers at all. However, in this discussion, I have in mind much more mundane everyday practical questions of how to live your life and deal with people. When it comes to these, traditional models and intuitions that have evolved naturally (in both the biological and cultural sense) normally beat any attempts at second-guessing them. That’s at least from my experience and observations.

Also I'm not sure how human rights are any more a metaphysical fiction than say... tax law is.

Fundamentally, they aren’t. The normal human modus operandi for resolving disputes is to postulate some metaphysical entities about whose nature everyone largely agrees, and use the recognized characteristics of these metaphysical entities as Schelling points for agreement. This gives a great practical flexibility to norms, since a disagreement about them can be (hopefully) channeled into a metaphysical debate about these entities, and the outcome of this debate is then used as the conclusive Schelling point, avoiding violent conflict.

From this perspective, there is no essential difference between ancient religious debates over what God’s will is in some dispute and the modern debates over what is compatible with “human rights” -- or any legal procedure beyond fact-finding, for that matter. All of these can be seen as rhetorical contests in metaphysical debates aimed at establishing and stabilizing more concrete Schelling points within some existing general metaphysical framework. (As for utilitarianism, here we get to another important criticism of it: conclusions of utilitarian arguments typically make for very poor Schelling points in practice, for all sorts of reasons.)

Of course, these systems can work better or worse in practice, and they can break down in all sorts of nasty ways. The important point is that human disputes will be resolved either violently or by such metaphysical debates, and the existing frameworks for these debates should be judged on the practical quality of the network of Schelling points they provide -- not on how convincingly they obfuscate the unavoidable metaphysical nature of the entities they postulate. From this perspective, you might well prefer God-talk in some situations for purely practical reasons.

Comment author: multifoliaterose 28 June 2011 06:08:18AM 3 points [-]

I agree with much of your worldview as I've interpreted it. In particular I agree that:

•Behavioral norms evolved by natural selection to solve coordination problems and to allow humans to work together productively given the particulars of our biological hard-wiring.

•Many apparently logically sound departures from behavioral norms will not serve their intended functions for complicated reasons of which people don't have explicit understanding.

•Human civilization is a complicated dynamical system which is (in some sense) at equilibrium and attempts to shift from this equilibrium will often either fail (because of equilibrating forces) or lead to disaster (on account of destabilizing the equilibrium and causing everything to fall apart.

•The standard for rigor and the accuracy in social sciences is often very poor owing to each of the biases of the researchers involved and the inherent complexity of the relevant problems (as you described in your top level post.

On the other hand, here and elsewhere in the thread you present criticism without offering alternatives. Criticism is not without value but its value is contingent on the existence of superior alternatives.

But you at least need some kind of feedback. "QALYs per hour of effort" is pretty decent.

Trouble is, once you go down that road, it's likely that you're going to come up with fatally misguided or biased conclusions.

What do you suggest as an alternative to MixedNuts' suggestion?

As rhollerithdotcom said, folk ethics gives ambiguous prescriptions in many cases of practical import. One can avoid some such issues by focusing one's efforts elsewhere, but not in all cases. People representative of the general population have strong differences of opinion as to what sorts of jobs are virtuous and what sorts of philanthropic activities are worthwhile. So folk ethics alone don't suffice to give a practical applicable ethical theory.

Also, very few, if any things people do result in a clear Pareto improvement for everyone, and interpersonal trade-offs are inherently problematic.)

But interpersonal trade-offs are also inevitable; it's not as though one avoids the issue by avoiding consequentialism.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 28 June 2011 09:27:29AM *  4 points [-]

The discussion has drifted away somewhat from the original disagreement, which was about situations where a seemingly clear-cut consequentialist argument clashes with a nearly universal folk-ethical intuition (as exemplified by various trolley-type problems). I agree that folk ethics (and its natural customary and institutional outgrowths) are ambiguous and conflicted in some situations to the point of being useless as a guide, and the number of such situations may well increase with the technological developments in the future. I don't pretend to have any great insight about these problems. In this discussion, I am merely arguing that when there is a conflict between a consequentialist (or other formal) argument and a folk-ethical intuition, it is strong evidence that there is something seriously wrong with the former, even if it's entirely non-obvious what it might be, and it's fallacious to automatically discard the latter as biased.

Regarding this, though:

But interpersonal trade-offs are also inevitable; it's not as though one avoids the issue by avoiding consequentialism.

The important point is that most conflicts get resolved in spontaneous, or at least tolerably costly ways because the conflicting parties tacitly share a focal point when an interpersonal trade-off is inevitable. The key insight here is that important focal points that enable things to run smoothly often lack any rational justification by themselves. What makes them valuable is simply that they are recognized as such by all the parties involved, whatever they are -- and therefore they often may seem completely irrational or unfair by other standards.

Now, consequentialists may come up with a way of improving this situation by whatever measure of welfare they use. However, what they cannot do reliably is to make people accept the implied new interpersonal trade-offs as new focal points, and if they don't, the plan will backfire -- maybe with a spontaneous reversion to the status quo ante, and maybe with a disastrous conflict brought by the wrecking of the old network of tacit agreements. Of course, it may also happen that the new interpersonal trade-offs are accepted (whether enthusiastically or by forceful imposition) and the reform is successful. What is essential to recognize, however, is that interpersonal trade-offs are not only theoretically indeterminate, but also that any way of resolving them must deal with these complicated issues of whether it will be workable in practice. For this reason, many consequentialist designs that look great on paper are best avoided in practice.

Comment author: pthalo 28 June 2011 07:14:28AM *  1 point [-]

Because I live in a former eastern bloc country (Hungary). My only guess is the fridge is that old. (It's not mine, but it came with the apartment I live in. The building I live in is Russian built too. :)

I will look again it, to make sure I got the letters right and to make sure it is pointing at what I thought it was. Since my Russian is so bad, when i checked last time what the words said, I was repeating "V soft sign K L" to myself so i wouldnt forget it before i got back to the keyboard. (I was confident i could remember min and maks) so it may have stood out in my head enough that i forgot what it was set to.

But it's definitely cold in fridge, so it cannot be set to "turn off."

This time, I take my camera with me :)

.... and discover that it is set to maximum (МАКС).

Here is a picture http://pics.livejournal.com/pthalogreen/pic/0012rat7 . It also has another setting "НОРМ" which im going to assume is the "normal" or "medium" that i was remembering that it had. I think I set it to maks some time ago in attempt to solve the food spoilage problem.

It's really hard for me to remember выключить because my knowledge of Slavic languages (and understanding of Russian via cognates) comes mostly from southern slavic languages which I have studied, like Serbian, and uključiti in Serbian means "to turn on".

Comment author: Vladimir_M 28 June 2011 08:13:40AM *  4 points [-]

It's really hard for me to remember выключить because my knowledge of Slavic languages (and understanding of Russian via cognates) comes mostly from southern slavic languages which I have studied, like Serbian, and uključiti in Serbian means "to turn on".

Haha, you've run into some of the most confusing false friends between any languages there. The Russian cognate of Serbian (and Bosnian/Croatian) uključiti is включить, which if I'm not mistaken means the same thing -- not выключить, which means the exact opposite.

To make things even more confusing, the BCS verbal prefix u- normally denotes arrival/entering, whereas in Russian it generally denotes leaving. So you get false friends like ući "to enter" vs. уйти "to go away," or uletjeti "to fly in" vs. улететь "to fly away." Generally, if there exists a Russian cognate of a BCS verb with the u- prefix, it will have the prefix в- or во-, not у- or вы-. The former are real etymological cognates, while the latter are not despite the similarity, and often in fact convey the opposite meaning.

Such false friends are even more fun when you see Serbian spelled in Cyrillic, making the false similarities even more prominent. (The first prize, I think, goes to this one, though my great favorite is also право, which is "straight" in Serbian but "right" in Russian when you give directions.)

Comment author: taryneast 27 June 2011 10:39:24AM *  5 points [-]

OOC - some examples would be nice :)

I think a lot of the people that fall into this camp (at least those that I know of) are people that have just recently deconverted - they've just been through a major life-change involving religion and therefore are understandably entranced with the whole process as it is particularly meaningful to them.

Alternatively, they are reacting against some heavy prejudice that they have had to suffer through - or have some loved ones that are particularly "afflicted" and want to see something done to prevent it happening to others.

Sure, there are other big, important things out there... but one man's meat is another's poison, and all that.

I think it's easy enough to say that there are bigger problems out there... when we are looking at it from the perspective of having been atheist for a long time. but some people have just had their world cave in - everything has been upturned. They no longer have that huge big safety net underneath them that tells them that everything is going to be alright in the afterlife. Maybe they've just discovered that they've been wasting one seventh of their life in church when they could have been out there exploring his beautiful world that we live in or spending quality time with their kids... it may seem like nothing important to you, but it's a Big Thing to some people.

PS - I am also inclined to agree with you that there are better things the time could be spent on... but that's "better from my perspective" and it's not mine that counts.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 27 June 2011 07:31:38PM *  10 points [-]

OOC - some examples would be nice :)

Well, whenever I open this topic, giving concrete examples is problematic, since these are by definition respectable and high-status delusions, so it's difficult or impossible to contradict them without sounding like a crackpot or extremist.

There are however a few topics where prominent LW participants have run into such instances of respectable opinion being dogmatic and immune to rational argument. On example is the already mentioned neglect of technology-related existential risks -- as well as other non-existential but still scary threats that might be opened due to the upcoming advances in technology -- and the tendency to dismiss people who ask such questions as crackpots. Another is the academic and medical establishment's official party line against cryonics, which is completely impervious to any argument. (I have no interest in cryonics myself, but the dogmatic character of the official line is clear, as well as its lack of solid foundation.)

This, however, is just the tip of the iceberg. Unfortunately, listing other examples typically means opening ideologically charged topics that are probably best left alone. One example that shouldn't be too controversial is economics. We have people in power to regulate and manage things, with enough power and influence to wreak havoc if they don't know what they're doing, whose supposed expertise however appears, on independent examination, to consist mostly of cargo-cult science and ideological delusions, even though they bear the most prestigious official titles and accreditations. Just this particular observation should be enough to justify my Titanic allegory.

Comment author: Friendly-HI 27 June 2011 03:16:03PM *  4 points [-]

I take [passionate atheism/skepticism] as strong evidence against their rationality

Why? Just because they spend their time in a perhaps less than optimal manner (compared to existential risks) doesn't automatically mean that passionate atheists and skeptics are somehow highly irrational people, does it? I suspect a lot of them would be potential lesswrong readers, it's just that they haven't yet encountered these ideas yet.

Most people first had to become "regular" rationalists before they became lesswrongers. If I had stumbled upon this website a looong time ago when I was still something along the lines of a New Ager, I strongly suspect the Bayesian rationality meme simply would not have fallen on fertile ground. Cleaning out the superstitious garbage from your mind seems to be quite an important step for many people. It certainly was for me.

I do not agree with your viewpoint that these people are entirely wasting their time. Not every man, woman and child can participate directly or indirectly in the development of friendly AGI - and I've seen much worse use of time and effort than conversion attempts by the "New Atheist" movement. After all, something we may want to keep in mind is that the success and failure of many futuristic things we discuss here on lesswrong may somewhat depend on public opinion and perception (think stem cells) - and I'd much rather face at least somewhat rational atheists than a bunch of deluded theists and esoterics. The difference between 10 and 20% atheists may be all the difference it takes, to achieve more positive outcomes in certain scenarios.

Furthermore, if lesswrongian though has any kind of easily identifiable target group that would be worth "advertising" to, you'd probably find it among skeptics and atheists.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 27 June 2011 06:53:44PM *  8 points [-]

Just because they spend their time in a perhaps less than optimal manner (compared to existential risks) doesn't automatically mean that passionate atheists and skeptics are somehow highly irrational people, does it?

I didn't say it was conclusive evidence, only that it is strong evidence.

Moreover, the present neglect of technology-related existential (and other) risk is only one example where the respectable opinion is nowadays remote from reality. There are many other questions where the prevailing views of academic experts, intellectuals, and other high-status shapers of public opinion, are, in my opinion, completely delusional. Some of these are just theoretical questions without much practical bearing on anything, but others have real ugly consequences on a large scale, up to and including mass death and destruction, or seriously threaten such consequences in the future. Many of them also make the world more ugly and dysfunctional, and life more burdensome and joyless, in countless little ways; others are presented as enlightened wisdom on how to live your life but are in fact a recipe for disaster for most people who might believe and try to apply them.

In this situation, if someone focuses on traditional religion as a supposedly especially prominent source of false beliefs and irrationality, it is likely that this is due to ideological reasons, which in turn means that they also swallow much of the above mentioned respectable delusions. Again, there are exceptions, which is why I wrote "lacking other information." But this is really true in most cases.

Also, another devilish intellectual hack that boosts many modern respectable delusions is the very notion of separating "religious" beliefs and opinions from others. Many modern ideological beliefs that are no less metaphysical and irrational than anything found in traditional religions can nevertheless be advertised as rational and objective -- and in turn backed and enforced by governments and other powerful institutions without violating the "separation of church and state" -- just because they don't fall under the standard definition of "religion." In my experience, and again with a few honorable exceptions, those who advocate against traditional religion are often at the same time entirely OK with such enforcement of state-backed ideology, even though there is no rational reason to see it as essentially different from the old-fashion establishment of religion.

Comment author: Friendly-HI 26 June 2011 02:52:29PM *  2 points [-]

Is this why you do this?

Partially perhaps, but it's hardly the main reason. Language nearly always carries with it a frequency that conveys social status and a lot of talk and argument isn't much more than a renegotiation or affirmation of the social contract between people. So quite a lot of the actual content of any given typical conversation you're likely to hear is quite braindead and only superficially appears to be civilized. That kind of smalltalk is boring if it's transparent to you, and controversy spices things up for sure - so yes, there may be something to it...

But I think the ultimate reason for being provocative is because "the truth" simply is quite provoking and startling by itself, given the typical nonrational worldviews people hold. If people were rational by nature and roughly on the same page as most lesswrongers, I certainly wouldn't feel like making an effort to provoke or piss people off just for the sake of disagreement. I simply care a lot about the truth and I care comparatively less about what people think (in general and also about me), so I'm often not terribly concerned about sounding agreeable. Sometimes I make an effort if I find it important to actually convince someone, but naturally I just feel like censoring my opinions as little as necessary. (Which is not to say that my approach is in any way all that commendable, it just simple feels natural to me - it's in a way my mental pathway of least resistance and conscious effort.)

I'm not doing it all the time of course, I can be quite agreeable when I happen to feel like it - but overall it's just not my regular state of being.

"...as if a pastor or bishop actually knows anything about anything. (Let alone something about morality and ethics)."

I disagree.

You can't be serious, how dare you trample on my beliefs and hurt my feelings like that? ;)

...well, maybe know more about morality isn't the right phrase, but they've [theologans] thought about it more.

Sure, and conspiracy theorists think a lot about 9/11 as well. The amount of thought people spend on any conceivable subject is at best very dimly (and usually not at all) correlated with the quality/truthfulness of their conclusions, if the "mental algorithm" by which they structure their thoughts is semi-worthless by virtue of being irrational (aka. out of step with reality).

Trying to think about morality without the concept that morality must exclusively relate to the neurological makeup of conscious brains is damn close to a waste of time. It's like trying to wrap your head around biology without the concept of evolution - it cannot be done. You may learn certain things nonetheless, but whatever model you come up with - it will be a completely confused mess. Whatever theology may come up with on the subject of morality is at best right by accident and frequently enough it's positively primitive, wrong and harmful - either way it's a complete waste of time and thought given the rational alternatives (neurology,psychology) we can employ to discover true concepts about morality.

What religion has to say about morality is in the same category as what science and philosophy had to say about life and biology before Darwin and Wallace came along - which in retrospect amounts pretty much to "next to nothing of interest".

So are all those Anglican priests nice and moral people? Sure, whatever. But do they have any real competence whatsoever to make decisions about moral issues (let alone things like nuclear power)? Hell no.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 27 June 2011 02:18:02AM *  13 points [-]

Trying to think about morality without the concept that morality must exclusively relate to the neurological makeup of conscious brains is damn close to a waste of time.

That's like saying that the job of a sports coach is a waste of time because he is clueless about physics. If it were impossible to gain useful insights and intuitions about the world without reducing everything to first principles, nothing would ever get done. On the contrary, in the overwhelming majority of cases where humans successfully grapple with the real world, from the most basic everyday actions to the most complex technological achievements, it's done using models and intuitions that are, as the saying goes, wrong but useful.

So, if you're looking for concrete answers to the basic questions of how to live, it's a bad idea to discard wisdom from the past just because it's based on models of the world to which we now have fundamentally more accurate ones. A model that captures fundamental reality more closely doesn't automatically translate to superior practical insight. Otherwise people who want to learn to play tennis would be hiring physicists to teach them.

Comment author: Nornagest 26 June 2011 01:50:26AM *  8 points [-]

Try a slogan like "democracy is retarded" on the other hand and you'll have butchered the holy cow of practically everyone.

Sure, but that's because slogans aren't about convincing people; they're about signaling group affiliation. Wear a T-shirt with "democracy is retarded" on it and you're effectively saying that you belong to a group that no one has ever heard of and is apparently openly opposed to one of the major shared tenets of practically every active political faction out there. Not a good way to win friends.

On the other hand, I'd be willing to bet that writing a series of blog posts, or even a book, on why democracy is retarded (ideally not in those words) wouldn't paint you as anything more than, at worst, mildly crankish. Very little is actually unthinkable in the educated world -- but if you're going to voice opinions outside the Overton window you'd better voice them in terms of actual arguments. By definition, you can't expect your audience to be familiar with the existing arguments for them.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 27 June 2011 01:45:41AM *  7 points [-]

Very little is actually unthinkable in the educated world -- but if you're going to voice opinions outside the Overton window you'd better voice them in terms of actual arguments.

That depends on how far you are outside the Overton window, and also in what direction. On some particularly charged topics where the respectable opinion is remote from reality (or at the very least lacking firm justification and open to serious doubt), people are aware that there are plausible-sounding arguments against the respectable opinion, but believe that this is just seductive propaganda by crackpots or villains that has been decidedly debunked by the respectable authorities. (Even though that's not the case, and the existing attempts at debunking are in fact severely flawed.) So even if you make a perfectly calm, logical, and scholarly argument against the respectable opinion, you'll just trigger people's alarms, without being able to make them listen.

Comment author: Friendly-HI 26 June 2011 01:27:44AM 9 points [-]

Sure, rationality has obviously nothing to do with how mainstream or contrarian a belief is - but that should be so obvious to even any fairly new lesswronger, that we can be quite sure that her goal isn't to alienate people just for the sake of it.

Also, you're right about the celestial: In the western world religion has become quite low-hanging fruit by now - so low it practically touches the ground. "The God Delusion" and "God is Not Great" apparently had quite an impact on the US and the UK during the last years and smart people begin to dole out stomach punches to Jesus left and right. By now one can easily wear his or her criticism of religion on a T-shirt and one will still have the lion's share of the academically educated world on one's side.

Try a slogan like "democracy is retarded" on the other hand and you'll have butchered the holy cow of practically everyone.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 27 June 2011 01:21:47AM 16 points [-]

Also, you're right about the celestial: In the western world religion has become quite low-hanging fruit by now - so low it practically touches the ground.

In most cases, when I see that someone is a particularly passionate and dedicated atheist (in the sense of the "New Atheists" etc.), lacking other information, I take it as strong evidence against their rationality. For someone living in the contemporary Western world who wants to fight against widespread and dangerous irrational beliefs, focusing on traditional religion indicates extreme bias and total blindness towards various delusions that are nowadays infinitely more pernicious and malignant than anything coming out of any traditional religion. (The same goes for those "skeptics" who relentlessly campaign against low-status folk superstition like UFOs or crystal healing, but would never dare mutter anything against all sorts of horrendous delusions that enjoy high status and academic approval.)

I like to compare such people with someone on board the Titanic who loses sleep over petty folk superstitions of the passengers, while at the same time being blissfully happy with the captain's opinions about navigation. (And, to extend the analogy, often even attacking those who question the captain's competence as dangerous crackpots.)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 26 June 2011 12:34:39AM *  22 points [-]

Ultimately, I have an awfully long way to go if I want to be rational, as opposed to being someone who’s just interested in reading about math and science.

What exactly is your benchmark for being "rational"? If you mean becoming more openly critical in situations where your agreeableness prevents you from it, you should be aware that there are topics much more dangerous than religion where an uncompromising quest for truth might lead you to clash with the respectable opinion, both public and private. With this in mind, and considering the rest of what you wrote, it seems to me that for you, becoming hostile towards religion would not mean becoming more rational in any meaningful sense of the term. It would merely be a way to signal to a certain sort of people, without increasing the accuracy of your beliefs in any way, and distracting from topics that are far more difficult and dangerous, and thus a more critical test of rationality.

Comment author: rhollerith_dot_com 25 June 2011 07:07:17AM *  1 point [-]

Your praise for folk ethics would be more persuasive to me, Vladimir, if it came with a description of folk ethics -- and if that description explained how folk ethics avoids giving ambiguous answers in many important situations -- because it seems to me that a large part of this folk ethics of which you speak consists of people attempting to gain advantages over rivals and potential rivals by making folk-ethical claims that advance their personal interests.

In other words, although I am sympathetic to arguments for conservatism in matter of interpersonal relationships and social institutions, your argument would be a whole lot stronger if the process of identifying or determining the thing being argued for did not rely entirely on the phrase "folk virtue ethics".

Comment author: Vladimir_M 25 June 2011 09:56:34PM *  2 points [-]

I don't think we need to get into any controversial questions about interpersonal relationships and social institutions here. (Although the arguments I've made apply to these too.) I'd rather focus on the entirely ordinary, mundane, and uncontroversial instances of human cooperation and coordination. With this in mind, I think you're making a mistake when you write:

[I]t seems to me that a large part of this folk ethics of which you speak consists of people attempting to gain advantages over rivals and potential rivals by making folk-ethical claims that advance their personal interests.

In fact, the overwhelming part of folk ethics consists of decisions that are so ordinary and uncontroversial that we don't even stop to think about them, and of interactions (and the resulting social norms and institutions) that are taken completely for granted by everyone -- even though the complexity of the underlying coordination problems is enormous, and the way things really work is still largely mysterious to us. The thesis I'm advancing is that a lot of what may seem like bias and imperfection in folk ethics may in fact somehow be essential for the way these problems get solved, and seemingly airtight consequentialist arguments against clear folk-ethical intuitions may in fact be fatally flawed in this regard. (And I think they nearly always are.)

Now, if we move to the question of what happens in those exceptional situations where there is controversy and conflict, things do get more complicated. Here it's important to note that the boundary between regular smooth human interactions and conflicts is fuzzy, insofar as the regular interactions often involve conflict resolution in regular and automatic ways, and there are no sharp limits between such events and more overt and dramatic conflict. Also, there is no sharp bound between entirely instinctive folk ethics intuitions and those that are codified in more explicit social (and ultimately legal) norms.

And here we get to the controversies that you mention: the conflict between social and legal norms that embody and formalize folk intuitions of justice, fairness, proper behavior, etc. and evolve spontaneously through tradition, precedent, customary practice, etc., and the attempts to replace such norms by new ones backed by consequentialist arguments. Here, indeed, one can argue in favor of what you call "conservatism in matter of interpersonal relationships and social institutions" using very similar arguments to the mine above. But whether or not you agree with such arguments, my main point can be made without even getting into any controversial issues.

Comment author: Unnamed 25 June 2011 05:25:51PM 2 points [-]

Could you say more about what makes folks ethics a form of virtue ethics (or at least sufficiently virtue-based for you to use the term "folk virtue ethics")? I can see some aspects of it that are virtue-based, but overall it seems like a hodgepodge of different intuitions/emotions/etc.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 25 June 2011 09:15:24PM 2 points [-]

Yes, it's certainly not a clear-cut classification. However, I'd say that the principal mechanisms of folk ethics are very much virtue-based, i.e. they revolve around asking what sort of person acts in a particular way, and what can be inferred about others' actions and one's own choice of actions from that.

Comment author: MixedNuts 24 June 2011 07:30:22AM 1 point [-]

Okay, I don't get it. I can only parse what you're saying one of two ways:

  • "We don't have any idea of folk ethics works." But that's not true, we know it's not "whatever emperor Ming says". We can and do observe folk ethics at work, and notice it favors ingroups, is loss averse, is scope insensitive, etc.
  • "Any attempt to do better won't be perfectly free of bias. Therefore, you can't do better. Therefore, the best you can do is to use folk ethics... which has a bunch of known biases."

You very likely don't mean either of these, so I don't know what you're trying to say.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 25 June 2011 12:13:31AM *  3 points [-]

These statements are a bit crude and exaggerated version of what I had in mind, but they're actually not that far off the mark.

The basic human folk ethics, shaped within certain bounds by culture, is amazingly successful in ensuring human coordination and cooperation in practice, at both small and large scales. (The fact that we see its occasional bad failures as dramatic and tragic only shows that we're used to it working great most of the time.) The key issue here is that these coordination problems are extremely hard and largely beyond our understanding. While we can predict with some accuracy how individual humans behave, the problems of coordinating groups of people involve countless complicated issues of game theory, signaling, etc., about which we're still largely ignorant. In this sense, we really don't understand how folk ethics works.

Now, the important thing to note is that various aspects of folk ethics may seem as irrational and biased (in the sense that changing them would have positive consequences by some reasonable measure), while in fact the truth is much more complicated. These "biases" may in fact be essential for the way human coordination works in practice for some reason that's still mysterious to us. Even if they don't have any direct useful purpose, it may well be that given the constraints of human minds, eliminating them is impossible without breaking something else badly. (A prime example is that once someone goes down the road of breaking intuitively appealing folk ethics principles in the name of consequentialist calculations, it's practically certain that these calculations will end up being fatally biased.)

Here I have of course handwaved the question of how exactly successful human cooperation depends on the culture-specific content of people's folk ethics. That question is fascinating, complicated, and impossible to tackle without opening all sorts of ideologically charged issues. But in any case, it presents even further complications and difficulties for any attempt at analyzing and fixing human intuitions by consequentialist reasoning.

(Also, similar reasoning applies not just to folk ethics vs. consequentialism, but also to all sorts of beliefs that may seem as outright irrational from a naive "rationalist" perspective, but whose role in practice is much more complicated and important.)

Comment author: Desrtopa 24 June 2011 02:54:24AM 4 points [-]

I don't think it would be an exaggeration to describe it as the biggest breakthrough in computer technology since the very invention of computers.

Bigger than the internet? Cars could already be driven, but people can't do internet stuff without the internet.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 24 June 2011 03:38:21AM *  5 points [-]

Admittedly this is a subjective judgment, but I really think it's incomparably greater. Once you take into account the steady improvement in computer speed and storage capacity, scalable and ultimately global computer networking is a straightforward development at some point along the road. After all, networking protocols consist of precise algorithms that are complete and self-contained in and of themselves, which just need powerful enough machines and network links to be executed. (In fact, the complexity of the present protocols comes only from cumulative clever optimizations for performance.) In contrast, these driverless cars are supposedly able to grapple with messy real-world situations and make decisions that can't be reduced to state machines in any obvious way. I can't think of any comparable technology that works well in practice.

Comment author: MixedNuts 23 June 2011 07:22:53AM 3 points [-]

in favor of "simplistic" virtue ethics

So, the fully naive system? Killing makes you a bad person, letting people die is neutral; saving lives makes you a good person, letting people live is neutral. Giving to charity is good, because sacrifice and wanting to help makes you a good person. There are sacred values (e.g. lives) and mundane ones (e.g. money) and trading between them makes you a bad person. What matters is being a good person, not effects like expected number of deaths, so running cost-benefit analyses is at best misguided and at worst evil. Is this a fair description of folk ethics?

If so, I would argue that the bar for doing better is very, very low. There are a zillion biases that apply: scope insensitivity, loss aversion that flips decisions depending on framing, need for closure, pressure to conform, Near/Far discrepancies, fuzzy judgements that mix up feasible and desirable, outright wishful thinking, prejudice against outgroups, overconfidence, and so on. In ethics, unless you're going to get punished for defecting against a norm, you don't have a stake, so biases can run free and don't get any feedback.

Now there are consequentialist arguments for virtue ethics, and general majoritarian-ish arguments for "norms aren't completely stupid", so this only argues for "keep roughly the same system but correct for known biases". But you at least need some kind of feedback. "QALYs per hour of effort" is pretty decent.

And this is a consequentialist argument. "If I try to kill some to save more, I'll almost certainly overestimate lives saved and underestimate knock-on effects" is a perfectly good argument. "Killing some to save more makes me a bad person"... not so much.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 24 June 2011 02:21:21AM *  2 points [-]

Is this a fair description of folk ethics?

No, because we don't even know (yet?) how to formulate such a description. The actual decision procedures in our heads have still not been reverse-engineered, and even insofar as they have, they have still not been explained in game-theoretical and other important terms. We have only started to scratch the surface in this respect.

(Note also that there is a big difference between the principles that people will affirm in the abstract and those they apply in practice, and these inconsistencies are also still far from being fully explained.)

But you at least need some kind of feedback. "QALYs per hour of effort" is pretty decent.

Trouble is, once you go down that road, it's likely that you're going to come up with fatally misguided or biased conclusions. For practically any problem that's complicated enough to be realistic and interesting, we lack the necessary knowledge and computational resources to to make reliable consequentialist assessments, in terms of QALY or any other standardized measure of welfare. (Also, very few, if any things people do result in a clear Pareto improvement for everyone, and interpersonal trade-offs are inherently problematic.)

Moreover, for any problem that is relevant for questions of power, status, wealth, and ideology, it's practically impossible to avoid biases. At the end, what looks like a dispassionate and perhaps even scientific attempt to evaluate things using some standardized measure of welfare is more likely than not to be just a sophisticated fig-leaf (conscious or not) for some ideological agenda. (Most notably, the majority of what we call “social science” has historically been developed for that purpose.)

Yes, this is a very pessimistic verdict, but an attempt at sound reasoning should start by recognizing the limits of our knowledge.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 24 June 2011 12:54:08AM *  2 points [-]

If these cars really work, it's a mighty big thing. I don't think it would be an exaggeration to describe it as the biggest breakthrough in computer technology since the very invention of computers. (One cynical question I'm fond of asking is whether there has really been any great progress in software technology in the last 40-50 years, and this is the first thing I've ever seen that might give a decisive positive answer to it.)

Also, a tantalizing question is what the economic (and other social) consequences will be once technologies like these start proliferating and replacing human workers across the board. Before this recent talk about self-driving cars, I had believed that such technologies would run against nearly-AI-complete problems and thus remain unavailable for a long time to come, but assuming this isn't just empty self-promotion, we might be looking at some very radical (and potentially very nasty) developments quite soon.

Comment author: MixedNuts 21 June 2011 09:00:26PM 1 point [-]

simplistic consequentialist views such as this one

ignorance and lack of insight

Waaah! You're a meanie mean-head! :( By which I mean: this was a one-sentence reaction to simplistic virtue ethics. I agree it's not a valid criticism of complex systems like Alicorn's tiered deontology. I also agree it's fair to describe this view as simplistic - at the end of the day, I do in fact hold the naive view. I disagree that it can only exist in ignorance of counterarguments. In general, boiling down a position to one sentence provides no way to distinguish between "I don't know any counterarguments" and "I know counterarguments, all of which I have rejected".

supreme self-assuredness

Not sure what you mean, I'm going to map it onto "arrogance" until and unless I learn you meant otherwise. Arrogant people are annoying (hi, atheist blogosphere!), but in practice it isn't correlated with false ideas.

Or is this just a regular accusation of overconfidence, stemming from "Hey, you underestimate the number of arguments you haven't considered!"?

my responses in the Consequentialism FAQ thread

You go into social-norms-as-Schelling-points in detail (you seem to point at the existence of other strong arguments?); I agree about the basic idea (that's why I don't kill for organs). I disagree about how easily we should violate them. (In particular, Near lives are much safer to trade than Far ones.) Even "Only kill without provocation in the exact circumstances of one of the trolley problems" is a feasible change.

Also, least convenient possible world: after the experiment, everyone in the world goes into a holodeck and never interacts with anyone again.

Interestingly, when you said

Similarly, imagine meeting someone who was in the fat man/trolley situation and who mechanically made the utilitarian decision and pushed the man without a twitch of guilt. Even the most zealous utilitarian will in practice be creeped out by such a person, even though he should theoretically perceive him as an admirable hero.

I automatically pictured myself as the fat man, and felt admiration and gratitude for the heroic sociopath. Then I realized you meant a third party, and did feel creeped out. (This is as it should be; I should be more eager to die than to kill, to correct for selfishness.)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 22 June 2011 06:32:32PM *  3 points [-]

By which I mean: this was a one-sentence reaction to simplistic virtue ethics.

Actually, I was writing in favor of "simplistic" virtue ethics. However simplistic and irrational it may seem, and however rational, sophisticated, and logically airtight the consequentialist alternatives may appear to be, folk virtue ethics is a robust and workable way of managing human interaction and coordination, while consequentialist reasoning is usually at best simply wrong and at worst a rationalization of beliefs held for different (and often ugly) reasons.

You can compare it with folk physics vs. scientific physics. The former has many flaws, but even if you're a physicist, for nearly all things you do in practice, scientific physics is useless, while folk physics works great. (You won't learn to ride a bike or throw a ball by studying physics, but by honing your folk physics instincts.) While folk physics works robustly and reliably in complex and messy real-world situations, handling them with scientific physics is often intractable and always prone to error.

Of course, this comparison is too favorable. We do know enough scientific physics to apply it to almost any situation at least in principle, and there are many situations where we know how to apply it successfully with real accuracy and rigor, and where folk physics is useless or worse. In contrast, attempts to supersede folk virtue ethics with consequentialism are practically always fallacious one way or another.

Comment author: MixedNuts 21 June 2011 03:25:12PM 0 points [-]

I hear bad things happen if you aren't a utility maximizer. Utilitarianism doesn't imply consquentialism, though; you can assign utility depending on whether (sentient?) decision processes choose virtuously and implement your favorite imperative. These ethical systems are consistent.

I find them quite appalling, however. What do you mean, saving four lives is less important than the virtue of not pushing people under trolleys?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 21 June 2011 03:51:39PM *  1 point [-]

I find them quite appalling, however. What do you mean, saving four lives is less important than the virtue of not pushing people under trolleys?

I find simplistic consequentialist views such as this one appalling, if anything because they combine supreme self-assuredness about important problems with ignorance and lack of insight about their vitally important aspects. (See my responses in the Consequentialism FAQ thread for more detail, especially the ones dealing specifically with trolley problems.)

Comment author: Wei_Dai 14 June 2011 10:09:04PM 1 point [-]

Ok, I was confused by "Platonic" which I thought you were using to refer to intrinsic as opposed to subjective value. Thanks for the clarification.

In the sense you intend, I think you're right that mainstream economists do subscribe to a Platonic concept of "real" value. They believe that real-world price indexes are based on a theory of price indexes, which is based on a theory of social welfare, which in turn is based on sound philosophy. But I think they are also aware that there are lots of problems with both theory and practice (perhaps less aware of the philosophical problems) even if they tend to not pay much attention to them in their daily work. Standard textbooks do mention the problems, and intuitively it's pretty obvious that price indexes must be at best very flawed approximations to reality.

Putting aside what mainstream economists believe, when you say "meaningless" or "fundamental arbitrariness", do you mean for example that there is no way, even in principle, to compare the marginal utility of a dollar in 1950 with the marginal utility of a dollar in 2010? Is it due to the standard interpersonal comparison of utility problem, or something else?

To put it another way, do you think the mainstream economics community should be more aware of problems with the theory and practice of price indexes and perhaps allocate more resources to solving them, or do you think they are just not solvable, and an entirely new approach is needed?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 16 June 2011 06:16:22AM *  2 points [-]

Ok, I was confused by "Platonic" which I thought you were using to refer to intrinsic as opposed to subjective value. Thanks for the clarification.

Subjective value is indeed among the core assumptions of neoclassical economics. The problem is that a whole lot of stuff that economists would like to be able to do (due to both theoretical and ideological interests) is automatically ruled out by this assumption. Reification of "real" values is one way how they try to square this circle, since it enables them to introduce intrinsic value in all but name into their theories.

Putting aside what mainstream economists believe, when you say "meaningless" or "fundamental arbitrariness", do you mean for example that there is no way, even in principle, to compare the marginal utility of a dollar in 1950 with the marginal utility of a dollar in 2010? Is it due to the standard interpersonal comparison of utility problem, or something else?

Yes, you can see this as a corollary of the general problem of interpersonal utility comparison. (Although even if interpersonally comparable utilities are granted and known, you need additional strong assumptions to get rid of all the degrees of freedom that make the choice of index arbitrary.) But these are all different ways of looking at the same problem, namely the problem of intrinsic vs. subjective value.

This is not to say that every attempt to compare the value of money in different places and times for some particular purpose is meaningless, but whether a given attempt is meaningful depends on the context and the sort of comparison used. To guarantee soundness, such comparisons should be justified on a case by case basis by demonstrating that the conclusion indeed follows from the particulars of the way comparison is done. What is definitely unsound is defining a general-purpose “real” value of money and then using it as de facto intrinsic value, without any reflection on how exactly its definition connects to the concrete problem at hand.

To put it another way, do you think the mainstream economics community should be more aware of problems with the theory and practice of price indexes and perhaps allocate more resources to solving them, or do you think they are just not solvable, and an entirely new approach is needed?

Your question seems to assume the existence of a real scientific community in economics, of the sort that exists in natural sciences. However, the problem is that the economics profession has always been deeply intertwined with politics, government bureaucracy, and broader ideological controversies, and as with other social sciences, many of its basic theories and concepts were invented to support an ideological agenda, not as part of a true scientific endeavor. Moreover, many questions in economics have real immediate implications in terms of power, wealth, and status -- to take a pertinent example, entitlement payments by the government are often linked to price indexes, so the question of how they should be defined is not just theoretical, but of immediate financial interest to many parties. Clearly, it would be naive to expect that such questions will be treated with a pristine scientific approach.

In this situation, it’s unrealistic to try to identify and fix the problems and biases in economics (and other social sciences) on a case by case basis, since the real problems are much more general and fundamental. Of course, the existing body of knowledge in economics is far from being entirely worthless, but separating the wheat of true insight from the chaff of ideological delusion and dishonesty, let alone establishing a real epistemologically sound science in place of what exists now, would be a very radical project.

Comment author: Wei_Dai 15 June 2011 09:11:14PM 2 points [-]

It's true that socializing doesn't help me solve hard problems, but I still do it because it makes me happier.

I wonder how much of "socializing makes me happier" has to do with alcohol. (I have a genetic condition somewhat common amongst East Asians that makes my liver unable to process alcohol properly, so I can't drink.)

Also, sorry to tell you this, but I consider your happiness secondary to getting my list of questions answered. :)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 16 June 2011 03:26:24AM 7 points [-]

I wonder how much of "socializing makes me happier" has to do with alcohol.

I'd say this hypothesis is false. Even in places like where drinking is out of the question, like most workplaces, people are normally much happier if they're surrounded by others with whom pleasant socializing is possible. My work, for example, demands long periods of intense individual concentration, but my happiness, morale, and ultimately also productivity would still suffer greatly if I were surrounded by completely unsociable coworkers, even if formal work-related communication with them went flawlessly.

Comment author: Hul-Gil 11 June 2011 06:49:35AM 5 points [-]

Yes. With smoking cigarettes, for instance: "smoking less" didn't work, but "this is my last cigarette EVER" did. I've seen it occur in other areas, too: it seems to be easier to be entirely abstinent than merely moderate - probably for the reason you list; you can't make excuses.

In response to comment by Hul-Gil on Action and habit
Comment author: Vladimir_M 16 June 2011 03:13:37AM 6 points [-]

From Schelling's The Strategy of Conflict (Section II-4):

[A] focal point for agreement often owes its focal character to the fact that small concessions would be impossible, that small encroachments would lead to more and larger ones. One draws a line at some conspicuous boundary or rests his case on some conspicuous principle that is supported mainly by the rhetorical question, "If not here, where?" The more it is clear that concession is collapse, the more convincing the focal point is. The same point is illustrated in the game that we play against ourselves when we try to give up cigarettes or liquor. "Just one little drink," is a notoriously unstable compromise offer; and more people give up cigarettes altogether than manage to reach a stable compromise at a small daily quota. Once the virgin principle is gone, there is no confidence in any resting point, and expectations converge on complete collapse. The very recognition of this keeps attention focused on the point of complete abstinence.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 14 June 2011 09:34:11PM 10 points [-]

Another important observation is that there are at least two very different ways of dressing "badly." One is dressing in a tacky and sloppy way with complete disregard for aesthetics, and the other involves breaking the conventions of formal wear but still dressing neatly and stylishly. The latter, I think, can be a useful signaling device in some situations where adherence to formal wear may lower your status by making you look like you're trying hard to please others.

The prime example would be situations like job interviews (especially in technical fields), where you're expected to dress up, but those you have do deal with are not, because they enjoy a position of superiority. When you show up for those wearing something obviously more formal than what you wear on a daily basis, you signal that you're trying hard to please the people you have to deal with. A much better signal can be achieved by dressing in a stylish but less formal way that signals all the right things in terms of social aptitude etc., but makes you look less like a supplicant, especially if it looks plausible that this is how you actually dress on a daily basis.

Of course, this can backfire if you exaggerate with informality, or if you use a wrong sort of casual style.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 14 June 2011 09:07:50PM *  10 points [-]

Dressing well is not entirely a zero sum game. Depending on how you look, you create a positive or negative externality on other people around you by making their environment more or less aesthetically pleasing. This also has clear signaling implications, separate from those status signaling issues that you have in mind.

Comment author: Wei_Dai 14 June 2011 04:01:53PM *  1 point [-]

I do not have the impression that mainstream economists subscribe to a Platonic concept of "real" values. (Or maybe I'm just confused about what you mean.) Can you cite an example of this (i.e., a paper or article that describes or assumes such a concept)?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 14 June 2011 06:36:40PM *  5 points [-]

I have in mind the regular use of "real" figures in economics (i.e. those that are "inflation-adjusted," as well as those based on "purchasing power parity" etc.). These concepts are in principle dissolvable -- when citing some "real" figures, economists could address the questions of what exact index was used to adjust the value, what would be the implications of choosing a different index, how much the figures vary under different more or less reasonable definitions of indexes, what political and bureaucratic incentives have influenced the design of the official government indexes, etc., etc. Trouble is, in practice they almost never do, and except for some narrow and specialized work that studies indexes as such, the de facto standard of discourse in economics is to treat the "real" values as having a Platonic reality. (Even people who specifically study price indexes typically speak about "overestimating" or "underestimating" their value, as if there existed some Platonic "true" value out there.)

As an example of nonsense along these lines, you can take almost any paper that discusses how much some "real" variables have changed over a period of several decades (sometimes they'll even talk about centuries). Of course, if you read that something cost a dollar in 1950, you'll want to know how that compares with the 1950 prices of, say, a loaf of bread, an hour of unskilled labor, etc., to get the feel for how much a dollar was worth back then. However, asking what the "real" value of a 1950 dollar is in 2011 dollars, as a unique and well-defined number, is simply meaningless, considering that you can't trade dollars across time, and the world has changed so much, both technologically and socially, that what counts as "living" in the typical "cost of living" in each era is incommensurable. (The same of course goes for comparing very different places in the same era, and even for similar places, what you count as the "typical" cost of living is largely arbitrary, especially considering the increasing prominence of status goods and conspicuous consumption in the modern economy.)

Yet such numbers are regularly cited with three, four, or even more significant digits, without any consideration of how their value depends on arbitrary conventions and how this dependence influences the argument at hand. (And even if such problems are acknowledged, they are usually presented as imprecise knowledge of the Platonic "true" value, not as the fundamental arbitrariness of the whole concept.)

Comment author: Zvi 13 June 2011 10:46:29PM 1 point [-]

On the low to medium end it seems logistically impossible for there to be a link given the way they set up the store.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 14 June 2011 12:21:52AM *  2 points [-]

I guess that depends on what exactly you consider as "low to medium." If at the cash register they ask whether any of the staff helped you with the purchase, it's likely that they get a commission for it. At least where I live, that will normally be the case in places where you can get someone to help you seriously.

Comment author: mutterc 13 June 2011 11:05:50PM 0 points [-]

My understanding is that one good wouldn't do it, but persistent, overall deflation would in fact devastate the economy.

Sure, right now you can stick money under a mattress for 6 months and buy more Core 2 laptops than you could today. But that doesn't seem the same as "getting richer".

Where's the line? Good question. Obviously if you could buy more of anything that would be getting richer without investing the money. Or if you could buy more (houses or food or cars or Internet access or electricity or sex or drugs or rock n' roll).

Comment author: Vladimir_M 14 June 2011 12:14:20AM *  6 points [-]

My understanding is that one good wouldn't do it, but persistent, overall deflation would in fact devastate the economy.

There was persistent overall deflation in various periods in the 19th century, and it didn't devastate the economy.

Comment author: Zack_M_Davis 13 June 2011 08:42:09PM 26 points [-]
Comment author: Vladimir_M 13 June 2011 09:02:58PM 4 points [-]

This is the first time my literary output has been set to music, so thanks for this unexpected honor.

Comment author: XiXiDu 13 June 2011 05:56:41PM *  3 points [-]

Unfortunately none of us knew much about the topic so the discussion turned into "how can we find an expert to advise us for minimal cost?

You don't need an expert, go into a shop where you can buy clothes and ask some sales women/girl to help you dress. Tell them for what occasion you want to get dressed. This will work well enough (i.e. much better than what you would be able to come up with yourself and its free).

Comment author: Vladimir_M 13 June 2011 06:16:43PM *  11 points [-]

Be careful, though. At least in North America, people who sell clothes often work for commission, and it's in their interest to sell you as much expensive stuff as possible, regardless of how good it really looks on you. Moreover, unless you have a body shape that fits the standard cuts very well (and very few people do, even among those who are fit and handsome), and unless you buy the same standardized item repeatedly, you'll usually need to go to several stores before you run into something that fits you really well.

Thus, it's much better to figure out how to recognize well fitting clothes yourself, and (for men) it's generally not a bad idea to bring along a lady friend or relative for advice. (This also makes it easier to resist the salespeople's pressure, since you'll feel like they can't blame you if she frowns.)

Of course, if you're rich enough that money's not an issue, custom-tailored stuff is the way to go.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 13 June 2011 05:51:19PM *  18 points [-]

I think that art is an important medium by which to communicate ideas, and for rationality to be successful as a meme it's going to need "carrier wave" works of art to help it compete with religion for the general population's passion and understanding.

Trouble is, you can't do that without the message becoming, well, irrational in the process. (Which is not without historical precedent!)

Not to disparage your artistic aspirations, but your poem is certainly an example. I won't even get into various relatively minor distortions of human history it presents. I'll just comment on its basic theme of technical progress, which it presents as a constant bringer of good fortune and improved life, and the expected source of a bright utopian future. This picture is just too remote from reality. Of course, it would be silly to deny the benefits of technical progress and economic growth since the Industrial Revolution, and various ideological attempts to argue otherwise are an awful pile of nonsense. However, in other periods in history, the connection has been less clear -- and more importantly, there is no guarantee that these historically recent favorable trends will continue into the future. The future technical progress may result in anything from human extinction to a grim Malthusian scenario, and in fact, a strong case can be made that such outcomes are more likely than "the world that we all long for" (whatever that is).

Now, you could say that in order to maximize the chances of bright future, we should raise awareness along these lines, promote humanism, etc. This however seems to me like an unproven assertion. Why would you believe this, and how would you justify this belief?

Also, another significant point of disconnect from reality in your article and poem is the belief that average people care for seeking truth beyond their own practical needs, or that they can be made to do so. Regardless of all the progress in science and technology, I see no indication whatsoever that average people in modern developed countries are less superstitious and less prone to high-status delusional beliefs than their ancestors centuries ago. In fact, I don't think this is true even of most highly educated people outside their particular fields of expertise, and I certainly don't believe it's true of most people who attach to themselves labels of rationalists, skeptics, free-thinkers, etc.

Comment author: Theogenis 13 June 2011 02:27:49AM 1 point [-]

Indeed, thinking of these systems I find it perfectly plausible the majority of altruist intentions where successfully channelled and employed by the regimes in question.

Also wouldn't the term authoritarian be better? Syria and Iran don't really compare to North Korea.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 13 June 2011 03:06:00AM *  7 points [-]

Also wouldn't the term authoritarian be better?

Most of the time, I find this term devoid of any real meaning. It's an ideological term of opprobrium, which gives little or no useful information about the structures of authority in the society to which it is applied. It merely communicates that the speaker disapproves of them for ideological reasons. In particular, the academic usage of this term, from Adorno till present day, has been mired in ideological nonsense so badly that I really think the term is better left unused.

You are certainly right that it makes no sense to conflate various mildly and moderately repressive regimes with the greatest extremes like North Korea or Stalin's USSR under the "totalitarian" label. On the other hand, as long as it's not diluted by overuse, this label makes more sense than the vague and ideologized "authoritarian" one.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 13 June 2011 02:08:41AM *  13 points [-]

Tyranny, whether it's that of Syria, Iran, North Korea, Nazi Germany, or the Soviet bloc under Stalin, aggressively selects against altruism. The most-altruistic people were among the first executed in all those places.

What support do you have for this claim? Do you have specific knowledge about the history of each of these regimes, or are you writing based on vague stereotypes?

(It takes a very extraordinary level of historical knowledge and understanding -- far beyond mere detailed knowledge of names, places, and dates -- to discuss such things meaningfully.)

Comment author: mutterc 12 June 2011 11:47:16PM 1 point [-]

Can you expand? Here's the difference as I see it:

  • Price index: the dollar is worth 5% less than last year because it buys 5% less of the stuff in this market basket, populated with stuff representative of the "cost of living"
  • Gold standard: the dollar is worth 5% less than last year because it buys 5% less gold

Which is more or less useful, and why?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 13 June 2011 01:46:00AM 1 point [-]

Depending on the context, either concept can be anything from useful to deeply misleading. However, in contrast to the (mis-)use of price indexes in mainstream economics, the goldbug obsessions can always be countered by simply pointing out that gold is not an end-all. Therefore, while there will always be goldbugs immune to rational argument, their ideas are unlikely to become a basis for elaborate, sophisticated-looking, and academically accredited pseudoscience.

In contrast, the concept of "real" values in mainstream economics typically degenerates into an even more far-flung Platonic fantasy that there is some "real value" of money out there to be measured, discussed, and incorporated into theories like a real physical quantity. This fantasy is obscured by a vast cloud of complicated and abstruse (and seemingly objective and scientific) theory, to the point where it's usually impossible to disentangle reality from fantasy and spin without a very considerable effort -- in which economists are usually unwilling to cooperate, if not outright hostile.

Comment author: mutterc 12 June 2011 07:29:28PM 2 points [-]

Sure, just discuss the particular problems with the (best versions of) propositions put forth by such people [goldbugs and libertarians], and how their conclusions don't follow, and what specific pieces of evidence weight heavily against them. (Note the lack of smearing them as racists in this method.)

OK. Libertarianism I can leave to others (I don't think I have anything new to say about it). As for hard-money advocacy, usually one sees the following errors:

  • Belief that there's some Platonic ideal of "value" against which currencies should be measured (traditionally "gold", though one sees variations these days)
  • Ignorance of the hazards of a totally exogenous money supply size. (fewer levers to deal with recessions and overly-hot economies; real wage declines have to happen nominally (which is very difficult) rather then through exchange rates)
  • Belief in immaculate transfer (trade balances, capital flows, and exchange rates in fact all affect one another)
  • Belief that the medium of exchange should be a stable long-term store of value, and in fact increase in real value without being invested (how could such a thing even work? What's creating the value?)

As far as I can tell, the only of those I've seen from you in particular is the last one, and that's another subthread.

There is a new one, from you, in this discussion though: the idea that "too much" economic activity is happening now, and it would be better to defer some of that economic activity until later. High unemployment refutes this. [If you'll claim current unemployment is structural in nature, then what is the industry that lacks labor, and is thusly currently experiencing increasing real wages?]

Comment author: Vladimir_M 12 June 2011 10:29:48PM *  3 points [-]

Belief that there's some Platonic ideal of "value" against which currencies should be measured

I find it funny how fans of mainstream economics mock goldbugs about this, while at the same time basing a large part of their own theories on a far more extreme Platonic concept of "real" values calculated using price indexes.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 12 June 2011 07:24:04PM *  15 points [-]

The main point of the article might make sense, but the example is awful. What you present as "logical inference" involves statements that are formulated so imprecisely that no accurate logical operations with them are possible at all. You also seem to operate with a puzzling notion of "equal work" performed by people whose skills differ, as well as an altogether inadequate model of how wages are determined in practice.

Also, of all charged and controversial topics, gender-related ones cause by far the most problems on LW in the sense of people being unable to handle them calmly and rationally, so you have actually chosen the very worst sort of example. (This is an interesting phenomenon, considering that other even more charged topics are usually discussed in a commendably rational way here.) Obviously, this is excusable for a new participant, considering that this warning isn't really spelled out anywhere, but you should be aware of it for the future.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 11 June 2011 01:52:00PM 1 point [-]

Would you care to be more specific?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 11 June 2011 06:00:31PM *  17 points [-]

As far as I know, the most thorough criticism of TMOM back in the early eighties was published by Arthur Jensen. Whatever you think about Jensen's own theories, his criticism of Gould is pretty damning, and it should be mandatory reading for anyone who has read TMOM. (Gould was invited to reply by the journal that published Jensen's review, but apparently he never did.) For other prominent criticisms of the book, see e.g. the 1983 review by Bernard Davis (Gould's reply here) or the 1995 retrospective review by John Carroll.

Also, the propagandistic rather than scientific quality of TMOM is especially evident from the fact that Gould republished it 15 years later without a single change in response to the criticisms the first edition received, nor even in response to the relevant scientific developments that occurred in the meantime. (He just tacked on his review of The Bell Curve as an appendix to the original text.)

Comment author: [deleted] 06 June 2011 04:58:55AM 2 points [-]

What doesn't make sense is postulating the existence of some reified "real" value of money, and then claiming that it has changed by 2.61% or whatever since last year. (Not to even mention the even more outlandish attempts to evaluate this change in "real" value across decades and centuries, or to compare them across vastly different places, where even the set of things available on the market is largely different, as well as all sorts of further reifications such as the "real" GDP.)

I would like to hear a more detailed criticism of the "real value of money" concept specifically. Human height varies over the course of a lifetime, over the course of a day, and geographically, and yet it is fairly clear that people are taller on average now than during the middle ages. And by different operationalizations we can measure how much taller. Isn't it also clear that people are richer on average now that during the middle ages? Are you arguing that any attempt to measure how much richer is doomed to be misleading?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 07 June 2011 12:33:42AM *  1 point [-]

Statistics about human height are not a good analogy, since the concepts are simple and straightforward enough that they can be readily dissolved and their connection to reality re-evaluated if necessary. But many other "social science" numbers are indeed as bad as those found in economics, in the sense that even a casual rational evaluation of these numbers will reveal critical problems that are nonchalantly ignored in the regular "scientific" practice in these areas. (Though it would probably be hard to find anything as perverse as the epistemic rat's nest that economists have built around various numbers they operate with.)

As for measuring how much richer people are than in the past, you can provide information that will leave readers with more or less correct intuitions about such things, by describing at length how much people in various occupation had to work and in what conditions, what they could afford with typical wages, etc., etc. But the idea that you can describe this with a single scalar number and then treat this number as a real physical quantity that features in models and theories is obviously complete nonsense.

Comment author: [deleted] 05 June 2011 01:53:47PM 2 points [-]

There are two questions here. One is whether economists have a good influence on policy. Another is whether they even understand anything. I don't have any illusions about the first question, but my interest is in understanding.

We observe that prices tend to go up, and wish to quantify that observation, maybe to test ideas about its relationship to money supply. So we have to operationalize "prices go up." We do it by sampling commonly purchased things and keeping track of their prices over time. That seems to me to be as innocuous as operationalizations come in social science. If you don't think we learn anything by doing it, I don't see how you think we can learn anything about human affairs at all.

You might object that in the details the way inflation is measured and reported is very political. I don't disagree but that's not the same thing as saying we don't know anything.

The crucial practical problem here is that attempts to tackle scientifically issues that are relevant for politics, power, and ideology are more likely to lead to the emergence of ideologically-driven pseudoscience than to a real scientific clarification of contentions issues.

That's a problem for all domains of knowledge including the hard sciences.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 05 June 2011 08:48:11PM *  1 point [-]

We observe that prices tend to go up, and wish to quantify that observation, maybe to test ideas about its relationship to money supply. So we have to operationalize "prices go up." We do it by sampling commonly purchased things and keeping track of their prices over time. That seems to me to be as innocuous as operationalizations come in social science. If you don't think we learn anything by doing it, I don't see how you think we can learn anything about human affairs at all.

Well, yes, if you just want to operationalize the vague statement that "prices went up," it makes sense to do it as you describe. What doesn't make sense is postulating the existence of some reified "real" value of money, and then claiming that it has changed by 2.61% or whatever since last year. (Not to even mention the even more outlandish attempts to evaluate this change in "real" value across decades and centuries, or to compare them across vastly different places, where even the set of things available on the market is largely different, as well as all sorts of further reifications such as the "real" GDP.) However, vast edifices of both theory and practical policy have been built under the assumption that you can do such things, and if one attempts to discuss them by dissolving these nebulous concepts, one encounters confusion and stonewalling.

That's a problem for all domains of knowledge including the hard sciences.

The problem is far more severe where the questions studied have some bearing on ideology, politics, and power. It's a matter of incentives, after all.

Comment author: [deleted] 04 June 2011 09:11:30AM 0 points [-]

The reality is that when you compare the purchasing power of money in different places and times, the differences in a myriad of relevant factors are often so great that it makes no sense at all to express them with a single number

That is too sweeping a criticism. We have to model the world somehow when making decisions, and quantitatively. That goes for policy makers also.

Are you familiar with Jared Diamond's lay account and defense of operationalization, here? I'd be interested to hear what parts of it you object to.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 04 June 2011 08:48:43PM *  4 points [-]

That is too sweeping a criticism. We have to model the world somehow when making decisions, and quantitatively. That goes for policy makers also.

With all due respect, this is exactly the sort of stonewalling, discourse-killing response I commonly see from economists. If you can't justify your model, then the correct and honest thing to do is to admit that you don't have a model and try to deal as best you can with your ignorance -- not to continue using models divorced from reality with the excuse that you don't have anything better. An astrologer can use the same excuse, with equal justification.

However, clearly, admitting ignorance in these matters also means admitting that "scientific" policy is in many instances just pseudoscientific dilettantism, which in turn hits all sorts of ideological hot buttons. Of course, some centuries ago, a court astrologer would also likely stonewall if questioned too much about the validity of his astrology, which is an almost perfect analogy.

Are you familiar with Jared Diamond's lay account and defense of operationalization, here? I'd be interested to hear what parts of it you object to.

There is in principle no problem with operationalization, as long as the models based on it are sound logically and epistemologically. In particular, it is important that the operationalized concepts can be traced back to how exactly they correspond to observable reality, and that the limitations of models are understood and recognized by those who employ them. What I'm arguing is that many concepts used by economists don't satisfy these basic criteria of validity.

The crucial practical problem here is that attempts to tackle scientifically issues that are relevant for politics, power, and ideology are more likely to lead to the emergence of ideologically-driven pseudoscience than to a real scientific clarification of contentions issues. Clearly, modern economics and other social sciences have not been immune to this problem, which is probably the main reason for their present awful state.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 June 2011 04:42:09AM 1 point [-]

I simply see nothing comparable among natural scientists, who are generally capable of dissolving the concepts they work with and avoiding getting lost in such elaborate fantasies built of reified artificial concepts.

While that's mostly true today after several centuries of work, Newton would have been hard pressed to explain what a force was without resorting to something that sounds like mysticism. Also calculus was only placed on a firm mathematical footing by Weierstrass two centuries after Newton had invented it and based his physics on it.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 04 June 2011 07:25:52AM *  2 points [-]

That's not a good comparison. Every physical theory postulates the existence of some fundamental constituents of reality that cannot be reduced further. (And a practically useful theory may well treat that way concepts that we in principle know how to reduce to something more fundamental, but it would be impractical to do so.) The concepts in economics that I'm attacking are a completely different case: they consist of quantities defined in arbitrary ways, whose arbitrariness is then forgotten -- leading to their treatment as objective properties of reality that should be calculated and studied in their own right, far beyond the limits of their actual usefulness, and without the ability to work back through the logic of their use as a reality check.

I can't think of anything comparable in the history of modern physics, from Galileo till present day. I simply can't imagine a physicist similarly incapable of grasping with the logic of physical theories and their connection to reality.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 June 2011 02:06:30AM 1 point [-]

I generally agree with you; however, some comments:

Even worse, however, are various artificial quantities such as price indexes and the "real" figures based on them, which are typically reified and treated as if they were objectively measurable properties of the real world, whereas in reality they are arbitrary constructs that could be defined with as much (or rather as little) justification in different ways to yield wholly different figures.

I'm sure you'll agree that long term economic numbers should be adjusted for inflation to be more meaningful, whether this is happening in a reasonable way is another question.

You'll practically never see anything like that from natural scientists.

Well, in physics you have things like friction and air-resistance that, at least at first, were fudge factors to explain why objects don't obey Newton's laws. In fact looking at physics, in order to make progress it was necessary to disentangle the "fundamental behavior" of objects, i.e., how they behave on "frictionless surfaces", when hung from "strings of negligible mass" and other unrealistic assumptions, from things like friction that cause real objects to behave slightly differently. The same will undoubtedly be necessary in economics.

That having been said, I have no idea whether existing attempts to do this are any good. Physicists, of course, had the advantage that they could do experiments much more easily.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 04 June 2011 03:36:06AM *  1 point [-]

I'm sure you'll agree that long term economic numbers should be adjusted for inflation to be more meaningful, whether this is happening in a reasonable way is another question.

The problem is that "adjusting for inflation" makes sense only as a rough and vague heuristic, not as an exact measure of objective value which can be computed up to three, four, or more significant digits. The reality is that when you compare the purchasing power of money in different places and times, the differences in a myriad of relevant factors are often so great that it makes no sense at all to express them with a single number, except perhaps for the purposes of some extremely rough, Fermi problem-style calculation.

The idea that you can define some objective and scientific "price index" and then do calculations that will tell you that some "real" values differ by 4.83%, or invent models that will predict such figures by capturing real insight, is completely detached from reality. This is not a simplification of a problem to make attacking it easier; it's not even an instance of unjustified simplification -- rather, it means dreaming up complete fantasies and giving them a pseudoscientific dressing. I simply see nothing comparable among natural scientists, who are generally capable of dissolving the concepts they work with and avoiding getting lost in such elaborate fantasies built of reified artificial concepts.

(From this it also follows that most discussions of economic growth are nonsense on stilts, since they require combining the nonsensical notions of "real" values with GDP and similar figures, which have their own host of problems that normally go unacknowledged, and which are also usually impossible to discuss rationally.)

Comment author: prase 03 June 2011 11:27:24AM 0 points [-]

On the other hand, there are many matters of widespread agreement or even near-consensus in modern economics that would not stand up to rational scrutiny, which are sometimes little more than a sophisticated fig-leaf for ideology.

Examples would help (if they don't contain much mind-killing potency).

Comment author: Vladimir_M 03 June 2011 11:15:26PM *  2 points [-]

One example are discussions of free trade, which is strongly favored by an overwhelming majority of economists. The standard justifications for this position are based on models whose connection to reality is tenuous at best, and which ignore a host of potentially relevant factors. (Also, I often see arguments that are clearly unsound even if the models used are assumed to be adequate, as well as naive intuitive arguments that violate elementary logic.) Now, for all I know, the majority opinion of economists on this issue could be mostly correct (though I am sure that it's wrong on some particulars), but whichever way it is, their existing justifications are far from adequate. Once you start questioning them about this, you are likely to quickly run into sneering, stonewalling, moral posturing, and what looks like ideologically induced blockheadedness.

Another example is the question of how meaningful various economic figures and quantities are. This includes various economic statistics that are often used in arguments and calculations with multiple digits of precision, even though the way they have been obtained clearly makes even the first digit, and sometimes even the order of magnitude, highly questionable. (Oskar Morgenstern's On the Accuracy of Economic Observations presents a good book-length critique of this phenomenon. This book has been conveniently ignored and forgotten by economists, even though the issues it raised have never been addressed, to my knowledge.)

Even worse, however, are various artificial quantities such as price indexes and the "real" figures based on them, which are typically reified and treated as if they were objectively measurable properties of the real world, whereas in reality they are arbitrary constructs that could be defined with as much (or rather as little) justification in different ways to yield wholly different figures. Again, with a few honorable exceptions, trying to discuss these issues with economists usually leads to frustrating unsuccessful attempts to explain what the problem is, often followed by smug dismissals. You'll practically never see anything like that from natural scientists.

Comment author: multifoliaterose 31 May 2011 11:32:01PM 1 point [-]

Do you have any books in particular in mind?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 01 June 2011 02:50:18AM *  3 points [-]

Well, that depends on what exactly interests you. On the whole, for a modern English speaker, there is a huge wealth of 18th and 19th century literature available for free online, which is probably optimal because it's distant enough to offer interesting perspective, but at the same time highly readable and not so alien as to be incomprehensible without specialized study. On almost any subject that is a matter of ideological controversy today (or that was a matter of controversy in past ages), you can have a lot of fun by reading through random titles from past centuries that come out of Google Books when you search for the relevant terms.

Comment author: Nic_Smith 31 May 2011 11:32:30PM 5 points [-]

Do you mean actually reading older literature, or academic analysis of older literature? If the latter, a quick look at the Wikipedia entry for literary theory seems to show that the field is full of confusion:

...many contemporary theorists and literary scholars believe either that "literature" cannot be defined...

and many of the schools of thought listed there seem to be about writing a bottom line, and then making whatever work of literature (whatever that is) is being examined fit.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 01 June 2011 02:35:37AM *  5 points [-]

I meant actually reading older literature, but third-party analysis and commentary can be very helpful, as long as you're not taking their claims for granted. I certainly agree that there is a whole lot of nonsense produced in the humanities in general, so caveat lector.

Comment author: atucker 31 May 2011 06:55:12PM 3 points [-]

I don't think that the appropriate distinction is between social and natural sciences, so much as it is between verifiable and not verifiable.

In Physics, there are lots of counterintuitive results for a truthseeker to have to accept, so it probably helps someone become more rational.

In Literature, there's very little that lets you check what you're saying, and in some circles not even asking the author what they meant counts. So there's confusion to dissolve, but it doesn't seem to be common practice.

I lean towards thinking that Economics is good rationalist training because of the messy data, emotionally-charged issues that you're investigating, and the ability to come up with useful results despite that.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 31 May 2011 10:44:12PM 10 points [-]

In Literature, there's very little that lets you check what you're saying, and in some circles not even asking the author what they meant counts. So there's confusion to dissolve, but it doesn't seem to be common practice.

Study of literature, especially older literature, is in my opinion indispensable for what is perhaps the most difficult act of overcoming bias, namely realization that there can exist people with views and values radically different from one's own who are not delusional, stupid, or malicious.

Comment author: komponisto 31 May 2011 08:25:13PM *  9 points [-]

Honestly, this discussion is backwards (in addition to being mostly a form of tribal warfare). You don't study a subject in order to become more rational; you become more rational in order to more effectively study a subject.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 31 May 2011 10:38:14PM 9 points [-]

It goes both ways, just like with e.g. lifting heavy things.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 31 May 2011 10:30:15PM *  9 points [-]

It's certainly true that the ideal of the scientific method is vastly better than the practice of economists, but I think that majoring in economics provides better training for a rationalist than majoring in any of the sciences does.

I disagree. Insofar as their body of expertise is sound, economists are able to mount sound criticism against ideas that contradict the well-established knowledge in their profession, but this is not different from any other area. I don't observe that they are exceptionally rational when it comes to questions that can't be readily answered using their standard knowledge and methods.

What's more, when it comes to questioning the soundness and justification of ideas that are widely accepted within their profession, economists are definitely far worse than natural scientists -- especially when it comes to ideas that they use to support their own ideological positions. When you ask physicists how they justify their physics, you get direct, detailed, and sound answers that go to the heart of the matter. In contrast, on many topics, economists are apt to react with a smug, dismissive, and stonewalling attitude instead. (With depressingly few honorable exceptions.)

Now, it does happen that there are a great many unsound ideas that sound nice and attractive to economically illiterate general public and intellectuals (often including smart natural scientists), and an economist is likely to be capable of discussing these much more rationally. On the other hand, there are many matters of widespread agreement or even near-consensus in modern economics that would not stand up to rational scrutiny, which are sometimes little more than a sophisticated fig-leaf for ideology. In these matters, various fringe low-status contrarians and even naive folk economics can be much closer to reality, however much credentialed economists tend to scoff at them. Clearly, a training in economics may well cause one to become less rational on such topics.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 21 May 2011 01:20:10AM *  6 points [-]

Yes, these are all good examples. Some other ones that come to mind are:

  • Traffic rules: the ones that other drivers expect you to follow and cops actually enforce are significantly different from the formal ones. (For example, speed limits.)

  • Dealing with bureaucracies, both governmental and private ones. Their real operational rules are usually different from the formal ones, and you can use this not only to save time and effort, but also to exploit all kinds of opportunities that theoretically shouldn't exist at all.

  • Excusing your offenses and failures by presenting them as something that, while clearly not good, is still within the bounds of what happens to reasonable, respectable, high-status people. If you pull this off successfully, people will be much more forgiving, and the punishments and reputational consequences far milder -- and you can be much bolder in your endeavors, knowing that you have this safety exit if you're unlucky. This basically means exploiting people's unwritten practical rules for judgment, which may treat very differently things that are theoretically supposed to be equally bad.

  • The exact bounds to which you can push self-promotion without risking being exposed as a liar and cheater. This is essential since if you're not an extraordinary achiever whose deeds speak for themselves, you're stuck in a nasty arms race in which everyone is putting spin and embellishing the truth. However, it's far from clear which rules determine in practice where exactly this stops being business as usual and enters dangerous territory.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 21 May 2011 05:15:11AM *  6 points [-]

Excusing your offenses and failures by presenting them as something that, while clearly not good, is still within the bounds of what happens to reasonable, respectable, high-status people. If you pull this off successfully, people will be much more forgiving, and the punishments and reputational consequences far milder -- and you can be much bolder in your endeavors, knowing that you have this safety exit if you're unlucky.

By the way, my thoughts on this matter were at one point stimulated by this shrewd quote by Lord Keynes:

A 'sound' banker, alas! is not one who foresees danger and avoids it, but one who, when he is ruined, is ruined in a conventional and orthodox way along with his fellows, so that no one can really blame him.

Comment author: Emile 20 May 2011 02:05:10PM 6 points [-]

Some examples would still be nice, even if controversial.

Some that I can think of:

  • A lot of what Pick-Up Artists talk about, i.e. the way a boy is "supposed" to behave to get a girl isn't always the way that actually works (I remember reading something about how the "traditional" wooing behavior made more sense in a context where you were mainly going after the approval of the girl's parents, but I haven't researched the subject in depth).

  • Much milder, "it's better to ask for forgiveness than permission", i.e. bypassing "official" hierarchy to get crap done

  • That some churches don't care that much about the actual professed belief

  • For many students, networking and contacts is more useful for the future than the degree you get or what you learn in classes (that's not a very big secret is it?)

  • When it's OK to ask for certain fees to be waived, to ask for a discount, to haggle

  • When it's OK to bribe someone (probably much more relevant in less-industrialized countries)

A lot of stuff is probably specific to a culture, or even to an organization.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 21 May 2011 01:20:10AM *  6 points [-]

Yes, these are all good examples. Some other ones that come to mind are:

  • Traffic rules: the ones that other drivers expect you to follow and cops actually enforce are significantly different from the formal ones. (For example, speed limits.)

  • Dealing with bureaucracies, both governmental and private ones. Their real operational rules are usually different from the formal ones, and you can use this not only to save time and effort, but also to exploit all kinds of opportunities that theoretically shouldn't exist at all.

  • Excusing your offenses and failures by presenting them as something that, while clearly not good, is still within the bounds of what happens to reasonable, respectable, high-status people. If you pull this off successfully, people will be much more forgiving, and the punishments and reputational consequences far milder -- and you can be much bolder in your endeavors, knowing that you have this safety exit if you're unlucky. This basically means exploiting people's unwritten practical rules for judgment, which may treat very differently things that are theoretically supposed to be equally bad.

  • The exact bounds to which you can push self-promotion without risking being exposed as a liar and cheater. This is essential since if you're not an extraordinary achiever whose deeds speak for themselves, you're stuck in a nasty arms race in which everyone is putting spin and embellishing the truth. However, it's far from clear which rules determine in practice where exactly this stops being business as usual and enters dangerous territory.

Comment author: komponisto 19 May 2011 04:29:04PM 23 points [-]

1. Too much emphasis on "altruism" and treatment of "altruists" as a special class. (As opposed to the rest of us who "merely" enjoy doing cool things like theoretical research and art, but also need the world to keep existing for that to continue happening.) No one should have to feel bad about continuing to live in the world while they marginally help to save it.

2. Not enough high-status people, especially scientists and philosophers. Do Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett know about LW? If not, why not? Why aren't they here? What can we do about it? Why aren't a serious-looking design and the logo of an Oxford institute enough to gain credibility? (Exception that proves the rule: Scott Aaronson has LW on his blogroll, but he was reading OB before he was high-status, and so far as I am aware, hasn't ever commented on LW as opposed to OB.)

3. Too much downvoting for disagreement, or for making non-blatant errors.

4. It's not that there are too many meetup posts, it's that there are too few content posts by comparison.

5. I sometimes feel that LW is not quite nice enough (see point 3.). Visiting other internet forums quickly snaps me out of this and puts things into perspective; but I still think we could probably do better.

6. Related to 3. and 5.: sometimes people don't read things carefully before reacting (and voting).

7. Art-related topics don't get enough respect. This fact manifests itself both in blatant ways (low scores for comments that discuss them) and in subtle ways (people make assumptions about what subtopic- and position-space look like in these domains, and show impatience with discussions about whether these assumptions are correct ).

Comment author: Vladimir_M 19 May 2011 11:29:34PM *  25 points [-]

Not enough high-status people, especially scientists and philosophers. Do Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett know about LW? If not, why not?

Well, to be blunt, arguing on public internet forums is not an effective way to accomplish anything much in practice. The only people who do it are those for whom the opportunity cost in time is low (and are thus necessarily underachievers) and those who find it enjoying enough to be worth the cost (but this is clearly negatively correlated with achievement and high status).

Also, arguing on the internet under one's real identity is a bad idea for anyone who isn't in one of these four categories: (1) those who already have absolute financial security and don't care what others will think of them, (2) those who instinctively converge towards respectable high-status opinions on all subjects, (3) those who can reliably exercise constant caution and iron self-discipline and censor themselves before writing anything unseemly, and (4) those who absolutely lack interest in any controversial topics whatsoever.

Comment author: Emile 19 May 2011 07:13:46PM 0 points [-]

I'd say chance is already a factor (is someone digging for dirt against that person? Is the topic currently "hot"?), and in general "does it make a good soundbite?". Disreputable opinions don't get repeated as much when they are phrased in academic jargon, or indirectly implied in a way that can only be understood with a lot of context. There's also the question of incentives, i.e. people are more likely to dig up dirt on the president of a law school than on an average Joe.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 19 May 2011 10:53:03PM 1 point [-]

I agree that all these considerations can be significant, but I don't think they are sufficient to explain everything I've seen.

Comment author: Emile 19 May 2011 07:17:42PM 1 point [-]

I'd be interested in reading more about the unwritten and unspoken de facto rules, and about what can be ignored and what can't. That's the kind of thing I tend to be bad at, so I'd like to get the experience of others.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 19 May 2011 10:48:52PM 1 point [-]

Well, any really interesting examples are likely to be controversial, since they necessarily involve repudiating some official rules, accepted norms, or respectable principles. Also, this sort of knowledge can be extremely valuable and not given away easily, or even admitted to, by those who have it. This is assuming they even have the ability to articulate it explicitly rather than just playing by instinct -- the latter is of course superior in practice, since it enables perfect duplicity between pious words and effective actions. Of course, at the same time, lots of people will talk nonsense about these topics as a status-gaining ploy.

Comment author: steven0461 18 May 2011 06:48:26PM *  1 point [-]

Great first two paragraphs. As to the third paragraph, I have two questions. Do you know any specific examples where people were penalized for merely suggesting they might harbor disreputable ideas? And how do you know that differences in whether people get away with these things aren't just due to random chance?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 18 May 2011 10:20:42PM *  2 points [-]

I wouldn't like to get into specific examples, not just because the issues are extremely contentious, but also because I don't want to write things like "X has expressed belief Y" in an easily googlable form and on a high-ranking website.

But to answer your questions, yes, I have seen several occasions where people publicly wrote or said something that suggested disreputable views only remotely and indirectly, and as a result were exposed to public shaming campaigns of the sort that may tar one's reputation with serious consequences, especially now that this stuff will forever come up when someone googles their names. In at least one of these cases, I am certain that the words were entirely innocent of the imputed meaning. (Feel free to PM me if you're curious about the details.)

Even when it comes to open and explicit expressions of dangerous views, I still observe vast differences. I'm sure that sometimes this is due to random chance, for example if a journalist randomly decides to make a big deal out of something that would have otherwise passed unnoticed. However, this can't possibly be the whole story, since I have seen people repeatedly say and write in prominent public venues practically the same things that got others in trouble, without any apparent bad consequences. There are possible explanations that occur to me in each particular case, but I'm not sure if any of them are correct.

Comment author: steven0461 18 May 2011 06:39:26PM 2 points [-]

read it as taking the moral superiority of our age for granted ... this seems like a very superficial and careless reading

I think it's an accurate reading. I think based on Eliezer's other writings, he believes that, while modern morality is wrong on many points, on those issues where modern and ancient morality differ, it's generally because moderns understand things that ancients did not.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 18 May 2011 10:02:58PM *  6 points [-]

I haven't read all that he's written on the topic, so it may be true for all I know. But I'd still be surprised and disappointed if he and other prominent participants here take for granted, for example, that one-person-one-vote democracy is a good idea for all places and times, which is given in the original article as one of the ideas that a proponent of modern values might want to transmit. (Of course, this is a widespread and high-status delusion nowadays, but the amount of evidence against it beats almost anything that's normally considered superstitious.)

Comment author: JohnH 18 May 2011 08:47:06PM *  -1 points [-]

... this is certainly not what I had in mind.

I assumed it was, based on the "not in moderation".

But the Mormon church also forbids a glass or two of wine with dinner, once a week.

Yes it does. You are free to read section 89 where it is so forbidden to see why.

In any case, one can look at the rings of trees, match them up to older trees, match those up to still older trees..

Not sure the trees would have died. Also not sure of the exact nature of the flood. The myth is an extremely common one and myths are usually based on some sort of fact. That we haven't definitively shown what this was based on does not mean that it did not exist.

it is unethical to eat animals, for example, which the church would find to be incorrect

I just showed that the church would not find this to be incorrect. I actually know some members that hold this exact position and they are members in good standing. Like I said some of the presidents of the church have held this position.

Something being culturally being less acceptable has nothing to do with whether it is incorrect or not. That the culture within much of the church would be biased against holding a vegetarian or vegan position it is true but that is nowhere near the same as saying the church itself holds the position to be wrong.

This is EXACTLY what I mean by "playing logic games"

I assume that you do not hold that position then. I have had multiple discussions with people that did hold that position and it is one of the more annoying things to deal with.

I'm not even sure which one is responsible for more deaths per year,

Alcohol causes about 23,000 fatalities a year. Pools appear to cause about 3,500 fatalities per year. Tobacco causes about 400,000 fatalities per year. Cars cause about 40,000 fatalities per year.

Many of the alcohol deaths are also car fatalities as well.

Per usage alcohol has a higher death rate then either tobacco or pools. Over the long term tobacco clearly has a higher death rate. I am unsure as to if marijuana has a similar long term usage effect. To be consistent society should either make alcohol and tobacco illegal or legalize all other substances with a similar amount of harm. I personally think each state should be able to make the decision.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 18 May 2011 09:44:05PM *  8 points [-]

Per usage alcohol has a higher death rate then either tobacco or pools.

Actually, the best available study suggests that drinking appears to increase life expectancy on average even in fairly heavy amounts. (Ungated paper available here -- see the striking graphs in figures 1 and 2.)

In practice, of course, this varies enormously between individuals, and it's somewhat correlated with ancestry. Some people with particularly bad predispositions are indeed better off as teetotalers, but the idea that total abstinence would make everyone (or even the majority of people in Western countries) healthier is just ludicrous.

As for those supposed total alcohol death statistics, these numbers are completely arbitrary. There is simply no reasonable unique way to define deaths as due to alcohol, and with convenient enough definitions you can make the numbers vary by orders of magnitude.

Comment author: Alicorn 18 May 2011 09:15:26PM 0 points [-]

Alcohol causes about 23,000 fatalities a year. Pools appear to cause about 3,500 fatalities per year. Tobacco causes about 400,000 fatalities per year. Cars cause about 40,000 fatalities per year.

Upvoted for apparently actually looking this up.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 18 May 2011 09:29:21PM 2 points [-]

I wouldn't be so generous. The car accident statistics are probably accurate, and the pool drownings might be too, but the other two figures are necessarily arbitrary and tendentious, however they were arrived at.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 18 May 2011 06:08:11PM *  14 points [-]

For what that's worth, when I reflect on my past blunders, the worst ones I can think of were due to misunderstandings of the unwritten and unspoken de facto rules according to which various institutions and human interactions work in practice. In these situations, I would either act according to the official rules and the respectable pious principles in situations where you're expected to break them, or I would break them in ways that seemed inconsequential to me but were in fact serious. (Sometimes I'd even feel bad for breaking them when there seemed to be no alternative, when in fact such breaking was tacitly considered business as usual.)

To me it seems evident that the ability to figure out the de facto rules quickly, instinctively, and accurately is mostly independent of general intelligence. It is certainly one of the key abilities that differentiate high achievers (and, conversely, big-time losers) from the rest. Its relation with other aspects of human social behavior and social skills is a complex and fascinating open question. For example, the talent for rule navigation seems to be largely independent of charisma, even though both can be a solid basis for high achievement. (Some historical events provide fascinating examples of clashes between super-charismatic and ingenious rule-navigating types -- think Trotsky vs. Stalin.)

This, incidentally, is a topic where I have found the insight from OB/LW about status and signaling significantly helpful in clearing up some confusions. Still, there are issues where I can't get my head around the de facto rules. For example, when it comes to certain beliefs that are nowadays considered disreputable, I observe people who were severely penalized just for suggesting that they might harbor them, but at the same time other people who have expressed them pretty openly without getting into any problems. Clearly there must be some significant differences involved, but I have nothing except vague hypotheses.

Comment author: [deleted] 17 May 2011 06:40:49PM *  7 points [-]

What surprised me is that many took for granted that the abolition of slavery in the Greek world was economically and socially feasible without making the Greeks less an influence on later civilization than they where.

Modern morals simply don't work very well in the ancient world. This goes for a variety of practices and laws that modern Westerners find abhorrent. To borrow Robin Hanson's vocabulary if you succeed in convincing ancient farmers to be more like foragers morality wise, this would not result in history being prettier in our eyes, but in them being displaced by other farmers with farmer values, since they will be, you know, better farmers.

Edit: Changed everyone to many in the first sentence.

In response to comment by [deleted] on [SEQ RERUN] Archimedes's Chronophone
Comment author: Vladimir_M 17 May 2011 07:04:46PM *  4 points [-]

I didn't get this impression from the article. I'm sure that some people read it as taking the moral superiority of our age for granted simply because they can't imagine that someone smart and respectable could do otherwise. However, this seems like a very superficial and careless reading -- the article clearly takes a dig at this feeling of superiority, claiming that it's due to the same cognitive strategy that would have lead people in past ages to align with the prevailing values of their time. It doesn't seem to me that the majority, let alone everyone, could have read it so negligently; the OB/LW audience is normally better than that.

Comment author: matt 17 May 2011 12:57:53AM *  3 points [-]

As for the second article, it says "Bitcoin is unstoppable without end-user prosecution." Well, duh,…

It's not quite "duh" - the original Napster and eGold died because the US Government could prosecute those who ran the services, at much lower cost (both monetary and electoral) than prosecuting enough users of those systems to kill them. It's a point worth making that Bitcoin doesn't have a single central hub that can be killed easily.

Unless you're a rare expert ready to go to extraordinary lengths, there is no anonymity on the internet if the government is decided to come after you.

But there's practical anonymity in a large enough crowd.
I would be surprised to learn that most Bittorrent pirates took reasonable security measures, yet Bittorrent piracy is hard to kill due to its popularity and its decentralised design.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 17 May 2011 01:43:56AM *  5 points [-]

It's a point worth making that Bitcoin doesn't have a single central hub that can be killed easily.

Things that can't be shut down centrally may continue indefinitely under crackdown, but their scope will be drastically reduced, and they will be done only by a handful of very seedy and/or reckless individuals. Even mild and sporadic enforcement (such as e.g. that practiced against drug dealing) is enough to make the activity out of bounds for respectable people and legal businesses. Really severe enforcement would make even the seediest people think twice.

Thorough and effective law enforcement is an easy problem for modern governments as long as there is the political will to do what is necessary. This is often not the case for a variety of reasons, but you can bet there will be plenty of political will if Bitcoin ever becomes subversive on a large scale.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 16 May 2011 11:54:21PM 2 points [-]

Because of what it says about economics -- that an outsider can reach the same conclusion, for the same reason, as (half of) the "experts". Remember the "layshadow test"? If an academic field is such that a layperson can come in, spend a few hours, and produce output indistinguishable from people who have spent years "learning" the field, then that field is lost because the inferential distance is low, implying little knowledge accumulation.

I'm not sure that's always true. For example, in my field, mathematics, there are a lot of results that are much easier to explain and learn then they were to discover.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 17 May 2011 12:24:51AM *  5 points [-]

I'm not sure that's always true. For example, in my field, mathematics, there are a lot of results that are much easier to explain and learn then they were to discover.

With any NP problem, it's much easier to verify the result than to come up with it. What you describe probably fits this pattern.

In economics, the problem is not that established results, or even open problems, are easy to explain. The problem is that credentialed experts keep arguing about toy problems that are easily explained to a layman, and are unable to produce any insight beyond what an intelligent layman would also be able to figure out quickly. What's more, they can't even reach consensus that the problem is intractable, each arrogantly claiming that his ideologically favored theory is correct, and his opponents disagree because they are delusional or dishonest charlatans. (The latter is usually expressed more diplomatically, though it's actually quite common even for top-rank economists' writing to drip with unconcealed scorn and contempt of the most arrogant sort.)

Comment author: cousin_it 16 May 2011 05:59:47PM 6 points [-]

I don't completely understand that story. Why didn't they start babysitting for half a coupon?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 16 May 2011 11:21:05PM 3 points [-]

I also wonder how come they didn't start trading coupons for cash. (Or maybe they did but won't tell?)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 16 May 2011 09:56:43PM 4 points [-]

The first article is spectacularly clueless on (1) (he simply lacks the relevant knowledge to express an informed opinion on the topic one way or another), but pretty much completely right on (2). I lack the expertise to judge the claims on (3), and he's clearly wrong on (4). So it's one or two out of four, depending on whether his claims about (3) are correct.

As for the second article, it says "Bitcoin is unstoppable without end-user prosecution." Well, duh, many things would be unstoppable without prosecuting the people involved in them. So they get prosecuted. Unless you're a rare expert ready to go to extraordinary lengths, there is no anonymity on the internet if the government is decided to come after you.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 16 May 2011 09:39:55PM 3 points [-]

I can read Russian with some difficulty, and occasionally I use machine translation for help when I get stuck with the vocabulary. I've tried several translation web pages (basically the ones that come up when you google for Russian translators), but I haven't observed any that would perform noticeably better than Google Translate. Sometimes you might have better luck with one website or another, but I haven't observed any systematic patterns.

The problem is that the syntactic constructs of Russian, a much more synthetic language than English, are much harder to match with their English equivalents automatically compared with the (modern) Germanic or Romance languages, and possibly even in comparison with some non-Indo-European analytic languages.

In response to comment by Vladimir_M on Liars for Jesus
Comment author: jasonmcdowell 15 May 2011 10:23:22PM -2 points [-]

A rational, appropriately meta, abstract deconstruction of the probable biases, trustworthiness, and relevance of the top post. Pure and clean and correct.

But the opposing sides of the argument aren't equal. The weight of bias isn't symmetrical. One side is much more wrong than the other. The obvious next criticism is 'reversed stupidity isn't intelligence'. Of course we'd like all sides to be less wrong! But the propaganda isn't symmetrical. The would-be theocrats have to distort more to make their case, because the truth isn't on their side.

There probably is value in the book. I doubt it is perfectly clean or fair. But I doubt it is worthless.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 16 May 2011 12:03:03AM *  7 points [-]

But the opposing sides of the argument aren't equal. The weight of bias isn't symmetrical. One side is much more wrong than the other. [...] The would-be theocrats have to distort more to make their case, because the truth isn't on their side.

Again, are you claiming this as an expert on the early U.S. history, or are you reasoning that since the "would-be theocrats" are further from the truth on contemporary issues, they must also be further from the truth about these historical controversies?

If the latter, it's a huge fallacy. I haven't studied this historical topic in-depth, but I have studied many others, some of which are commonly brought up in contemporary ideological controversies. In my experience, even in dispassionate topics it's hard to avoid oversimplifying and caricaturing history and retrojecting modern attitudes and conflicts onto it -- and when history is written for propaganda purposes, it's overwhelmingly likely to be distorted and biased to the point of worthlessness, no matter who does it and whose case it's supposed to advance. (This book might be an exception, for all I know, but what I object to is taking its value and accuracy for granted just based on ideological solidarity with the author.)

Not to mention that bringing up "theocrats" itself betrays a biased attitude. You may dislike the people in question and oppose their agenda, but "theocracy" is a reasonably well defined term in political theory, and what these people advocate doesn't satisfy this definition. Throwing derogatory labels at people may be an effective PR tactic in some circumstances, but there is no good reason to do it here.

In response to Liars for Jesus
Comment author: Vladimir_M 15 May 2011 09:37:23PM *  11 points [-]

Are you recommending this book as someone independently knowledgeable about the relevant history? Or do you just assume that since its thesis, if accepted, would further some contemporary political goals that you favor, its historical claims must be more accurate than the historical claims of the other side? I lack the expertise to evaluate this book, but I do know that history written with the goal of providing propaganda ammunition for modern ideological controversies almost inevitably ends up heavily biased, no matter whose case it serves.

In any case, the idea that the modern U.S. First Amendment constitutional law doctrines and the controversies arising from them have any relation with its original meaning and purpose is fantastically ahistorical. Taking quotes from that period, to whatever effect, and trying to present them as having some bearing on the present-day issues is sheer propaganda.

Comment author: gwern 15 May 2011 04:23:20PM *  0 points [-]

I don't understand the standards you and your upvoters are using. So Eliezer can single out Aumann (with summaries of as much scholarly merit as the ones on the wiki page), to name one, in multiple articles - to general upvotes and lack of Vladimir_M comments; XiXiDu can make a list - to general upvotes and lack of Vladimir_M comments; I, timtyler, and nhamann can suggest additions - to general upvotes and lack of Vladimir_M comments, and so on except when I post a Discussion article about a wiki article, then it gets fiercely downvoted.

What lesson am I meant to infer from this? That I am not high-status enough to make such claims (but Eliezer is)? That only now have people come to their senses under your trenchant critique? That it's fine to name names and have a community-wide agreement that some are beyond the pale - but we dare not write it down?

And as far as bad taste goes - I would think that the ones with mental illness would be the most valuable ones to include inasmuch as they are the only ones most of the rest of humanity will agree with us in saying that they were flat-out wrong and this demonstrates compartmentalization. (There's a difference between mental diseases and mere religious or other beliefs...? But the mind is a physical thing, so the difference is not one of kind.)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 15 May 2011 06:08:26PM *  7 points [-]

What lesson am I meant to infer from this?

Simply that publishing a list like this one is a bad idea, for all the reasons I've listed (among others). I'm not picking on you personally in any way -- I would have made the same comments if it had been anyone else.

I don't keep track of all LW posts and comments, and I don't have the same amount of time and will for commenting at all times, so if I replied critically to one post but not to another similar one, that doesn't mean I'm playing favorites. Moreover, publishing a list like yours is much worse that just dropping a name in passing to illustrate a point. If you don't understand why, please take it at my word -- I really don't have the time to explain it at length now. As for the approving comments, they were all made (and upvoted) before mine, so it's reasonable to conclude that my comment has swayed the general opinion somewhat.

In any case, I will again urge you (and, barring that, the Wiki editors) to remove this really bad article. Besides all the problems I've listed, it's awfully sloppy and vague with facts. For example, Ayala left the priesthood more than fifty years ago, but you list him as if he still were a priest. And how on Earth do you know that Donal Knuth is "devout"? Do you perhaps know him personally to vouch for it? Have you read, or even just opened, that book because of which you think he deserves being mocked? Then, why on Earth was it irrational for Berger to try and investigate his hypotheses about telepathy experimentally (which he clearly did in a sufficiently sound way to make a major scientific contribution in the process)? You're just firing off cheap rhetorical shots at people like a propagandist.

Most of all, what gives you (or anyone else) the authority to choose which people are to be publicly attacked and mocked like this? What are your exact criteria based on which you're going to take a dozen or so people and proclaim them as the worst irrationalists among all scientists, worthy of being included in the official LessWrong hall of shame?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 14 May 2011 01:14:54AM *  9 points [-]

The Pravda article is a secondary account of an alleged interview with Perelman published recently by Komsomolskaya Pravda, another historic Russian Communist Party newspaper that has turned into a tabloid since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The KP article is here (if you can't decode Russian, automatic translation should give you the idea):
http://kp.ru/daily/25677.3/836229/

It's hard to tell how credible any of this is. To make it even weirder, the article is accompanied by what looks like a stalker video of Perelman walking around town.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 13 May 2011 10:04:06PM *  30 points [-]

This is an awful idea for so many reasons that I'm seriously disappointed that I have to spell them out here.

For start, publishing condemnatory lists of people is bad for all sorts of PR reasons. Can you imagine what this list will look like to random visitors and what associations it will evoke?

Then, if you're going to denounce people publicly for their views, basic decency requires that you give a correct and detailed account of what exactly they said and wrote. Supporting your list with paraphrased soundbites from Wikipedia and the popular press is far below this standard.

Next, what exactly qualifies a belief as so irrational that someone who has it should be put on the official LessWrong list of shame? If religion counts, why wouldn't Marxism or any other modern ideological delusion? And if you're going to call out people for those, then you might as well save space by instead listing those who didn't (or don't) have any, according to you.

Also, as one commenter already noted, you're being extremely disrespectful towards people with mental problems who have ended up on your list. Normally I'm the last one here to insist on hypersensitivity, but this is in bad taste however you turn it.

These are not the only reasons why this list should be deleted, but they should be sufficient.

Comment author: Emile 13 May 2011 07:51:35AM 4 points [-]

In case you haven't encountered him before, Peter A Taylor, the author of that FAQ has some interesting articles on religion and politics: Rational Religion, The Market for Sanctimony, or Yet Another Space Alien Cult, What Does "Morality" Mean?, etc. - he apparently is a reader of LessWrong.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 13 May 2011 07:27:03PM 4 points [-]

Yes, I have rummaged around his website already. There is some interesting stuff there.

Interestingly, in the "Market for Sanctimony" article, he confirms my impressions about Unitarian Universalism, contrary to the claims of User:handoflixue:

Officially, UU does not have a creed. A consequence of this is that any psychological needs that depend on getting together with co-believers are likely to be frustrated at a UU church. This in turn leads people to promote hard left-wing politics as an unofficial creed. [...] Thus a church that prides itself on not asking people to check their minds at the door ends up doing it anyway, just in a different fashion.

Comment author: [deleted] 13 May 2011 01:41:40AM 1 point [-]

Which makes me wonder if our understanding of the world doesn't involve even more "mysterious answers" for all practical purposes outside of our narrow domains of expertise.

I'm not disputing your other points, but for most typical practical purposes I as good as know things that I don't actually know, because I can make use of specialists, trading on my own specialty. The practical value of literally, on an individual level, knowing how to recreate technology from scratch is limited, outside of highly contrived situations such as those that are contrived by the scriptwriters of the MacGyver TV show. This could conceivably change in a sufficiently extreme survivalist scenario, though I have my doubts about the likelihood of an actual Robinson Crusoe scenario in which you literally have to do it all yourself with no possibility for specialization and trade. There are also books. If you have a good library, then you can have a lot of information at your fingertips should the need arise without literally having to have it in your head right now.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 13 May 2011 06:00:36PM *  3 points [-]

I don't think we have any real disagreement here. Clearly, if the present system is not in danger of breaking down catastrophically (and it doesn't seem to be, at least in the short to medium run), we're better off with specialization. Unlike in the 19th century, we are technologically far beyond the limit of what could be created from scratch without enormous numbers of people working in highly specialized roles, and barring a cataclysmic breakdown, old-fashioned versatile technical skills are not worth the opportunity cost of acquiring them.

(I think you are underestimating the difficulty of translating information from books into actually getting things done, though. Think just how hard it is to cook competently from recipes if you're a newbie.)

In the past, however, people didn't have this luxury of living in a complex world where you can create value and prosper by specializing, and where you can acquire correct scientific knowledge from readily available sources. Yet with their crude provisional theories and primitive and self-reliant technical abilities, they managed to create the foundations for our present knowledge and technology out of almost nothing. I think we do owe them respect for this, as well as the recognition that their work required amazing practical skills that few, if any people have today, even if only because it's no longer worthwhile to acquire them.

Comment author: thomblake 12 May 2011 10:55:55PM 0 points [-]

attributes to them intellectual errors of which they were not guilty in reality

Don't worry, we're not going to hang anybody for it.

especially if this means feeling superior to people whose work was the basis and foundation of this contemporary knowledge

But I am superior to them. I have a better understanding of the world. I can access most of human knowledge from a device that I keep in my pocket. I can travel hundreds of miles in a day. I have hot running water in my house. Yes, all these things are true because I "just happen" to live in this time. It makes me better than those who came before, and worse than those who will come after. Similarly, I am better than I was yesterday, and hopefully I am worse than I will be tomorrow.

Let us not forget Themistocles's taunt: "I should not have been great if I had not been an Athenian, nor would you, were you an Athenian, have become Themistocles." Perhaps Kelvin would have been greater than I had he been born in this time. But sadly he was not.

Rationality is no place for false humility, and we should not revere those who came before as though they were wiser than us. Be aware of your power and grow more powerful.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 13 May 2011 12:02:17AM *  8 points [-]

But I am superior to them. I have a better understanding of the world.

Also, it is questionable if our supposedly better individual understanding of the world would survive any practical tests outside of our narrow domains of expertise. After all, these days you only need to contribute some little details in a greatly complex system built and maintained by numerous others, of which you understand only a rough and vague outline, if even that. How much actual control over the world does your knowledge enable you to exert, outside of these highly contrived situations provided by the modern society?

One could argue that a good 19th century engineer had a much better understanding of the world judging by this criterion of practical control over it. These people really knew how to bootstrap complex technologies out of practically nothing. Nowadays, except perhaps for a handful of survivalist enthusiasts, we'd be as helpless as newborn babes if the support systems around us broke down. Which makes me wonder if our understanding of the world doesn't involve even more "mysterious answers" for all practical purposes outside of our narrow domains of expertise. Yes, you can produce more technically correct statements about reality than anyone in the 19th century could, but what can you accomplish with that knowledge?

Comment author: thomblake 12 May 2011 10:55:55PM 0 points [-]

attributes to them intellectual errors of which they were not guilty in reality

Don't worry, we're not going to hang anybody for it.

especially if this means feeling superior to people whose work was the basis and foundation of this contemporary knowledge

But I am superior to them. I have a better understanding of the world. I can access most of human knowledge from a device that I keep in my pocket. I can travel hundreds of miles in a day. I have hot running water in my house. Yes, all these things are true because I "just happen" to live in this time. It makes me better than those who came before, and worse than those who will come after. Similarly, I am better than I was yesterday, and hopefully I am worse than I will be tomorrow.

Let us not forget Themistocles's taunt: "I should not have been great if I had not been an Athenian, nor would you, were you an Athenian, have become Themistocles." Perhaps Kelvin would have been greater than I had he been born in this time. But sadly he was not.

Rationality is no place for false humility, and we should not revere those who came before as though they were wiser than us. Be aware of your power and grow more powerful.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 12 May 2011 11:45:34PM 4 points [-]

Don't worry, we're not going to hang anybody for it.

I don't know who you mean by "we," but in any case, I don't think objecting to misrepresentations and strawmen is unreasonable even if they're directed against people who are long dead.

But I am superior to them. I have a better understanding of the world.

Then why the need to invent strawmen instead of discussing their actual ideas and theories?

What I want to emphasize is that grappling with reality successfully enough to make a great intellectual contribution is extremely hard. If a theory provides motivation and guidance for work that leads to great contributions, then it should be seen as a useful model, not an intellectual blunder -- whatever its shortcomings, and however thoroughly its predictions have been falsified in the meantime. Historically, theories such as phlogiston, aether, or vitalism clearly satisfy this criterion.

Now of course, it makes sense to discuss how and why our modern theories are superior to phlogiston etc. What doesn't make sense is going out of your way to bash strawmen of these theories as supposedly unscientific and full of bad reasoning. In reality, they were a product of the best scientific reasoning possible given the state of knowledge at the time, and moreover, they motivated the crucial work that led to our present knowledge, and to some degree even provided direct practically useful results.

Comment author: thomblake 12 May 2011 09:58:45PM -2 points [-]

bashing people who held them centuries ago as dimwits who sought to mysticize the questions instead of elucidating them is sheer arrogant ignorance.

I don't think that's what Eliezer is doing here (Except maybe Kelvin, but he deserved it).

The point is not to bash the people who held these beliefs; the point is to see how we can do better.

And for the most part, there isn't a point to "grappling with the real complexity of the history of ideas". From this particular parable, we see more clearly that a hypothesis must constrain our anticipated experiences, and as a side note nothing is inherently mysterious. Moving on.

Ignorance is not the source of my arrogance. It is deserved pride.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 12 May 2011 10:22:14PM *  14 points [-]

The problem is that the "parable" is presented as an account of the actual historical vitalist theories. As such, it seriously misrepresents them and attributes to them intellectual errors of which they were not guilty in reality. It's similar with other LW articles that use phlogiston as a whipping horse. If you look at a real historical account of these theories, you'll see that they implied plenty of anticipated experiences, and were abandoned because they made incorrect predictions, not because they were empty of predictive power and empirical content.

As for "deserved pride," if an exposition of your insight requires setting up strawmen to knock down, instead of applying it to real ideas actually held by smart and accomplished people, past or present, then something definitely seems fishy. Not to mention that pride is hardly a suitable emotion to feel just because you happen to live at a time in which you were able to absorb more knowledge than in earlier times -- especially if this means feeling superior to people whose work was the basis and foundation of this contemporary knowledge, and their theories that provided decisive guidance in this work. Yes, you do know more than they did, but while they made decisive original contributions, what have you done besides just passively absorbing the existing knowledge?

Comment author: Emile 12 May 2011 07:07:57PM *  4 points [-]

There are some conservative Universal Unitarians, which seems to indicate that there isn't complete ideological uniformity.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 12 May 2011 09:29:57PM *  4 points [-]

Point taken, and thanks for the interesting link. Googling around a bit more, it seems like there are a few groups like these, but they are small and extreme outliers without influence and status. Before writing my above comments, I checked out the links on the first few search pages that come up when you google "Unitarian Universalist," and I definitely encountered perfectly predictable and uniform positions advocated on those.

Comment author: Dreaded_Anomaly 12 May 2011 07:05:36PM 3 points [-]

Similarly now we have forces at the atomic level that we don't understand how they function, and yet quantum theory is generally accepted as truth.

Please elaborate, because on its face that statement does not seem accurate. We do understand how the electromagnetic, weak, and strong forces function. There are places where quantum field theory fails, but there are plenty of places where it succeeds and makes good predictions.

In contrast, "elan vital" doesn't make any predictions. It doesn't drive curiosity because there's no way to test it and get results that we can then try to understand better.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 12 May 2011 08:51:28PM *  18 points [-]

In contrast, "elan vital" doesn't make any predictions. It doesn't drive curiosity because there's no way to test it and get results that we can then try to understand better.

Honestly, how much direct familiarity do you have with the actual historical vitalist theories, as opposed to third- or fourth-hand strawman accounts peppered with a few convenient soundbites, such as the one presented in the original post here?

One of the worst tendencies often seen on LW is the propensity to thrash these ridiculous strawmen instead of grappling with the real complexity of the history of ideas. Yes, historical scientific theories like vitalism and phlogiston have been falsified, but bashing people who held them centuries ago as dimwits who sought to mysticize the questions instead of elucidating them is sheer arrogant ignorance.

Even the original post itself lists an example where vitalism (i.e. its strong version) made concrete predictions that could be falsified, and which were indeed falsified by Woehler's experiments. Another issue where (weaker) vitalism made falsifiable predictions that lead to hugely important insight was the question of the spontaneous generation of microorganisms (and molds etc.). It was a vitalist model that motivated Pasteur's experiments that demonstrated that such generation does not occur and thus sterilized stuff remains such once sealed.

Yes, of course, nowadays we know better than all of these people, but bashing them is as silly as taking a sophomore course in relativity and then jeering at Galileo and Newton as ignorant idiots.

Edit: For those interested in the real history of vitalism rather than strawmen, here is a nice article:
http://mechanism.ucsd.edu/teaching/philbio/vitalism.htm

Comment author: Peterdjones 12 May 2011 02:08:02PM 1 point [-]

a glance at a typical Unitarian web page will show a comprehensive and consistent list of left-wing ideological positions.

Dictatorship of the Proletariat? Class struggle? Ownership of the means of Production? Universal Free Healthcare, even?

Or did you mean the kind of lpoliicies that count as "left wing" in the US, and liberal/moderate/centre-left everywhere else.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 12 May 2011 05:30:42PM *  10 points [-]

Or did you mean the kind of lpoliicies that count as "left wing" in the US, and liberal/moderate/centre-left everywhere else.

"Everywhere else"? I hate to break the news, but there are other places under the Sun besides the Anglosphere and Western Europe! In most of the world, both by population and surface area, and including some quite prosperous and civilized places, many UU positions would be seen as unimaginably extremist. (Try arguing their favored immigration policies to the Japanese, for example.)

You are however correct that in other Western/Anglospheric countries, the level of ideological uniformity in the political mainstream is far higher than in the U.S., and their mainstream is roughly similar to the UU doctrine on many issues, though not all. (Among their intellectual elites, on the other hand, Unitarian Universalism might as well be the established religion.)

In any case, I didn't say that the UUs had the most extreme left-wing positions on everything. On the contrary, what they espouse is roughly somewhere on the left fringe of the mainstream, and more radical leftist positions are certainly conceivable (and held by some small numbers of people). What is significant for the purposes of this discussion is the apparent ideological uniformity, not the content of their doctrine. My points would hold even if their positions were anywhere to the left or right of the present ones, as long as they were equally uniform.

Comment author: handoflixue 12 May 2011 03:03:24AM 2 points [-]

judging by the uniformity of ideological positions espoused on the Unitarian/UU websites, there does seem to be a strong and apparently unchallenged consensus among them.

The core theme I've seen repeated across congregations is the "seven core principles" that I posted above. I've seen some degree of ideological consistency across those, but I've attended seen quite a few sermons discussing various perspectives on the seven core principles. It seems like a fairly common tradition to even invite speakers from other religions or affiliations to come and share their own thoughts.

Certainly a bias towards those who are "compatible" with the group consensus, and there is some degree of "group think". LessWrong has this going for it as well, though: there's a strong thread of anti-religion bias, and I'd say there's a moderate pro-cryonics/singularity bias. I don't see a lot of posts about how SIAI is a waste of time and money, or how Christianity is really misunderstood and we should come to embrace our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ.

Can you can point to something specific in the UU literature that makes you feel that they're less tolerant to dissent than LessWrong?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 12 May 2011 07:27:45AM *  13 points [-]

Can you can point to something specific in the UU literature that makes you feel that they're less tolerant to dissent than LessWrong?

Before I even click at a link to a Unitarian Universalist website, I know with very high probability that there is going to be a "social justice" section espousing ideological positions on a number of issues. And for any such section, I can predict with almost full certainty what precisely these positions will be before I even read any of it.

Now, the UU folks would probably claim that such agreement exists simply because these positions are correct. However, even if I agreed that all these positions are correct, given the public controversy over many of these issues, it would still seem highly implausible that such ideological uniformity could be maintained in practice in a group highly tolerant of dissent. In contrast, I see nothing comparable on LW.

You say:

LessWrong has this going for it as well, though: there's a strong thread of anti-religion bias, and I'd say there's a moderate pro-cryonics/singularity bias. I don't see a lot of posts about how SIAI is a waste of time and money, or how Christianity is really misunderstood and we should come to embrace our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ.

Actually, in my opinion, LW does have its collective quirks and blind spots, but you're nowhere close to pinpointing them.

Regarding SIAI being a waste of time and money, I've seen such opinions raised in several threads without getting downvoted or otherwise creating any drama. (I can dig up some links if you insist.) As long as you make a polite and coherent argument, you won't elicit any hostility by criticizing SIAI.

Regarding religious proselytism, that is generally considered impolite anywhere. On the other hand, I actually do believe that there is a lot of misunderstanding of religion on LW, in the sense of many people having a "reversed stupidity" attitude towards various religious teachings and beliefs, developing "applause lights" reactions to various loudmouth atheists who bash traditional religion but believe far crazier stuff instead, etc., etc. I have made arguments along these lines on occasions, and I've never encountered any hostility in response, just reasonable counterarguments.

Regarding cryonics, it may well be that the average opinion on LW is heavily biased in favor of it. But again, if you want to argue that cryonics is bunk, you'll be welcome to do so as long as you have something new, intelligent, and well-informed to say about it. (In fact, I remember posts from people who solicited for anti-cryonics arguments.)

In contrast to these topics, one that usually destroys the quality of discourse on LW are gender issues. This really is a recurring problem, but then, I seriously doubt that a diversity of views on these issues is welcome among UUs. Another problem are certain topics whose understanding requires familiarity with some peculiar theories that are discussed on LW occasionally, where certain (seemingly) very theoretical and far-fetched speculations are apparently taken seriously enough by some of the prominent people here that discussing them can lead to bizarre drama. None of this however comes anywhere close to the ideological uniformity that I observe among the Unitarian Universalists, at least judging from their internet presence.

Comment author: handoflixue 12 May 2011 01:32:30AM *  2 points [-]

Well, there are seven formal UU values:

*The inherent worth and dignity of every person;

*justice, equity and compassion in human relations;

*world peace, liberty and justice for all; and

*respect for the interdependent web of all existence.

*Acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations;

*a free and responsible search for truth and meaning; and

*the right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregation and in society at large.

I would consider the first four to be values that are roughly shared with LessWrong, although there are definitely some differences in perspective. The fifth one, UUs focus on spiritual growth, LW focuses on growing rationality. The sixth principle is again shared. The seventh seems implemented in the LessWrong karma system, and I'd actually say LW does better here than the UUs.

It's also worth noting that these are explicitly "shared values", and not a creed. The general attitude I have seen is that one should show respect and tolerance even to people who don't share these values.

LessWrong is a place for rationalists to meet and discuss rationality. UU Churches are a place for UUs to meet and discuss their shared values. It doesn't serve LessWrong to have it dominated by "religion vs rationality" posts, nor posts trying to sell Christianity or de-convert rationalists. It doesn't serve the UUs to have church dominated by challenges to those values.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 12 May 2011 02:01:27AM *  12 points [-]

Well, there are seven formal UU values:

This is a list of applause lights, not a statement of concrete values, beliefs, and goals. To find out the real UU values, beliefs, and goals, one must ask what exact arrangements constitute "liberty," "justice," etc., and what exact practical actions will, according to them, further these goals in practice. On these questions, there is nothing like consensus on LW, whereas judging by the uniformity of ideological positions espoused on the Unitarian/UU websites, there does seem to be a strong and apparently unchallenged consensus among them.

(To be precise, the applause lights list does include a few not completely vague goals, like e.g. "world peace," but again, this says next to nothing without a clear position on what is likely to advance peace in practice and what to do when trade-offs are involved. There also seems to be one concrete political position on the list, namely democratism. However, judging by the responses seen when democracy is questioned on LW, there doesn't seem to be a LW consensus on that either, and at any rate, even the notion of "democracy" is rather vague and weasely. I'm sure that the UU folks would be horrified by many things that have, or have historically had, firm democratic support in various places.)

Comment author: jsalvatier 11 May 2011 09:42:31PM *  1 point [-]

1) It all depends on whether your predictions are better than or worse than the relevant traders. If the traders already have access to such an oracle, you won't be able to make any money; if they don't, you will. Many macroeconomic variables of interest (GDP, employment etc.) are not martingales which means that predicting their movements is not the same thing as predicting them better than relevant traders. Being able to predict an asset price difference (between now and some future time) and acting on that information tends to move the price to eliminate that difference now. Being able to predict say a difference in unemployment (between now and some future time) does not necessarily tend to move unemployment to eliminate that difference right now.

Perhaps the following is a more relevant example: lets that you and everyone else found out a couple of days ago that aliens are going to land on earth in a month. The variable aliens-on-earth (binary) is certainly an important macro variable. Naturally market prices currently reflect the fact that aliens will soon be among us. The current value of aliens-on-earth, however, is False and no amount of trading can change that. Aliens-on-earth is not a martingale; its current value is not equal to its discounted expected value and you can predict it quite well (aliens-on-earth(t) = {False for t < 1month and True for t >= 1 month).

2) I'll give a concrete but extreme question: what would happen if the US moved to a uranium based commodity money system? Would it be good? bad? Trader based models are likely pretty useless for this because no one thinks this is likely to happen so there are few benefits to developing a model for it. Even if they did, you might not have a way to get at those predictions. However, you could get a rough idea about the consequences by building an economic model for this scenario taking into account the economics of money, estimates about the stock and potential supply of uranium, the costs of avoiding radiation poisoning during transactions etc.

Obviously this question is extreme, but questions like it are valuable: should we move to a competitive currency system (free banking)? what would that look like? How does an optimal central bank behave (for various definitions of optimal)? Are countercyclical unemployment insurance extensions welfare improving? Is countercyclical government spending welfare improving?

I have some opinions on the preceding questions including that some of them are obviously of little interest, but I only came to them because I learned some macroeconomics.

4) 'There's potential money to be made by selling rough macro models to say industrial producers' is a fair point. However, it's a lot of work to turn a model that says 'keeping money supply constant, an increase in people's desire to hold money produces recessions' to something that might be useful to producers for planning. It's the job of macroeconomists to come up with the former not the latter in the same way that it's the job of government funded battery researcher to come up with basic theory related to batteries, or a computer scientist to come up with interesting and potentially useful classes of algorithms. If one of these researchers comes up with something really big that is immediately implementable, perhaps they will go off and start a company to take advantage of the idea, but generally they stick to basic theoretical research because thats whats easy and comfortable and where their advantage is.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 12 May 2011 01:20:45AM *  2 points [-]

(1) I know what martingale variables are, but I don't see why the non-martingale nature of the macroeconomic variables is relevant. Clearly, if you have figured out a novel way to predict the coming of the aliens ahead of others (or even just to predict its timing and other details more accurately), you can get rich by figuring out how their coming will affect the markets. This is perfectly analogous to a theory that will predict various macroeconomic variables more accurately than the state of the art, since these variables have predictable effect on asset prices. (In fact, once you have this information, they are no longer martingales for you, since e.g. if you know a recession is coming withing a year, the expected trend for countercyclical assets is upward.)

Or to put it differently, from all that you have written thus far, I still don't see a concrete example (either actual or hypothetical) of the thing whose existence you assume: macroeconomic predictions that are interesting, novel, accurate, and at the same time useless for beating the markets.

(2) I understand that there are hypothetical questions about monetary systems where an accurate answer would have no practical implications by itself. However, presently we are in a situation where there are deep and bitter disagreements even about the predicted consequences of the ordinary and standard monetary policy options. What I find implausible is that one could obtain correct answers of the former sort without a theory that would at the same time be able to give more accurate answers to questions of the latter sort (which would again translate into investment information in a straightforward way). It would be as if you had a theory of mechanics capable of predicting the motions of hypothetical planetary systems but of no use for practical technical problems.

(3) Regarding your point about theoretical vs. applied research in other areas, the same heuristic actually is widely applicable. Whenever you see people doing research into something that should have straightforward practical applications, but you don't see them running to monetize the results, something fishy is likely going on.

Of course, sometimes there is real insight that can't be monetized in any obvious way, like for example fundamental theoretical physics. However, there is an essential difference here. A physical theory can make predictions only about things that are of no business interest, so in fact you have to spend money to contrive experimental setups to test it. In contrast, anything that a macroeconomic theory might be making predictions about and that might actually occur in the real world is inherently of business interest. (And again, if you have a counterexample, I'd be curious to hear it.)

Comment author: handoflixue 12 May 2011 12:00:20AM 1 point [-]

Having been raised Unitarian Universalist, I always find it very odd that "religion" is conflated with "unquestionable dogma". I don't think Unitarians have that any more than LessWrong does.

That said, if "religion" is being used as a shorthand for "unquestionable dogma", then the comments about religion make significantly more sense :)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 12 May 2011 12:33:55AM *  6 points [-]

Having been raised Unitarian Universalist, I always find it very odd that "religion" is conflated with "unquestionable dogma". I don't think Unitarians have that any more than LessWrong does.

I highly doubt that. For one, a glance at a typical Unitarian web page will show a comprehensive and consistent list of left-wing ideological positions. Are you really claiming that if one were to express deep disagreement with those among the Unitarians, the reactions would be equally dispassionate, upfront, and open to argument as they usually are when the prevailing opinion is challenged on LW? (Not that LW is perfect in this regard either, but compared to nearly any other place, credit must be given where it's due.)

Of course, some would claim that old-fashioned religious dogma is somehow incomparably worse and more irrational than modern ideological dogma, so much that the UU stuff doesn't even deserve that designation. However, I don't think this position is defensible, unless we insist on a rather tortured definition of "dogma."

Comment author: jsalvatier 10 May 2011 09:04:19PM *  2 points [-]

Replying by paragraph:

3) sure; my point was that (1) does not imply (2).

1) I'm not clear on how you're disagreeing with me, so this is mostly going to be a reworking of my previous answer. Let me know if you can clarify your disagreement.

Academic and trader models can be better at answering different questions. Neither one need always dominate the other. Academic models might be better at answering questions which rarely come up, for example 'what happens when we change monetary institutions?', so not offer useful investment advice except in those rare occasions but still be useful for deciding what options policy makers should consider.

Academic models can also provide much more understandable and accessible models of the economy (see 2). Non-traders may find these much more useful than trader models (which they may not have access to or be able to understand).

2) No. Remember I stated that this information was already taken into account by the market. NGDP, employment etc. are not random walks (Edit: I mean they are not martingales); their expected future value is not independent of past values. Unemployment is highly non random see here. Some macroeconomic variables are random walks, for example stock market indexes, but most of them are not.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 11 May 2011 08:30:19PM *  3 points [-]

I'm not sure I understand you either. Are you actually saying that if I had an oracle capable of telling me what, say, the rate of unemployment or NGDP growth will be in a year, it would not be possible to make investments with above-market returns using this information?

Moreover, I am at a loss trying to imagine a theory that would enable us to predict with reliable accuracy what would happen if we changed the monetary institutions in a given way, and which wouldn't also enable us to get reliably accurate information on the uncertain and controversial questions about the consequences of the present monetary policies. This would also constitute valuable investment information. (Or do you think it wouldn't?)

On the whole, the problem is that I simply cannot imagine any questions that macroeconomic theories purport to handle where a truly reliable and non-trivial information would not be valuable for investment.

Also, you can't answer these questions by claiming that the relevant information has already been incorporated into the market prices, only in some obscure way that we now seek to disentangle. Many investments are specifically made in order to hedge against uncertainty in macroeconomic trends. If you have a theory that eliminates these uncertainties, or at least provides more accurate probability distributions, there's a straightforward killing to be made there.

Comment author: nerzhin 10 May 2011 08:08:18PM 2 points [-]

A perfectly clear, logical, honest, and readable account of your work is often ipso facto unpublishable: what is required is writing according to unofficial, tacitly acknowledged rules that are extremely hard to figure out on your own.

This has not been my experience. My experience with journal editors and reviewers has been that they want a clear and readable account, but it probably varies a great deal from field to field.

Your point about brand names and networks, however, is very well taken.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 10 May 2011 09:31:03PM *  6 points [-]

This has not been my experience. My experience with journal editors and reviewers has been that they want a clear and readable account, but it probably varies a great deal from field to field.

In many fields -- but not all, as you note, and it's hard to speculate on the exact proportion -- there's an evil arms race in fundamentally dishonest self-promotion. Basically, you must employ every imaginable spin short of outright lying to blow up your contribution out of all proportion and minimize the perceived shortcomings of your work. If instead you write up a complete, straightforward, and honest account that will leave the reader informed as accurately as possible, there's no way you're getting published unless it's a very extraordinary breakthrough.

Of course, even in such circumstances, you want your paper to be clear and readable in the sense that the reviewers will read it easily and end up convinced by your claims and impressed by its high-status qualities, without too may unpleasant questions occurring to them. But this is mostly about Dark Arts, not real clarity of exposition.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 10 May 2011 08:31:35PM 16 points [-]

In most cases, "I know I'm biased, but..." is used as a way of feigning humility and deflecting criticism by preemptively responding to accusations of bias.

It can be a useful signal that you're open to counterarguments and won't get all prissy and offended if someone contradicts you.

Comment author: jsalvatier 10 May 2011 07:27:31PM *  2 points [-]

Perhaps I wasn't clear. I don't think that macroeconomic theorizing is useful even if it predicts nothing. Obviously that's useless. I think that macroeconomic theorizing is useful even if they don't generally outperform market predictions of market forcasted variables because it gives you different kinds of information about the economy.

For example, imagine a world where relevant traders have very good models for predicting the value of the S&P500. However, these models are proprietary, detailed and heavily specialized for predicting the S&P500. Academic models are open, relatively simple and based on 'first principles'.

In this scenario, how useful are these two types models? Depends on what kind of question you're asking:

  • What will the value of the S&P be in 1 year? Trader models useful. Academic models useless.
  • What kinds of alternative monetary institutions would be better than current ones? Trader models useless. Academic models useful.

Perhaps you could formulate prediction markets to answer the second kind of question well, but I sure don't know how and in any case is not currently something people do.

There are also plenty of non-trivial macroeconomic predictions that you cannot make money off of. For example, 'employment will be 1 point higher in 1 year' is non-trivial, but it could be information already perfectly incorporated into the markets. 'printing money now increases employment and inflation for 1 year out' is also nontrivial but may also be fully accounted for. If you don't have access to markets that predict precisely this information, such forecasts can easily be useful.

Also, all relevant prediction markets do not exist. Examples: there are no very liquid unemployment prediction markets, there are no very liquid real GDP prediction markets etc. What is individually useful to trade is not necessarily the same thing as what is socially valuable to know.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 10 May 2011 08:22:39PM *  2 points [-]

What kinds of alternative monetary institutions would be better than current ones? Trader models useless. Academic models useful.

It may well be that the existing trader models are useless for answering this question, but any novel model that is capable of answering them should ipso facto be able to provide useful investment information. There are endless public controversies over the expected effects of the current monetary policy, which have direct bearing on all sorts of markets, and if you can forecast their effects with more accuracy than any existing model, you should be able to beat the markets.

There are also plenty of non-trivial macroeconomic predictions that you cannot make money off of. For example, 'employment will be 1 point higher in 1 year' is non-trivial, but it could be information already perfectly incorporated into the markets.

If you really know that employment will be one point higher in a year, there are straightforward implications on trading. For example, people who bet (possibly as a way of hedging their investments) that there's going to be a very bad recession within a year are certainly wrong, and you can profit by betting against them. If I, a complete amateur, can easily think of such strategies, then I can only imagine what expert financiers could do with this information! It's similar with predicting NGDP and all other aggregate variables.

I don't see any logical possibility how some macroeconomic prediction could be at the same time: (1) meaningful and non-trivial, (2) more accurate than the state of the art, and (3) useless for investment.

Comment author: cousin_it 10 May 2011 06:57:04PM *  4 points [-]

For generating content that is pleasant to consume, many things have a better track record than rationality, e.g. some musicians can write really interesting music while drunk or high. But if you need actionable information, most instances of beautiful-sounding insight generated by "narrative-minded" people fail when you try to apply them, because they weren't selected for correctness.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 10 May 2011 08:09:37PM *  6 points [-]

I mostly had in mind insight that's interesting for reasons of intellectual curiosity rather than practical usefulness (which is still a higher bar than content that's merely pleasant to consume, like music). You are of course right that practically useful insight is much rarer, but I don't think the output of most narrative-minded people would be improved in this regard by making them adhere to stricter intellectual standards.

It would be great if their creative intellectual excursions could somehow be made to home onto correct insight more frequently, but I doubt this could be accomplished in any practical way. At best, you could make them apply a stricter bullshit filter to their existing output, but this isn't much of an improvement over filtering it yourself. At worst, this could make them more cautious and improve the average accuracy of their output only at the cost of lowering its peak quality.

Comment author: Barry_Cotter 10 May 2011 12:20:48PM 0 points [-]

I agree. I wasn't saying that anyone will pay attention to what you get published, (but IIRC from a Vassar comment somewhere, most tenured academics outside top departments don't get any attention either.)

I didn't say that you could published in top field journals after six months work, but I suspect that in at least some fields that would be possible, albeit maybe only in low quality journals. Without a doubt you need to conform to the unpublished as well as the public criteria for publication; otherwise you might as well do it as a blogpost. But if you can't figure out those criteria on your own there are still grad students and professors at low prestige universities who might co-author with you if you've got the start of something publishable and are persistent with enough of them.

Do you have any specific evidence on the prestige factor? Double blind peer review would seem to argue against this but then again papers are often refused before reaching this stage as "not suitable for us".

Getting papers published is probably not the most efficient way of spreading knowledge, except in highly technical fields where the criteria are likely to be relatively transparent and high anyway, but it would make getting into a graduate programme substantially easier, and might be worthwhile for other purposes.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 10 May 2011 06:37:15PM 4 points [-]

Do you have any specific evidence on the prestige factor? Double blind peer review would seem to argue against this but then again papers are often refused before reaching this stage as "not suitable for us".

Well, clearly, I can't give any anecdotal evidence with too much detail in public. I'll just say that "prestige" is probably the most diplomatic term one might choose to use there.

Regarding double-blind review, it has always seemed to me as a farce. Any particular research community is a small world, so how can you possibly be competent to review a paper if you can't guess who the author might be based on the content and the work it builds on? Then, of course, there are the editors, who know everything, whose discretion is large, and who can often drop hints to the reviewers one way or another.

Comment author: jsalvatier 10 May 2011 03:23:41PM 1 point [-]

Like Silas Barta, I have come to the view that a lot of macroeconomics is terribly confused. I have an ongoing mission to make sense of macroeconomics. My explanation of how most macroeconomic theories of macroeconomic fluctuations work at their core is here.

I'm not sure I understand your question, so if I'm answering past you, let me know. Anyway, if you came up with a model that predicted macroeconomic variables better than the marginal traders who trade assets strongly affected assets, yes you could make a killing. As I see it macroeconomic modeling is about producing theoretical understanding rather than producing predictions about the path. If we had really good and detailed prediction markets of all important macroeconomic measures, that would generate good predictions but it might not be very enlightening about what policy makers should do differently and why. In other words, modeling answers questions about what forces are at work while prediction about whats going to happen at some specific point in time is about what the net effect of those forces are.

Theoretical macroeconomics can help us understand what kinds of things we should try to measure, what kinds of general rules policy makers should adopt etc. A good predictive mechanism can help us determine what people should do right now (should your grocer expect an increase or decrease in sales), whether policy makers do a good job.

Does that clarify things?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 10 May 2011 06:07:47PM *  2 points [-]

Anyway, if you came up with a model that predicted macroeconomic variables better than the marginal traders who trade assets strongly affected assets, yes you could make a killing. As I see it macroeconomic modeling is about producing theoretical understanding rather than producing predictions about the path.

Such "theoretical understanding" is as if you had a theory of physics that purported to "explain" past observations but was unable to make any predictions about future events. That is not science. At best it's just empty philosophizing, and at worst pernicious bullshit used to rationalize actions out of touch with reality.

As for the relevant prediction markets, they already exist for all practical purposes. I don't know much about finance or investment, but I do have at least a rough idea how any correct non-trivial macroeconomic prediction could be translated into a winner investment strategy.

Comment author: cousin_it 09 May 2011 07:38:31PM *  13 points [-]

I enjoyed Venkat's theory of corporate life and his post about right questions. Unfortunately I don't know how to switch someone over from the dangerous attractor of "narrative rationality" (basically, attachment to self-generated deep wisdom) to actual rationality. Mencius Moldbug is another example of such a person, very smart but so far gone that trying to switch him over would be a lost cause.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 10 May 2011 05:47:40PM *  11 points [-]

Unfortunately I don't know how to switch someone over from the dangerous attractor of "narrative rationality" (basically, attachment to self-generated deep wisdom) to actual rationality.

Why would you want to do this anyway? What we have in terms of "actual rationality," as you call it, is often excellent for detecting bullshit, but it's still largely impotent when it comes to generating interesting hypotheses and novel insight about many (if not most) interesting questions. In contrast, smart people who follow the "narrative" path will inevitably end up producing lots of nonsense in the process, but as long as you avoid getting carried away and take care to apply a bullshit filter to their output consistently, what remains will often contain otherwise unreachable gems of insight. Even when the "narrative" attractor lowers the average accuracy of beliefs of people who fall into it, the value of their output for a careful reader may still be higher than if they were restrained by more stringent intellectual standards.

Comment author: Barry_Cotter 10 May 2011 01:47:24AM *  2 points [-]

One very interesting implication. If this applies to fields as diverse as philosophy, psychology and artificial intelligence it probably applies to any field that is not so diseased that there's no there there. Thus the barriers to going from knowing nothing about a field to being able to write a publishable paper are actually relatively low in quite a few fields, particularly those where you don't need lab equipment or great mathematical sophistication.

Academic paper reading slackers of Lesswrong, to the social science and law paper writing! It'll get you into a good grad school!

Comment author: Vladimir_M 10 May 2011 07:02:57AM *  9 points [-]

Thus the barriers to going from knowing nothing about a field to being able to write a publishable paper are actually relatively low in quite a few fields, particularly those where you don't need lab equipment or great mathematical sophistication.

I think your impression is wrong. You are right that in many areas, if you're reasonably smart and have a strong amateur interest, it doesn't take very much time and effort to start asking questions and possibly even generating insight at the same level as accredited scholars. However, in such areas, and in many others as well, the most difficult obstacles are of different sorts.

First, a perfectly clear, logical, honest, and readable account of your work is often ipso facto unpublishable: what is required is writing according to unofficial, tacitly acknowledged rules that are extremely hard to figure out on your own. (If anything, academic publishing is so competitive that unless you have an earth-shattering breakthrough, it is difficult or even impossible to publish without intensely optimizing for passing the actual review and editorial process, rather than following some idealistic criteria of quality.)

Second, of course, there is the factor of brand-names, networking, and patronage. Each publication venue has some minimal status threshold for authors and their affiliation, below which your chances of publication are practically nil no matter what the content of your paper may be. (Again, with the possible hypothetical exception of evident stunning breakthroughs.)

Comment author: jsalvatier 10 May 2011 03:39:30AM 3 points [-]

As for economists and investing, their standard advice is described in the comments here. The reason economists aren't fabulously wealthy is that financial markets are fairly efficient so it's hard to make money unless you have an edge.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 10 May 2011 04:53:29AM 7 points [-]

The reason economists aren't fabulously wealthy is that financial markets are fairly efficient so it's hard to make money unless you have an edge.

One straightforward question to which I've never seen an answer is how the supposed existence of a science of macroeconomics can be reconciled with the efficient markets hypothesis, even the weak one. If you have come up with a macroeconomic theory that has non-trivial predictive power, surely it would be irrational to just publish it in a journal instead of first employing it to make some killer investments.

Comment author: Barry_Cotter 09 May 2011 05:27:24PM *  0 points [-]

I obviously need to work on phrasing things more clearly.

Anger functions as a strategic precommitment which improves your bargaining position. Two examples of a precommitment would be as follows (1) A car buyer going to a dealership with a contract stating that for every dollar they pay over a predetermined price (manufacturers price plus average industry margin presumably) they must pay ten dollars to some other party (who can credibly hold them to it). (2) Destroying your means of retreat when you plan aggression against another party, so that you have no motive to hold anything back, like Cortes did when he burned his ships upon landing in Mexico.

Now (1) is more like anger than (2) is because it's a public signal, but both of them reduce your options to strengthen your position, (1) in a negotiation, (2) as a committed, cohesive group. (1) is very much like throwing the steering wheel out the window in the game of chicken. Pretending your hands are tied and you can't go above/below the stated price without going further up the chain of command is actually one of those negotiating tricks that are in all the books, like the car salesman who goes "Oh, I'm not sure; I'll have to consult my boss" and smokes a cigarette in the office before coming back and agreeing to a lower price.

Swimmer963 asked me:

If you're not angry, what would motivate you to do any of those things?

and I replied

If you are dealing with someone in your social circle, or can be seen by someone in your social circle and you want to build or maintain a reputation as someone it is not wise to cross. Even if it's more or less a one shot game, if you make a point of not being a doormat it is likely to impact your self-image, which will impact your behaviour, which will impact how others treat you.

Even if in the short run retaliating helps nobody and slightly harms you, it can be worth it for repuatational and self-concept reasons.

which I think shows at least a weak grasp of how these precommitments can work; one builds a reputation, and given that we're meatbags with malleable conceptions of self, a reason to make such precommitments even when they cannot effect our reputation.

If "normally impossible" means very, very hard I agree completely; robust self-behavioural modification is hard even for small things, never mind for something as difficult to bring into conscious awareness or control as anger.

Would you consider expanding upon quality of calibration?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 09 May 2011 08:30:07PM *  6 points [-]

Yes, I think we understand each other now. Funny, I had the "must consult my boss" trick pulled on me just a few days ago by a guy whom I called up to haul off some trash. I still managed to make him lower the supposedly boss-mandated price by about 20%. (And when I later thought about the whole negotiation more carefully, I realized I could have probably lowered it much more.)

Regarding the quality of calibration, it's straightforward. Emotional reactions can serve as strategic precommitments the way we just discussed, and often they also serve as decision heuristics in problems where one lacks the necessary information and processing power for a conscious rational calculation. In both cases, they can be useful if they are well-calibrated to produce strategically sound actions, but if they're poorly calibrated, they can lead to outright irrational and self-destructive behavior.

So for example, if you fail to feel angry indignation when appropriate, you're in danger of others maneuvering you into a position where they'll treat you as a doormat, both in business and in private life. On the other hand, if such emotions are triggered too easily, you'll be perceived as short-tempered, unreasonable, and impossible to deal with, again with bad consequences, both professional and private.

It seems to me that the key characteristic that distinguishes high achievers is the excellent calibration of their emotional reactions -- especially compared to people who are highly intelligent and conscientious and nevertheless have much less to show for it.

Comment author: Barry_Cotter 08 May 2011 09:07:11PM 2 points [-]

Now of course, in the modern world there are many more situations where this tendency is maladaptive than in the human environment of evolutionary adaptedness. Nevertheless, I'd say that in most situations in which it enters the strategic calculations it's still greatly beneficial.

I agree, or at least agree for situations where people are in their native culture or one they're intimately familiar with, so that they're relatively well-calibrated. What I wrote was poorly phrased to the point of being wrong without lawyerly cavilling.

To rephrase more carefully; you can act in a manner that gets the same results as anger without being angry. You can have a better, more strategic response. I'm not claiming it's easy to rewire yourself like this, but it's possible. If your natural anger response is anomalously low, as is the case for myself and many others on the autism spectrum, and you're attempting some relatively hardcore rewiring anyway, why not go for the strategic analysis instead of trying to decrease your threshold for blowing up?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 09 May 2011 06:15:09AM *  7 points [-]

I'm not sure if you understand the real point of precommitment. The idea is that your strategic position may be stronger if you are conditionally committed to act in ways that are irrational if these conditions are actually realized. Such precommitment is rational on the whole because it eliminates the opponent's incentives to create these conditions, so if the strategy works, you don't actually have to perform the irrational act, which remains just a counterfactual threat.

In particular, if you enter confrontations only when it is cost-effective to do so, this may leave you vulnerable to a strategy that maneuvers you into a situation where surrender is less costly than fighting. However, if you're precommitted to fight even irrationally (i.e. if the cost of fighting is higher than the prize defended), this makes such strategies ineffective, so the opponent won't even try them.

So for example, suppose you're negotiating the price you'll charge for some work, and given the straightforward cost-benefit calculations, it would be profitable for you to get anything over $10K, while it would be profitable for the other party to pay anything under $20K, so the possible deals are in that range. Now, if your potential client resolutely refuses to pay more than $11K, and if it's really impossible for you to get more, it is still rational for you to take that price rather than give up on the deal. However, if you are actually ready to accept this price given no other options, this gives the other party the incentive to insist with utter stubbornness that no higher price is possible. On the other hand, if you signal credibly that you'd respond to such a low offer by getting indignant that your work is valued so little and leaving angrily, then this strategy won't work, and you have improved your strategic position -- even though getting angry and leaving is irrational assuming that $11K really is the final offer.

(Clearly, the strategy goes both ways, and the buyer is also better off if he gets "irrationally" indignant at high prices that still leave him with a net plus. Real-life negotiations are complicated by countless other factors as well. Still, this is a practically relevant example of the basic principle.)

Now of course, an ideally rational agent with a perfect control of his external behavior would play the double game of signaling such precommitment convincingly but falsely and yielding if the bluff is called (or perhaps not if there would be consequences on his reputation). This however is normally impossible for humans, so you're better off with real precommitment that your emotional propensity to anger provides. Of course, if your emotional propensities are miscalibrated in any way, this can lead to strategic blunders instead of benefits -- and the quality of this calibration is a very significant part of what differentiates successful from unsuccessful people.

Comment author: erratio 08 May 2011 07:28:39PM 1 point [-]

did he literally leave $1 bills in fridges?

I think so. But as a general rule, for every study he describes in great detail, there are several variations that he also tested to control for various conditions. So I'm guessing that the overall conclusion is robust even though it is pretty darn weird to place six $1 bills on a plate in the fridge.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 09 May 2011 04:30:02AM 9 points [-]

I don't see what is supposed to be strange or novel about this result. The usual norm, at least in Western and not too distant societies, is that among people who are stuck together for whatever reason, food, drink, and smokes should be shared to some degree. (More specifically, you're supposed to offer to share if you're consuming in front of others or if someone asks politely, as long as it doesn't become exploitative, and even taking a reasonably small amount without asking is at worst a peccadillo and often tacitly agreed upon as OK.) Money, on the other hand, is sacrosanct and stealing it marks one as a thief altogether unfit for company of honest people. I don't see anything particularly irrational about these norms, and while it's hard to pinpoint their origin and rationale precisely and completely, there is no shortage of plausible hypotheses.

Interestingly, I apply similar principles even to panhandlers. I never give them money, but if I'm carrying bags full of booze, I'll give them a beer if they ask.

Comment author: Barry_Cotter 07 May 2011 01:03:36PM 3 points [-]

You don't need to be angry to hit someone, or to spread gossip, or to otherwise retaliate against them. If you recognise that someone is a threat or an obstacle you can deal with them as such without the cloud of rage that makes you stupider. You do not need to be angry to decide that someone is in your way and that it will be necessary to fuck them up.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 07 May 2011 10:08:31PM *  8 points [-]

If you recognise that someone is a threat or an obstacle you can deal with them as such without the cloud of rage that makes you stupider.

Then why didn't humans evolve to perform rational calculations of whether retaliation is cost-effective instead of uncontrollable rage? The answer, of course, is largely in Schelling. The propensity to lose control when enraged is a strategic precommitment to lash out if certain boundaries are overstepped.

Now of course, in the modern world there are many more situations where this tendency is maladaptive than in the human environment of evolutionary adaptedness. Nevertheless, I'd say that in most situations in which it enters the strategic calculations it's still greatly beneficial.

Comment author: jhuffman 07 May 2011 12:36:16PM *  1 point [-]

Why do you think so many Germans (25%!) think the US Government is responsible for the 9/11 attacks?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 07 May 2011 09:48:47PM 4 points [-]

Outside the U.S., and even in some circles inside the U.S., anti-Americanism is a popular and cheap status-signaling attitude. (Moldbug wrote a good analysis of the phenomenon a while ago.) Clearly, in more sophisticated circles it usually has subtler forms, but among the common folk it often has rather crude expressions such as this one.

Comment author: ciphergoth 07 May 2011 01:13:12PM 2 points [-]

It would have been good to include a few entries here along the lines of "President Nixon tried to cover up the role of his re-election campaign in the Watergate break-in".

Comment author: Vladimir_M 07 May 2011 09:38:02PM *  12 points [-]

Or, for example, the theory that a head of state could have illegally circumvented U.S. law by falsely claiming to be a natural-born citizen based on a fake Hawaiian birth certificate.

Haha, sorry couldn't resist. Just in case, I beg everyone to click on the links before downvoting...

Comment author: Vladimir_M 07 May 2011 06:20:22PM *  10 points [-]

I can think of two common and closely related patterns of delusional conspiracy theories that are nevertheless plausible to great numbers of people. (These are not the only ones, of course.)

The first pattern occurs when large groups of people express beliefs and perform acts that are systematically biased in a certain direction and effectively further some clearly recognizable interests and goals, and yet there is no consciously organized coordination among them. Such situations often occur because humans are instinctively attracted towards opinions and acts that signal high status and affiliation with prestigious groups. Yet for many people it's hard to believe that such spontaneous decentralized coordination is possible, so they seek explanation in conspiracy theories.

So, for example, the mainstream media often exhibit strong and practically uniform bias in their coverage of politicians, events, and issues. Thus, for many people it's tempting to assume that they are indeed under some centralized editorial command. Depending on their ideological inclinations, they may imagine these commands coming from boardrooms of nefarious media tycoons, or perhaps (for even loonier types) from scheming cabals of Jews. Yet in reality, even the strongest and most uniform biases simply reflect those beliefs that are considered high-status among the sort of people that tend to work in the media -- and the prevalence of this sort of people is itself not a matter of any conspiracy or centralized control, but a spontaneously originating and self-perpetuating artifact of normal human social behavior.

The second, closely related pattern occurs when people detect correctly that they are getting cheated, lied to, or screwed over by the elites in charge, but are unable to analyze accurately what's going on. (These actions may actually be conspiratorial to some degree, but more often it's a matter of spontaneous coordination as in the above example.) In many instances, an accurate analysis of the situation would be too complicated for the average person, while intellectuals risk their own status if they realize the truth and speak it openly (attacking the elite opinion is by definition a status-lowering move). Thus, people end up creating conspiracy theories that have some vague kernel of truth in them, but are a gross and simplistic caricature of what's really going on. In turn, intellectuals are happy to use these laughable caricatures as convenient strawmen for attacking their more sophisticated critics.

For example, the conspiracy theories that flourished in the Second Red Scare (a.k.a. "McCarthyist") period in the U.S. were a consequence of a very real record of misdeeds, blunders, covert dealings, ideological delusions, and sometimes even real espionage and treason among the American political and intellectual elites. Yet the popular awareness of these problems found its expression in naive and grotesque grand conspiracy theories à la General Ripper, which were a ridiculous caricature of the complicated and bizarre reality -- in which actual conspiracies were far from absent, but a relatively minor factor in the big picture, which was as usual determined by the regular human patterns of social behavior and status-seeking, and the systematic biases and spontaneously coordinated actions following from them.

Comment author: Yvain 05 May 2011 10:00:49PM *  3 points [-]

Okay, thank you.

I will replace the phlogiston section with something else, maybe along the lines of the example of a medicine putting someone to sleep because it has a "dormitive potency".

I agree with you that there are lots of complex and messy calculations that stand between consequentialism and correct results, and that at best these are difficult and at worst they are not humanly feasible. However, this idea seems to me fundamentally consequentialist - to make this objection, one starts by assuming consequentialist principles, but then saying they can't be put into action and so we should retreat from pure consequentialism on consequentialist grounds. The target audience of this FAQ is people who are not even at this level yet - people who don't even understand that you need to argue against certain "consequentialist" ideas on consequentialist grounds, but rather that they can be dismissed by definition because consequences don't matter. Someone who accepts consequentialism on a base level but then retreats from it on a higher level is already better informed than the people I am aiming this FAQ at. I will make this clearer.

This gets into the political side of things as well. I still don't understand why you think consequentialism implies or even suggests centralized economic planning when we both agree centralized economic planning would have bad consequences. Certain decisions have to be made, and making them on consequentialist grounds will produce the best results - even if those consequentialist grounds are "never give the government the power to make these decisions because they will screw them up and that will have bad consequences". I continue to think prediction markets allow something slightly more interesting than that, and I think if you disagree we can resolve that disagreement only on consequentialist grounds - eg would a government that tried to intervene where prediction markets recommended intervention create better consequences than one that didn't. Nevertheless, I'll probably end up deleting a lot of this section since it seemed to give everyone an impression I don't endorse.

Hopefully the changes I listed in my other comment on this thread should help with some of your other worries.

In response to comment by Yvain on Consequentialism FAQ
Comment author: Vladimir_M 06 May 2011 03:40:09AM *  10 points [-]

However, this idea seems to me fundamentally consequentialist - to make this objection, one starts by assuming consequentialist principles, but then saying they can't be put into action and so we should retreat from pure consequentialism on consequentialist grounds.

Fair enough. Though I can grant this only for consequentialism in general, not utilitarianism -- unless you have a solution to the fundamental problem of interpersonal utility comparison and aggregation. (In which case I'd be extremely curious to hear it.)

I still don't understand why you think consequentialism implies or even suggests centralized economic planning when we both agree centralized economic planning would have bad consequences.

I gave it as a historical example of a once wildly popular bad idea that was a product of consequentialist thinking. Of course, as you point out, that was an instance of flawed consequentialist thinking, since the consequences were in fact awful. The problem however is that these same patterns of thinking are by no means dead and gone -- it is only that some of their particular instances have been so decisively discredited in practice that nobody serious supports them any more. (And in many other instances, gross failures are still being rationalized away.)

The patterns of thinking I have in mind are more or less what you yourself propose as a seemingly attractive consequentialist approach to problems of public concern: let's employ accredited experts who will use their sophisticated models to do a cost-benefit analysis and figure out a welfare-maximizing policy. Yes, this really sounds much more rational and objective compared to resolving issues via traditional customs and institutions, which appear to be largely antiquated, irrational, and arbitrary. It also seems far more rational than debating issues in terms of metaphysical constructs such as "liberties," "rights," "justice," "constitutionality," etc. Trouble is, with very few exceptions, it is usually a recipe for disaster.

Traditional institutions and metaphysical decision-making heuristics are far from perfect, but with a bit of luck, at least they can provide for a functional society. They are a product of cultural (and to some degree biological) evolution, as as such they are quite robust against real-world problems. In contrast, the experts' models will sooner or later turn out to be flawed one way or another -- the difficulty of the problems and the human biases that immediately rear their heads as soon as power and status are at stake practically guarantee this outcome.

Ultimately, when science is used to create policy, the practical outcome is that official science will be debased and corrupted to make it conform to ideological and political pressures. It will not result in elevation of public discourse to a real scientific standard (what you call reducing politics to math) -- that is an altogether utopian idea. So, for example, when that author whose article you linked uses sophisticated-looking math to "analyze" a controversial political issue (in this case immigration), he's not bringing mathematical clarity and precision of thought into the public discourse. Rather, he is debasing science by concocting a shoddy spherical-cow model with no connection to reality that has some superficial trappings of scientific discourse; the end product is nothing more than Dark Arts. Of course, that was just a blog post, but the situation with real accredited expert output is often not much better.

Now, you can say that I have in fact been making a consequentialist argument all along. In some sense, I agree, but what I wrote certainly applies even to the minimalist interpretation of your positions stated in the FAQ.

Comment author: Yvain 04 May 2011 01:46:21PM *  3 points [-]

Phlogiston: my only knowledge of the theory is Eliezer's posts on it. Do Eliezer's posts make the same mistake, or am I misunderstanding those posts?

Trolley-problem: Agreed about Schelling points of interactions between people. What I am trying to do is not make a case for pushing people in hypothetical trolley problems, but to show that certain arguments against doing so are wrong. I think I returned to some of the complicating factors later on, although I didn't go quite so deep as to mention Schelling points by name. I'll look through it again and make sure I've covered that to at least the low level that would be expected in an introductory argument like this.

Aggregating interpersonal utilities: Admitted that I handwave this away by saying "Economists have some ideas on how to do this". The FAQ was never meant to get technical, only provide an introduction to the subject. Because it is already 25 pages long I don't want to go that deep, although I should definitely make it much clearer that these topics exist.

Procedures in place for violating heuristics: By this I mean that we have laws that sometimes supervene certain rights. For one example, even though we have a right to free speech, we also have a law against hate speech. Even though we have a right to property, we also have laws of eminent domain when one piece of property is blocking construction of a railway or something. Would it be proper to rephrase your objection as "We don't have a single elegant philosophical rule for deciding when it is or isn't okay to violate heuristics"?

Parties pointing out natural rights are at stake: In a deontological system, these conflicts are not solveable even in principle: we simply don't know how to decide between two different rights and the only hope is to refer it to politicians or the electorate or philosophers. In a consequentialist system it's certainly possible to disagree, and clever arguers can come up with models in their favor, but it's possible to develop mathematical and scientific tools for solving the problem (for example, prediction markets would solve half of this and serious experimental philosophy could make a dent on the other half). And there are certain problems which are totally opaque to rights-based arguments which you couldn't even begin to argue on consequentialist grounds (eg opt-out organ example given later)

Section 7: I don't really understand your criticism. Yes, it's jumping from place to place. I'm answering random objections that people tend to bring up. Do you think I'm straw-manning or missing the important objections? The Nazi and slavery objections at your link seem very much like the racism and slavery objections addressed on the FAQ, and the Hannibal-the-baby-eater objection only seems relevant if one confuses money with utility.

Welfare of some more than others: I admit that I have these preferences, but I don't think they're moral preferences. I might choose to save my mother rather than two strangers, I just would be doing it for reasons other than morality. This strikes me as a really weird objection - is there some large group of people who say that nepotism is the moral thing to do?

Game theoretic issues: Agreed that these are important. This is meant to be an introductory FAQ to prime some intuitions, not a complete description of all human behavior. Given that game theory usually means that consequentialism is more likely to give the intuitively correct answer to moral dilemmas, I don't feel like I'm being dishonest or cherry-picking by excluding most mentions of it. (game theory is against consequentialism only if you mistake consequentialism for certain consequentialism-signaling actions, like pushing people in front of trolleys or assassinating Hitler, rather than considering it as the thought process generating these actions. Learn the thought process first, then master the caveats)

Regarding economists and statisticians: The widespread consensus of economists and statisticians is that economic central planning doesn't work. I would expect something like prediction markets to be not only be able to guide certain policies, but to be able to accurately predict where to use and where not to use prediction markets.

General response to your comments: Mostly right but too deep for the level at which this FAQ is intended. I will try to revise the FAQ to emphasize that the FAQ is intended only to teach consequentialist thought processes, and that these must then be modified by knowledge of things like game theory.

In response to comment by Yvain on Consequentialism FAQ
Comment author: Vladimir_M 05 May 2011 08:40:24PM *  16 points [-]

Each of these issues could be the subject of a separate lengthy discussion, but I'll try to address them as succinctly as possible:

  1. Re: phlogiston. Yes, Eliezer's account is inaccurate, though it seems like you have inadvertently made even more out of it. Generally, one recurring problem in the writings of EY (and various other LW contributors) is that they're often too quick to proclaim various beliefs and actions as silly and irrational, without adequate fact-checking and analysis.

  2. Re: interpersonal utility aggregation/comparison. I don't think you can handwave this away -- it's a fundamental issue on which everything hinges. For comparison, imagine someone saying that your consequentialism is wrong because it's contrary to God's commands, and when you ask how we know that God exists and what his commands are, they handwave it by saying that theologians have some ideas on how to answer these questions. In fact, your appeal to authority is worse in an important sense, since people are well aware that theologians are in disagreement on these issues and have nothing like definite unbiased answers backed by evidence, whereas your answer will leave many people thinking falsely that it's a well-understood issue where experts can provide adequate answers.

  3. Re: economists and statisticians. Yes, nowadays it's hard to deny that central planning was a disaster after it crumbled spectacularly everywhere, but read what they were saying before that. Academics are just humans, and if an ideology says that the world is a chaotic inefficient mess and experts like them should be put in charge instead, well, it will be hard for them to resist its pull. Nowadays this folly is finally buried, but a myriad other ones along similar lines are actively being pursued, whose only redeeming value is that they are not as destructive in the short to medium run. (They still make the world uglier and more dysfunctional, and life more joyless and burdensome, in countless ways.) Generally, the idea that you can put experts in charge and expect that they their standards of expertise won't be superseded by considerations of power and status is naively utopian.

  4. Re: procedures in place for violating heuristics. My problem is not with the lack of elegant philosophical rules. On the contrary, my objections are purely practical. The world is complicated and the law of unintended consequences is merciless and unforgiving. What's more, humans are scarily good at coming up with seemingly airtight arguments that are in fact pure rationalizations or expressions of intellectual vanity. So, yes, the heuristics must be violated sometimes when the stakes are high enough, but given these realistic limitations, I think you're way overestimating our ability to identify such situations reliably and the prudence of doing so when the stakes are less than enormous.

  5. Re: Section 7. Basically, you don't take the least convenient possible world into account. In this case, the LCPW is considering the most awful thing imaginable, assuming that enough people assign it positive enough value that the scales tip in their favor, and then giving a clear answer whether you bite the bullet. Anything less is skirting around the real problem.

  6. Re: welfare of some more than others. I'm confused by your position: are you actually biting the bullet that caring about some people more than others is immoral? I don't understand why you think it's weird to ask such a question, since utility maximization is at least prima facie in conflict with both egoism and any sort of preferential altruism, both of which are fundamental to human nature, so it's unclear how you can resolve this essential problem. In any case, this issue is important and fundamental enough that it definitely should be addressed in your FAQ.

  7. Re: game theory and the thought process. The trouble is that consequentialism, or at least your approach to it, encourages thought processes leading to reckless action based on seemingly sophisticated and logical, but in reality sorely inadequate models and arguments. For example, the idea that you can assess the real-world issue of mass immigration with spherical-cow models like the one to which you link approvingly is every bit as delusional as the idea -- formerly as popular among economists as models like this one are nowadays -- that you can use their sophisticated models to plan the economy centrally with results far superior to those nasty and messy markets.

General summary: I think your FAQ should at the very least include some discussion of (2) and (6), since these are absolutely fundamental problems. Also, I think you should research more thoroughly the concrete examples you use. If you've taken the time to write this FAQ, surely you don't want people dismissing it because parts of it are inaccurate, even if this isn't relevant to the main point you're making.

Regarding the other issues, most of them revolve around the general issues of practical applicability of consequentialist ideas, the law of unintended consequences (of which game-theoretic complications are just one special case), the reliability of experts when they are in positions where their ideas matter in terms of power, status, and wealth, etc. However you choose to deal with them, I think that even in the most basic discussion of this topic, they deserve more concern than your present FAQ gives them.

Comment author: JohnH 03 May 2011 04:21:51AM 0 points [-]

Agreed.

The whole Bayesian being an ultra-rational agent and any deviation on the part of humans is a sign of irrationality has been moved away from by some economists. Now some think that humans are rational and the trick is to figure out how what appears irrational at first glance can be considered rational. This because the model for rationality didn't give very many useful results outside of gambling and playing stocks, even then people have gotten burned by it.

Much of it comes down to limited information and variable time preferences.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 05 May 2011 04:37:15PM *  1 point [-]

I think you misunderstood my point. I meant that the behavior of these people may well have been rational, or at least not remarkably irrational, by the standard economic definition of the term, i.e. in the sense of advancing one's own self-interest.

Even if you're responsible for a failure with large total costs, this may still advance your self-interest if the benefit you derive from it is larger than the share of the costs you have to bear yourself (plus of course the future reputational and other indirect costs, of course). It seems to me this may have been the case in both examples from the original post, so it's unjustified to parade them as obvious examples of irrational behavior.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 02 May 2011 05:34:15AM 6 points [-]

One problem with this post, which is also seen in various other posts in the sequences and many LW posts in general, is the tendency to jump to conclusion that people's behavior is irrational. Neither of these examples (Casey Serin and the LTCM people) strikes me as being obviously irrational, in the sense that these people would be acting against their own interest clearly and to an unusual degree.

This is especially true of the LTCM example. While it might be possible that this venture was really a mistake for Merton, Scholes, and the others involved (from the perspective of their own self-interest), the way this conclusion is reached in the post and the idea that they would have something to learn from being lectured about this topic are just childishly naive.

Comment author: AdeleneDawner 01 May 2011 11:52:41PM 6 points [-]

Even if she is autistic: So what?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 02 May 2011 12:21:25AM 4 points [-]

Many people are in the position where they have to spend a very considerable part, sometimes the majority, of their waking hours in the company of their coworkers. If the coworkers fail to maintain a pleasant enough disposition and are difficult to deal with, for whatever reason, this can make one's life very miserable. The problem is of course even more severe if the coworker in question is a superior.

Comment author: David_Gerard 29 April 2011 09:32:21PM *  0 points [-]

A classic, and one well worth linking to out in the wider world.

I'm not saying that I think Overcoming Bias should be apolitical, or even that we should adopt Wikipedia's ideal of the Neutral Point of View.

As someone who's been around it for years, I think NPOV is actually the most amazing thing about Wikipedia - greater than letting everyone edit the website, for example. It's the only way we can get everyone editing the website without killing each other. But it's also the quintessence of how to serve the reader. Can be hard on the writers, of course.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 01 May 2011 06:00:16PM *  6 points [-]

Trouble is, NPOV is often in direct conflict with the "reputable sources" and "no original research" rules. In areas where reputable sources are mostly unbiased and disreputable sources are mostly crackpots, everything's fine. However, in those where respectable opinion is nowadays remote from reality, reporting what reputable sources say is not going to produce a NPOV account, and if editors attempt to make sense of the available information on their own, this becomes illicit "original research."

Also, it can be misleading to note the contrast between the modern seemingly neutral academic tone and the tone of the old scholarly works that strikes the modern reader as unabashedly opinionated, as you have noted about the old Britannica. What looks like neutral and dispassionate tone in modern academic and reference works is often every bit as opinionated and biased, except that this is achieved in more underhanded ways. And frankly, I prefer the old-fashioned open and explicit way.

Comment author: lessdazed 29 April 2011 01:42:33AM 2 points [-]

I would like to "flag" this post as the point where "experienc[ing] fear and hostility" was warped into "feeling fear and hostility towards". That makes comments below subject to equivocation. It does not mean anything, at least not any one thing, to "[feel] fear and hostility towards" anything. The fear and hostility are in the brain and do not emanate therefrom.

This is more than a semantic quibble. Consider the fallacy of composition. It is possible for a liberal to hate all poor people and love the poor, and for a Confederate soldier to have hated blacks and loved all blacks.

I don't think "dislike and fear certain groups" is precise enough to have an non-careful conversation about because it is more than one thing.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 01 May 2011 04:15:52AM 2 points [-]

I don't understand the relevant linguistic distinction here; it might be some finesse of English grammar that eludes me. Does saying "fear and hostility towards X" imply some observable action motivated by these feelings?

The sort of "fear and hostility" I had in mind is of the same sort as your hypothetical liberal's love of the poor.

Comment author: Alicorn 01 May 2011 01:10:51AM *  6 points [-]

I have trouble with this one. In general, what I'm doing with my body is largely determined by my efforts to maintain physical comfort and has little (albeit not quite zero) relationship with the interactions I'm having/emotions I'm experiencing.

My face also makes expressions without my permission that often have no obvious relationship with what I'm thinking or feeling, and I can't tell without looking in a mirror. (I can make deliberate expressions, too, but this is effortful. Also some of them seem to be wrong: I have been told that my attempt at "attentive" is more "terrified".)

My tone of voice is not quite as unruly, but sometimes misbehaves. And I'm not good at tracking when it's doing that if I'm using my own words in real time and therefore have to compose them while I speak. On top of all this I have an undiagnosed breathing disorder that makes me yawn, sigh, and gasp a lot when the semantic content of these sounds is inappropriate.

Is there anything I can do to make people pay less attention to these cues, short of demanding that people only interact with me via text? I tell people these things but, except for the breathing thing, they often outright don't believe me, and even the ones who claim to believe me seem to forget.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 01 May 2011 03:48:34AM *  7 points [-]

In general, what I'm doing with my body is largely determined by my efforts to maintain physical comfort and has little (albeit not quite zero) relationship with the interactions I'm having/emotions I'm experiencing.

Have you reached this conclusion by systematic study of your behavior, or is it just a vague impression that you have? If the latter, you may be extremely wrong about it. People usually have a horribly inaccurate view of what their behavior really looks like from the outside.

Besides, many crucial elements of body language are determined by movements that don't affect physical comfort much.

Comment author: wilkox 01 May 2011 02:04:51AM 6 points [-]

Always wait for someone else to laugh at your joke before you join in.

This is generally good advice, but can backfire if you show no signs that you are conscious of making a joke. Making people laugh while remaining deadpan yourself is a high-level humour skill. Listeners who are not sure whether or not to laugh will look for cues from other listeners and from you, and if you're not laughing they may just go along with that.

Often it's better to make it obvious that you've amused yourself with your own joke, with a smile or small chuckle, but not react to whether others laugh or not. That displays confidence, and gives others the social room to laugh if they want.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 01 May 2011 03:32:20AM 3 points [-]

All this is extremely context-dependent. On some of the most fun occasions when I told jokes or funny stories, I was barely able to tell them comprehensibly because I was unable to suppress spasms of laughter. Of course, if the audience and the atmosphere is not right, this can make you look like an idiot or extremely annoying.

Comment author: gjm 29 April 2011 10:54:40PM 2 points [-]

I'm puzzled by Eliezer's comments on the Nixon example. How is "Republicans are not pacifists" going to make Republicans feel unwelcome? That would require either (1) that it be seen as an insult to Republicans or (2) that it be seen as an obnoxious stereotyping of Republicans. But (1) lots of people -- the great majority, I think -- are not-pacifists and generally no one thinks any the worse of them for it; indeed my impression is that far more people think that pacifism is foolish than think that not-pacifism is evil; and (2) since (a) the whole point of the example is that generalizations like these should generally be taken as approximations only and (b) it is in fact a very good generalization that Republicans are not pacifists (note: I have no statistical evidence for this, and am willing to be refuted; but I don't expect to be), it seems unlikely that many Republicans will feel insulted by being told that Republicans are generally not pacifists.

Now, I happen not to be a Republican (or a pacifist or a Quaker) myself, so I don't entirely trust my intuitions about how members of those groups might react to the example. So:

Am I missing something? Is anyone reading this a Republican who would feel insulted or over-pigeonholed by seeing the example Eliezer cites in a textbook or lecture?

(For the avoidance of doubt: I agree with the general point Eliezer is making; it just seems to me like he could have chosen a better example.)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 01 May 2011 01:47:19AM 7 points [-]

As soon as you make any statements with political or ideological content, the way people understand them will be determined by their informal signaling implications much more strongly than by their literal content and its formal logical implications. This is especially true if such statements are made abruptly in an unrelated context. Sometimes people really mean innocently only what they literally say and are surprised at the reactions to the unintended signaling, but more often signaling is a part of the speaker's intention (though of course its effects can be mispredicted).

In this case, the Nixon example is meant to send a clear ideological signal (whose details I won't spell out to avoid making potentially contentious statements). Moreover, the use of the example in a totally unrelated context, in a document intended for a community of technical experts, signals that ideological agreement is expected in this community and places dissenters in a position where they have to take it in silence (thus confirming their low status) or protest loudly and expose themselves to ridicule (or worse).

Comment author: CronoDAS 29 April 2011 11:29:02PM 4 points [-]

An alternative: David Brin has proposed that cell phones should be capable of peer-to-peer text messaging when they can't connect with a tower.

(My father, a professor of electrical engineering, says that this proposal would be technically difficult to implement because cell phones transmit and receive on different frequencies.)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 01 May 2011 01:08:13AM 4 points [-]

It also runs into a public good problem, unless turning off the functionality is somehow made impossible. Battery life of cell phones is inconveniently short as it is, and the last thing people want is to spend even more energy on routing strangers' messages. (If necessary, of course, they can turn it on just to send a message.)

Comment author: utilitymonster 30 April 2011 08:51:42AM 0 points [-]

Can you explain why this analysis renders directing away from the five and toward the one permissible?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 01 May 2011 12:47:55AM *  10 points [-]

The switch example is more difficult to analyze in terms of the intuitions it evokes. I would guess that the principle of double effect captures an important aspect of what's going on, though I'm not sure how exactly. I don't claim to have anything close to a complete theory of human moral intuitions.

In any case, the fact that someone who flipped the switch appears much less (if at all) bad compared to someone who pushed the fat man does suggest strongly that there is some important game-theoretic issue involved, or otherwise we probably wouldn't have evolved such an intuition (either culturally or genetically). In my view, this should be the starting point for studying these problems, with humble recognition that we are still largely ignorant about how humans actually manage to cooperate and coordinate their actions, instead of naive scoffing at how supposedly innumerate and inconsistent our intuitions are.

Comment author: sark 29 April 2011 05:05:47PM 0 points [-]

I have compressed an essay's worth of arguments into a few sentences, but I hope the main point is clear.

I unfortunately don't get the main point :(

Could you elaborate on or at least provide a reference for how a consideration of Schelling points would suggest that we shouldn't push the fat man?

In response to comment by sark on Consequentialism FAQ
Comment author: Vladimir_M 29 April 2011 09:06:40PM *  16 points [-]

This essay by David Friedman is probably the best treatment of the subject of Schelling points in human relations:
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Property/Property.html

Applying these insights to the fat man/trolley problem, we see that the horrible thing about pushing the man is that it transgresses the gravest and most terrible Schelling point of all: the one that defines unprovoked deadly assault, whose violation is understood to give the other party the licence to kill the violator in self-defense. Normally, humans see such crucial Schelling points as sacrosanct. They are considered violable, if at all, only if the consequentialist scales are loaded to a far more extreme degree than in the common trolley problem formulations. Even in the latter case, the act will likely cause serious psychological damage. This is probably an artifact of additional commitment not to violate them, which may also be a safeguard against rationalizations.

Now, the utilitarian may reply that this is just human bias, an unfortunate artifact of evolutionary psychology, and we’d all be better off if people instead made decisions according to pure utilitarian calculus. However, even ignoring all the other fatal problems of utilitarianism, this view is utterly myopic. Humans are able to coordinate and cooperate because we pay respect to the Schelling points (almost) no matter what, and we can trust that others will also do so. If this were not so, you would have to be constantly alert that anyone might rob, kill, cheat, or injure you at any moment because their cost-benefit calculations have implied doing so, even if these calcualtions were in terms of the most idealistic altruistic utilitarianism. Clearly, no organized society could exist in that case: even if with unlimited computational power and perfect strategic insight you could compute that cooperation is viable, this would clearly be impractical.

It is however possible in practice for humans to evaluate each other’s personalities and figure out if others’, so to say, decision algorithms follow these constraints. Think of how people react when they realize that someone has a criminal history or sociopathic tendencies. This person is immediately perceived as creepy and dangerous, and with good reason: people realize that his decision algorithm lacks respect for the conventional Schelling points, so that normal trust and relaxed cooperation with him is impossible, and one must be on the lookout for nasty surprises. Similarly, imagine meeting someone who was in the fat man/trolley situation and who mechanically made the utilitarian decision and pushed the man without a twitch of guilt. Even the most zealous utilitarian will in practice be creeped out by such a person, even though he should theoretically perceive him as an admirable hero. (As always when it comes to ideology, people may be big on words but usually know better when their own welfare is at stake.)

(This comment is also cursory and simplified, and an alert reader will likely catch multiple imprecisions and oversimplifications. This is unfortunately unavoidable because of the complexity of the topic. However, the main point stands regardless. In particular, I haven’t addressed the all too common cases where cooperation between people breaks down and all sorts of conflict ensue. But this analysis would just reinforce the main point that cooperation critically depends on mutual recognition of near-unconditional respect for Schelling points.)

Comment author: Dr_Manhattan 28 April 2011 03:00:29AM 7 points [-]

Agree with Clippy, but as an exercise, my answers would be:

1) Stay in public. I repeat this, from personal experience in rough neighborhoods as a kid in Ukraine.

2) Looking like a badass may or may not help, depending on whether the potential perpetrator is after your money or your status.

3) Looking like a total nobody (or even like a bum) may not help, depending on the same thing.

4) Element of surprise helps, potential perpetrators are unlikely to think more than one step ahead. Run, scream, pretend to know the local mafia lord.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 29 April 2011 05:15:26PM 5 points [-]

2) Looking like a badass may or may not help, depending on whether the potential perpetrator is after your money or your status.

This is an extremely important point. If you're in an area where the main threat is from muggers who just want money with minimal hassle and risk, projecting a convincing "don't mess with me" attitude is a powerful deterrent. However, if the main threat is from local hooligan gangs who beat up people for sports and to show off, it will have the opposite effect, since they'll see it as a provocation (if you're a man, at any rate).

From what I've noticed, in North America you're much more likely to encounter the former, and in Eastern Europe the latter type of threat. There are of course significant local exceptions, especially in EE: touristy places with a lot of clueless foreigners are likely to attract muggers, pickpockets, purse-snatchers, etc. rather than hooligans, whereas in lower-class neighborhoods the gangs of local ne'er do wells are often around looking for trouble.

Comment author: jimrandomh 29 April 2011 02:30:16AM *  0 points [-]

Dictators in general are bad for humanity's chances, since they sometimes try to acquire nuclear weapons and sometimes go crazy or play ultimatum games. Anything that makes becoming a dictator or retaining dictatorial power more difficult is a good thing. This would do that. In particular, it frees people from having to route all their messages through cell towers that may monitor or censor them, denying tyrants an important tool.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 29 April 2011 05:31:38AM 14 points [-]

You seem to believe that mass popular movements necessarily result in saner governments. Depending on how you interpret the historical evidence, this seems at best like a shaky assumption, and at worst a thoroughly falsified one.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 29 April 2011 03:23:41AM 4 points [-]

Dictators in general are bad for humanity's chances, since they sometimes try to acquire nuclear weapons and sometimes go crazy or play ultimatum games. A

It seems very difficult to get enough nukes to be a serious existential risk. Even a nuclear war between Pakistan and India would make things unpleasant but humanity would clearly survive. There's been no example since Stalin of a situation where a dictator had enough nuclear weaponry to start a nuclear war that had the opportunity to destroy humanity, and even then it is likely that a nuclear war in that time period would not have destroyed humanity completely.

Fewer dictators will reduce existential risk, but only at an indirect level since fewer dictators means fewer resources spent dealing with them and will be spent elsewhere, so there will be some small trickle down to things that decrease existential risk.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 29 April 2011 05:27:50AM *  8 points [-]

There's been no example since Stalin of a situation where a dictator had enough nuclear weaponry to start a nuclear war that had the opportunity to destroy humanity, and even then it is likely that a nuclear war in that time period would not have destroyed humanity completely.

I don't think Stalin qualifies even remotely. The Soviets tested their first thermonuclear bomb in summer 1953, a few months after Stalin's death. During his lifetime, they didn't amass more than a few dozen ordinary A-bombs of power similar to those that Americans delivered on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Moreover, this was long before ICBMs, so the only delivery option were strategic bombers, and the quality of Soviet aviation left much to be desired. All in all, Stalin could hardly do more than wreck a few cities in Western Europe (if even that), with casualties and destruction probably lower than those of conventional WW2 bombing campaigns.

Comment author: Zack_M_Davis 28 April 2011 04:15:18PM 5 points [-]

even though from an outside perspective [the lives of modern middle-class Americans] can look frightfully regimented and devoid of any meaningful personal freedom [emphasis added].

I find this claim surprising. I could just be ethnocentric, but it genuinely seems to me that modern middle-class Americans have significantly more personal freedom (of speech, of belief, of dress, of diet, of sexuality, &c.) than members of ultraorthodox communities. Is there any chance you could try to explain the outside perspective of which you speak?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 28 April 2011 10:21:47PM *  13 points [-]

My wording wasn't very clear here -- I didn't mean to compare middle-class Americans with ultra-Ortodox communities specifically, but to make a more general point about how people can consider themselves very free and really feel that way, even though things may look very different from an outside perspective.

Generally speaking, people feel unfree when they're suddenly constrained from doing something that they're used to and care about, or when constraints lower their status. In contrast, constraints that are ingrained in a culture are often not even noticed consciously by its people, or they are seen as self-evidently reasonable and necessary, since people are used to living under them, and are also at peace with the existing status hierarchy. However, this won't seem so to an outsider who is used to a different way of life and who perhaps derives status in his own community from some freedoms that are absent in their culture. Similarly, the level of discipline and regimentation (in both scope and intensity) is perceived subjectively depending on what one is used to.

So, ultimately, it depends on how you choose to measure freedom. In some extreme cases, it may be that one society is freer than another across the board, or very nearly so, for example if you compare modern-day U.S. with North Korea. [1] But usually, the impression greatly depends on what regime of constraints one is used to seeing as natural, and on one's subjective evaluation of the trade-offs involved. For example, many of those modern freedoms you mention are due to disappearance of strong informal communal norms that restrained people's behavior in the past, but as these social structures broke down, the necessary trade-off was the establishment and growth of impersonal bureaucracies that took over their necessary functions, and which now regulate, micromanage, and re-engineer practically all aspects of life and society. Whether you like this trade-off, and what you think of communities that preserved the older traditional modes of social organization, is of course your call.


[1] Though even this case might not be so clear-cut. Once I saw a documentary showing some illegal recordings of everyday life smuggled out of North Korea, and one of those showed a lady getting into a shouting match with a policeman, who eventually relented! In the U.S. this would be an invitation to get tazered, arrested, and likely charged. This of course doesn't mean that North Korea is not every bit as awful as people imagine -- if anything, it's probably even worse -- but this does suggest that some aspects of social regimentation may be more relaxed over there.

Comment author: lessdazed 26 April 2011 02:29:50AM *  4 points [-]

A few details leave them worse off, as far as I can tell.

First, the items Chassidim use as signals are almost all consumable or have their costs over the long term, in contrast to the middle class. Weddings and kosher food are examples of the first type, number of children and isolation from secular knowledge/intensive religious schooling for young men are of the second. The middle class has expensive weddings and vacations, but primarily is enslaved to owned cars/houses or educations that merely fail to be fully worth their opportunity cost.

Second, having religious values in addition to other values deemphasizes the focus one can put on the other values. E.g., if I value my happiness, family, career, etc., I will put effort into each of them. If in addition I value baseball cards, I do so by taking money and attention from the other categories. It is true that one who only values happiness is unlikely to achieve it, and that valuing additional things such as the Yankees' winning would or does make some people happier. Nonetheless, the body of ordinances, injunctions, and so forth that these people are expected to follow is amazingly comprehensive and capable of crowding out much having to do with happiness.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 28 April 2011 05:47:10AM *  14 points [-]

The middle class has expensive weddings and vacations, but primarily is enslaved to owned cars/houses or educations that merely fail to be fully worth their opportunity cost.

I see quite a bit more stuff among the regular middle classes that looks like pure signaling waste, though you're clearly more knowledgeable how this compares with the analogous phenomena among orthodox Jews.

However, one very important issue you're not taking into account is that the primary objective that drives the North American middle classes to work their asses off is the need to afford living in an expensive enough neighborhood to insulate oneself and one's family from the underclass. (Clearly, various signaling and purely instrumental goals are entangled here.) With some luck and creativity, you can skimp on all kinds of signaling consumerism, but with this issue there's no joking, and it keeps imposing a horrible threat should you ever slack off. The lack of this pressure seems to me like a major point in favor of life in a deeply traditionalist community, so I think it counts in favor of the KJ setup.

Nonetheless, the body of ordinances, injunctions, and so forth that these people are expected to follow is amazingly comprehensive and capable of crowding out much having to do with happiness.

I find the orthodox Jewish observances a puzzling question: is it a matter of extreme runaway signaling that imposes excruciating burdens on these people, or are these just their natural folkways that merely look strange and arbitrary due to cultural distances? (Of course, it's a complex question whether and how these two things can even be distinguished in some objective sense. Many modern middle-class Americans would claim that they are more free than any other people in human history, and many of them undoubtedly really feel that way, even though from an outside perspective their lives can look frightfully regimented and devoid of any meaningful personal freedom.)

Comment author: lessdazed 26 April 2011 10:10:32AM *  10 points [-]

As for the attitude towards the State of Israel, my understanding is that religious Jews generally support it, except for an ultra-Orthodox fringe who believe that Zionism is an irreverent mockery...

This is a good (even the best) first step in the process of going from confusion to knowledge, but it's mostly wrong, somewhat less enlightening than replacing the concept of a banana with the concept of molecules, while ignoring atoms and quarks.

"Support [Israel]" doesn't mean only one thing without more context, even in most people's minds, any more than "like people" would if I asked if you "like people". About half the self-identifying Orthodox Jews in Israel and far fewer than that in America do not find any religious justification or basis for the modern state of Israel and are the Chareidim. This includes almost all Chasidim. Worse than not finding warrant for it, there is Talmudic justification for opposing its creation, while reactions to finding it created predictably differ.

The most noticeable members of this group are the dozen or hundred or so portion of the Neturei Karta who spend a lot of time and effort seeking to replace the state with another state, any other state, even an Arab one, at any cost. They are better known in the West than influential or representative people for the same reason an Afghan might be more likely to know about the Westboro Baptist Church than the Anglicans.

The reaction of most Chareidi Jews to the state is more similar to their reaction to most things without scriptural warrant, such as glasses or air conditioning, i.e. little concern. At least, it would likely be so, if not for a few other important factors.

Sticking with religious issues for now, it is a largely secular state. It is not obvious how religious or coercive any religious person should want their government, but it's easy to see why autocratically minded theocrats could reach a (deceptively unanimous) consensus that the current state isn't religious enough, details aside. This widespread opinion is a theoretically defeasible concern, unlike the narrowly-held pure religious opposition to any non-Messianic state.

The next issue is a social reaction to the rest of the Jewish world, particularly the Religious Zionists but more broadly the Modern Orthodox in general. Religious Zionists find that the current state meets their religious criteria to deserve their full backing. This position is more popular among the less religiously extreme. Reaching it requires a more expedient and flexible reading of religious texts and understanding of what the tradition entails. The conclusion that Israel is A-OK is what the judge should feel in his heart before inquiring into the religious texts. To quote Barack Obama, "We need somebody who's got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it's like to be a young teenage mom, the empathy to understand what it's like to be poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old - and that's the criterion by which I'll be selecting my judges." It is no coincidence that the "living constitution" branch of Judaism that decided to go along with what the other Jews were doing had previously decided that it wasn't necessary to wear fur hats in the summer.

The identification of the secular state of Israel as religiously significant is regarded by Chareidim as akin to idol worship, a reductio ad absurdum of deciding what the tradition says before examining it, and it is to Religious Zionism that the Chareidim are opposed, along with their opposition to the domestic policies of the state.

It is these less extreme religious Jews who are the "settlers", attempting to graft biblical injunctions of foreign policy to Israel. Interpretations of these vary widely, perhaps the most widespread interpretation absolutely forbids surrendering territory but is very lenient and practical regarding how hard one must try to conquer all of the designated land. Relatively fewer of these live in America, as they see it as necessary to dwell in the state, particularly where it advances Israel's strategic interests.

Less literal and more liberal Jews who are still Orthodox are more likely to have a standard set of liberal positions, including regarding Israel and church-state separation.

It is in one sense very unfair to call extremists more religious than non-extremists. Many self-identifying Orthodox Jews might even assert and/or believe that the greatest rabbis of the other camps are more religious than they are, even for less extreme camps. In another sense, it is of course quite fair.

So we see the flexibility of interpretation has led to the centrists being the most irredentist, a position one expects to find religious extremists occupying. It is generally false that the extremists compensate by having logically irreconcilable differences with the state, though this notion can be forgiven since the most visible do and the rest have practically irreconcilable differences with the state as it is.

Demographically, Chareidim in America are less extreme than those in Israel, particularly among the non-Chassidim. Religious Zionists are far fewer, and the Modern Orthodox form a solid continuum from Religious Zionists to the secular American left. The mainstream Israeli left is probably to the right of the American left's statements, though perhaps not to its actions, if you consider Obama representative or if you think important the left's non-response to Guantanamo staying open, drone strikes in Pakistan continuing, undeclared action in Libya, etc. American non-Chassidic Chareidim are somewhat more pro-Israel than one would expect from the extent to which they are less extreme than Israeli non-Chassidic Chareidim, and are probably less cheated by conflation with Chrisitian fundamentalists than any other Jewish group regarding their beliefs and degree of nationalism.

Sephardim never collectively went through the shock of the enlightenment and have more traditional social forces, such as social cohesion around place of origin rather than level of observance and extended families with all levels of observance represented. Even the less religious are generally unlikely to see Reform or Conservative as at all valid and consider Judaism as degrees of Orthodoxy, and Israeli Ashkenazim are similar in this respect. Sephardim generally have little sympathy for active anti--Zionism and behave more like liberal somewhat nationalistic Modern Orthodox Jews with mildly Religious Zionist Rabbis, the top leaders of whom are actually mildly anti-Zionist and confederate with Chareidim.

This is all intended to be an enlightenment for those who know only of bananas as fruit, in which I explain bananas are made of little bricks called molecules. If anyone wants to correct or add anything, or take this as a starting point for explaining how bananas are really made of quarks (but first we really must teach you atoms as if they were billiard balls...) feel free. This isn't the type of thing I have done any formal study of but it's the type of thing one develops a perspective on, however biased, and I find that regarding this topic there is so much confusion that I think reading this will help many.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 28 April 2011 05:20:51AM 1 point [-]

So we see the flexibility of interpretation has led to the centrists being the most irredentist, a position one expects to find religious extremists occupying.

This is actually more or less how I imagined it (though of course I'm nowhere as familiar with all the details). Thanks for the very informative comments.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 27 April 2011 01:34:50AM *  3 points [-]

Lessdazed gave what seems to me to be a good answer to most of these questions so I'll just address the remaining one (which unfortunately is one of the one's I don't know as much about.)

In particular, in many countries there is the institution of "Chief Rabbi" that enjoys some government recognition, but which Jewish groups stand behind those?

The Chief Rabbi as a separate institution evolved when in the late Middle Ages the various European states wanted official representatives of the Jewish population to talk to the government. Since for many purposes Jews were often autonomous groups this was the primary method of interaction. Somewhat similarly, in some places such as England, all recognized religions had to have a recognized chief clergy member who was actually considered to serve the monarch. For essentially historical reasons, this job has been generally taken up by a prominent Orthodox Rabbi in most countries where the title exists. In some countries with small Jewish populations (such as Norway and New Zealand) there's very rarely more than one Orthodox Rabbi and so this individual becomes the Chief Rabbi more or less by default. In countries with larger Jewish communities this position can be surrounded by heavy politics and other considerations. Also in some countries the Chief Rabbi is not actually a government recognized position but is the term used to refer to a certain position overseeing some large organization of shulls.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 28 April 2011 05:12:27AM *  1 point [-]

Thanks for all the info. For whatever reason, even though I usually have no problem finding and sorting out information about complicated and controversial topics, I find this one (i.e. the general topic of Jewish religious and ethnic divisions) very difficult to systematize, and your comments have clarified a lot. Of course, even I was much more knowledgeable about the topic, I'd still consider it a valuable opportunity to hear the perspective of someone who has some insider knowledge but nevertheless strives for objectivity.

In response to Consequentialism FAQ
Comment author: Vladimir_M 27 April 2011 01:03:19AM *  40 points [-]

OK, I've read the whole FAQ. Clearly, a really detailed critique would have to be given at similar length. Therefore, here is just a sketch of the problems I see with your exposition.

For start, you use several invalid examples, or at least controversial examples that you incorrectly present as clear-cut. For example, the phlogiston theory was nothing like the silly strawman you present. It was a falsifiable scientific theory that was abandoned because it was eventually falsified (when it was discovered that burning stuff adds mass due to oxidation, rather than losing mass due to escaped phlogiston). It was certainly a reductionist theory -- it attempted to reduce fire (which itself has different manifestations) and the human and animal metabolism to the same underlying physical process. (Google "Becher-Stahl theory".) Or, at another place, you present the issue of "opposing condoms" as a clear-cut case of "a horrendous decision" from a consequentialist perspective -- although in reality the question is far less clear.

Otherwise, up to Section 4, your argumentation is passable. But then it goes completely off the rails. I'll list just a few main issues:

  • In the discussion of the trolley problem, you present a miserable caricature of the "don't push" arguments. The real reason why pushing the fat main is problematic requires delving into a broader game-theoretic analysis that establishes the Schelling points that hold in interactions between people, including those gravest ones that define unprovoked deadly assault. The reason why any sort of organized society is possible is that you can trust that other people will always respect these Schelling points without regards to any cost-benefit calculations, except perhaps when the alternative to violating them is by orders of magnitude more awful than in the trolley examples. (I have compressed an essay's worth of arguments into a few sentences, but I hope the main point is clear.)

  • In Section 5, you don't even mention the key problem of how utilities are supposed to be compared and aggregated interpersonally. If you cannot address this issue convincingly, the whole edifice crumbles.

  • In Section 6, at first it seems like you get the important point that even if we agree on some aggregate welfare maximization, we have no hope of getting any practical guidelines for action beyond quasi-deontologist heuristics. But they you boldly declare that "we do have procedures in place for breaking the heuristic when we need to." No, we don't. You may think we have them, but what we actually have are either somewhat more finely tuned heuristics that aren't captured by simple first-order formulations (which is good), or rationalizations and other nonsensical arguments couched in terms of a plausible-sounding consequentialist analysis (which is often a recipe for disaster). The law of unintended consequences often bites even in seemingly clear-cut "what could possibly go wrong?" situations.

  • Along similar lines, you note that in any conflict all parties are quick to point out that their natural rights are at stake. Well, guess what. If they just have smart enough advocates, they can also all come up with different consequentialist analyses whose implications favor their interests. Different ways of interpersonal utility comparison are often themselves enough to tilt the scales as you like. Further, these analyses will all by necessity be based on spherical-cow models of the real world, which you can usually engineer to get pretty much any implication you like.

  • Section 7 is rather incoherent. You jump from one case study to another arguing that even when it seems like consequentialism might imply something revolting, that's not really so. Well, if you're ready to bite awful consequentialist bullets like Robin Hanson does, then be explicit about it. Otherwise, clarify where exactly you draw the lines.

  • Since we're already at biting bullets, your FAQ fails to address another crucial issue: it is normal for humans to value the welfare of some people more than others. You clearly value your own welfare and the welfare of your family and friends more than strangers (and even for strangers there are normally multiple circles of diminishing caring). How to reconcile this with global maximization of aggregate utility? Or do you bite the bullet that it's immoral to care about one's own family and friends more than strangers?

  • Question 7.6 is the only one where you give even a passing nod to game-theoretical issues. Considering their fundamental importance in the human social order and all human interactions, and their complex and often counter-intuitive nature, this fact by itself means that most of your discussion is likely to be remote from reality. This is another aspect of the law of unintended consequences that you nonchalantly ignore.

  • Finally, your idea that it is possible to employ economists and statisticians and get accurate and objective consequentialist analysis to guide public policy is altogether utopian. If such things were possible, economic central planning would be a path to prosperity, not the disaster that it is. (That particular consequentialist folly was finally abandoned in the mainstream after it had produced utter disaster in a sizable part of the world, but many currently fashionable ideas about "scientific" management of government and society suffer from similar delusions.)

In response to Consequentialism FAQ
Comment author: Vladimir_M 26 April 2011 08:49:40PM 8 points [-]

I skimmed the FAQ (no time to read it in detail right now, though I have bookmarked it for later). I must say that it doesn't address some of the most crucial problems of consequentialism.

Most notably, as far as I can tell, you don't even address the problem of interpersonal utility comparison, which makes the whole enterprise moot from the beginning. Then, as far as I see, you give the game-theoretic concerns only a cursory passing mention, whereas in reality, the inability to account for those is one reason why attempts to derive useful guidelines for action based on maximizing some measure of aggregate welfare are usually doomed to end up in nonsense. This, in turn, is just a special case of the general law of unintended consequences that consequentialists typically treat with hubristic nonchalance. I don't see any discussion of these essential issues.

On the whole, I would guess that your FAQ will sound convincing to a certain type of people, but it fails to address the most important problems with the views you advocate.

Comment author: Will_Sawin 25 April 2011 01:02:47PM 1 point [-]

Could you summarize, at whatever level of detail is possible without problematic idealogically sensitive topics, where you differ from my views and what statements I made you disagree with?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 26 April 2011 04:59:27AM 5 points [-]

It seems to me that your criteria for evaluating the potential for trouble with various groups, given the present global demographic, ideological, and other trends, are seriously flawed. But getting into concrete details here is impossible without making a whole bunch of controversial and potentially inflammatory statements, so I really think the topic is best left alone.

Comment author: Will_Sawin 25 April 2011 01:12:07PM 3 points [-]

Is this as true in non-US countries at is true in the US?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 26 April 2011 04:49:36AM 8 points [-]

Generally speaking, it is even more true of other countries that are commonly recognized as democratic, though in some places that have authentic local democratic traditions there are still strong holdovers (e.g. in Switzerland). In Europe, in particular, the EU institutions are almost completely insulated from any real popular input.

Not that this is a wholly bad thing, of course. Democracy works only in very specific cultural conditions that can't be established and reproduced at will, and arguably only on small scales. Otherwise, it usually produces a rapid and often bloody disaster. Thus, I'd say that the present standard of having a bureaucratic oligarchy with a veneer of democratic institutions is almost everywhere less bad than authentic democracy would be. (Though I'm not too terribly optimistic about its prospects either.)

Comment author: JoshuaZ 24 April 2011 10:58:45PM *  10 points [-]

Do you maybe know of some good book that has a comprehensive explanation of these divisions, preferably with reference to the historical context of their development, and also their ancestral geographic origins?

Not really. As far as I'm aware most of the history books on this sort of thing are either books which focus on a specific group, or are books about the history of Jews from a very long time, and thus don't have as much focus on the last few hundred years when the modern divisions have arose. I've been told that Hayim Ben-Sasson's "A History of the Jewish People" is in general a good book written from a modern, scholarly perspective. It has a section on the modern era which should be good. I haven't read it myself though. I'm not aware of any book that focuses specifically on the chassidim which is what one would probably want. I suspect such books exist, but you can do a Google search as easily as I can, and I'm not going to be able to evaluate the books in any useful way.

However, the main divisions aren't that complicated to summarize, and one doesn't need much detail to have the context to follow things like New York Times articles about them. Data dump follows:

In the late 1700s, the Ba'al Shem Tov started the chassidic movement. The movement initially emphasized song, dance and prayer over religious study. This was a big deal because it gave the regular Jews, not just the bright scholars, something to do. The movement also had a strong mystical element and a focus on charismatic leaders. The movement quickly split into groups based on separate charismatic leaders whom the members would refer to as "Rebbe" (which literally means "my Rabbi"). The different groups were divided up by essentially geographic lines, and became named after the various cities where they were centered. Lubavitch had the Lubavitchers, Satu Mare had the Satmars, etc. A humorous aside is to note that the very late formed Boston chassidim are stuck with a very American sounding name; that is sometimes made up for by calling them "Bostoners" with a heavy Yiddish accent.

There was a strong reaction against chassidic movement which disrupted the pre-existing social norms, and power struggles. Moreover, there was perception (of some but not much justification) that the chassidim were ideological descendants of Sabbatai Zevi, an extremely disruptive individual who claimed to be the messiah about a hundred and fifty years before. The people against the chassidim were often called "misnagdim" from the Hebrew word for "against", and a complicating factor arose that some people used misnagid to mean non-chassic (and chassidim still use it that way sometimes with very negative connotations).

This all took place during the general emancipation of Jews in Europe. Restrictions on their businesses and where they could live were dropped. The rise of the chassidic movement was thus one of a number of factors which severely disrupted the pre-existing social structure. In that chaos, other groups arose also, including Reform Judaism (around 1900 the Conservative movement would break off from the Reform, trying to return to more strict beliefs and practices but not nearly as strict as the Orthodox). At around this era, the notion of Orthodox started to arise as a separate term (prior to that no one needed a separate notion).

At the same time, in reaction to the Reform movement, the so called "ultra-Orthodox" or "charedi" arose becoming more religious and increasing how strict their observances were. At the same time, this group sort of pulled the chassidim along in some ways, making the chassidim more focused on learning and studying of classical texts, and at the same time, the chassidic movement started producing its own texts which became very important for each of the corresponding chassidic groups. Thus the chassidic groups as they exist today are more intellectual than classical chassidim. At the same time, some of the ideas that the chassidim had (especially about singing and dancing being fun things that are good in religious settings) became more common among the general Orthodox population. In that sense, the original chassidim in many ways won, in a similar way to how over time the Catholic church has adopted many ideas that the early Protestants were calling for.

The modern Orthodox also arose, which believed in keeping the classical laws while interacting with the secular world. In principle, this meant also accepting scientific knowledge about things like the age of the earth, however, studies (especially those by Alexander Nussbaum) show that among Orthodox students at secular universities, the acceptance of evolution, or the age of the Earth and similar issues is surprisingly low. The so-called "Modern Orthodox" have been more or less pulled in the last few years to the right in many ways, and attitudes about science is only one aspect. To complicate matters further, many Orthodox people don't like the large set of connotations that either "modern Orthodox" or "charedi/ultra-Orthodox" brings (the issues are similar to those of what constitutes a blegg) and so self-identify as only Orthodox or observant. Some sometimes use the Yiddish word "frum" or occasionally "shomer mitzvot" which is Hebrew for "guards the commandments". Also, some people when they hear the word "charedi" think one means non-chassidic ultra-Orthodox, this is especially true in Israel. And this can lead to some confusion if one isn't careful.

And now that I've typed all this I've realized that I haven't dealt with any of the different groups' attitudes towards the State of Israel, which is actually really important to understanding them in any modern context. So, um yeah, I guess this is a lot more complicated than I realized and I've just internalized it. If there's a real need I can explain that (there are a lot of misconceptions about this among both non-Orthodox Jews and non-Jews. In particular, the ultra-Orthodox are not generally the people who are pushing for right-wing policies in Israel regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 25 April 2011 08:07:28AM *  5 points [-]

Thanks for the informative reply! As you note, however, the topic really is too complex to address in a single comment. For one, if I understand correctly, you're writing only about various Ashkenazi groups -- and one of the issues I find most puzzling is how they relate to the other geographic/linguistic/ethnic Jewish groups and their subdivisions. Another question where I can't find a clear answer is the relationship of various local Jewish groups with national governments, both in Israel and in other countries. In particular, in many countries there is the institution of "Chief Rabbi" that enjoys some government recognition, but which Jewish groups stand behind those?

As for the attitude towards the State of Israel, my understanding is that religious Jews generally support it, except for an ultra-Orthodox fringe who believe that Zionism is an irreverent mockery, since it lacks explicit (Messianic?) signs of support from God, and it has created a secular state, which they dislike for obvious reasons. However, I have no idea where exactly on the Orthodox spectrum these ideas become prevalent, and I also don't know whether there is a significant opposition between more moderate anti-Zionist Orthodox groups and Neturei Karta (and perhaps other such groups that I don't know about?).

Of course, I'm sure all these questions are further complicated by the contrast between the official leadership proclamations and the situation on the ground, just like it is for various conflicts between Christian denominations.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 24 April 2011 08:06:13PM 10 points [-]

a.These groups are genetically almost identical to me. In the same situation as me, they would behave no worse than me.

Depending on which groups you're talking about this isn't completely obvious.

c. The other differences are memetically weak. Take the example of women's rights. Some developing countries have attitudes towards women's rights worse than any developed country, but they are not worse than past attitudes in developed countries. The same cultural changes that enabled us to free ourselves from these bad memes will enable them to free themselves as well.

I think you're looking only at the superficial memes. It's entirely possible that there are more subtly cultural factors, e.g., belief in progress, openness to new ideas, that are responsible for both our development of modern technology and our adoption of different attitudes toward women. Of course, now that the technology has been invented, they can import it without necessarily importing the memetic baggage.

Also, as Eliezer pointed out here even the most liberal person from the 18th century, say Ben Franklin, if transported to today would be so shocked by all the changes to prevailing morality that he might even conclude that the monarchists were right about man not being fit to govern himself. Well, Franklin didn't get to see the future so we live in a democracy today. However, the people in developing countries can see where our path leads, and they may very well choose not to follow it.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 25 April 2011 06:40:52AM *  13 points [-]

[E]ven the most liberal person from the 18th century, say Ben Franklin, if transported to today would be so shocked by all the changes to prevailing morality that he might even conclude that the monarchists were right about man not being fit to govern himself.

Well, that is basically the modern prevailing doctrine, though of course it's never spelled out so bluntly. The contemporary respectable opinion pays lip service to the idea of democracy in the abstract, but as soon as any really important issues are raised, it is considered incontrovertible that policy should be crafted by professional bureaucracies under the gentle and enlightened guidance of accredited experts. In fact, one of the surest paths to being scorned as a low-status extremist or troglodyte is to argue that an expression of popular will should override the decisions favored by the expert/bureaucratic establishment in some particular case.

Comment author: Will_Sawin 23 April 2011 11:58:35PM 5 points [-]

I object to your use of "a priori". I am aware of ironclad arguments that it is incorrect to dislike and fear certain groups. These arguments are not fully general - they do not apply to all groups.

Is it obvious to you that these cases are symmetrical? It is not obvious to me.

I never claimed to be unbiased. I, in fact, went out of the way to state a lack of confidence in my local rationality.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 25 April 2011 06:29:39AM 5 points [-]

Seeing your reply to Eugine Nier, I must admit that your position is more thought out than I had assumed. I still disagree with your view, and I think your arguments are significantly biased. However, as much as I'd like to try and straighten out the issue, I think getting into this discussion would lead too far into problematic ideologically sensitive topics. So I guess it would be best if we could respectfully agree to disagree at this point.

Comment author: gwern 24 April 2011 08:37:27PM *  6 points [-]

They're genuinely nice... aside from the Meidung, the restricted life opportunities and lack of many freedoms, whatever sexual (rape & incest, sometimes enabled by anesthetic) abuses are covered up by social structures, and all the other problems they have from our perspective. Let's not idealize them.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 25 April 2011 06:18:25AM *  9 points [-]

Indeed, but even if you take the worst imaginable view of them, you still have to admit that they respect the "good fences -- good neighbors" principle. I see no prospect that they might cease doing so in the foreseeable future, even if they expand greatly.

I sure won't be joining them anytime soon, but this still makes it irrational for me to be frightened by them, considering all the the high-status mainstream people whose Meidung I have to fear if I speak my mind with too much liberty, who limit my freedoms and opportunities in ways I find suffocating and frustrating, and who run the presently powerful institutions with an incomparably worse record of abuses. (The latter often aren't even covered up in an active and planned way, but rather kept from scrutiny merely by the high status of the institutions in question, making it a self-destructive status-lowering move just to start arguing against them.)

Comment author: JoshuaZ 24 April 2011 01:30:12AM *  8 points [-]

Also, do you think these ultra-Orthodox groups would not be able to adapt to participation in the regular economy if their sources of government support dried up? I have the impression that they would be able to adapt very well, and are presently just taking advantage of their exceptionally favorable position to take advantage of government support. However, I'm sure you know more about them than I do, so I'd be curious to hear what you think.

The short answer to this is I don't know. Over the last hundred years the ultra-orthodox have adopted a set of attitudes that has little in the way of historical precursors. Those attitudes include 1) a much more negative attitude towards secular schooling than existed previously and 2) an attitude that any line of work other than constant study of religious texts is bad 3) a strong aversion to interacting with people outside their own groups, even for business purposes. This makes it very difficult for them to do much other than this sort of rent-seeking behavior. However, in the other direction the more moderate end of the charedim have had some success getting jobs. A fair number are now doing work in IT or some actuarial jobs that minimize interaction with other people, and there are some lawyers as well. They actually have some advantages in that regard, in that the constant study of classical Jewish legal texts has trained their minds to think precisely given specific sets of constraints. But that's the moderate end of the ultra-Orthodox and you won't find almost any of them in a place like Kiryas Joel. Many people in places like Kiryas Joel consider such people to be borderline heretics.

Note that I'm glossing over here some complicating issues. The Kiryas Joel community is chassidic which is a proper subset, not a synomym, for ultra-orthodox. The specific group that controls Kiryas Joel and makes up the majority of the population are the Satmar chassidim, which are seen by many as more reactionary and conservative than most of the other chassidic sects or any non-chassidic charedi group. Moreover, the Satmars have had a complicated schism in the last few years which I don't understand in detail but my impression is that the less moderate faction is the one which ended up with control over Kiryas Joel, while the more moderate Satmars are in Williamsburg and Borough Park (which while largely Orthodox are both much more diverse areas among the Orthodox population than Kiryat Joel, and have some non-Orthodox population).

Comment author: Vladimir_M 24 April 2011 04:55:51AM 5 points [-]

Thanks for the answer! Looking at your comment and googling around a bit, it seems like I may have some significant misconceptions about various groups within the contemporary Judaism and their relations between each other and the wider world, especially on the Orthodox end of the spectrum. (For example, I just realized that my imagined Venn diagram of several of the groups you've mentioned was flawed.) Do you maybe know of some good book that has a comprehensive explanation of these divisions, preferably with reference to the historical context of their development, and also their ancestral geographic origins?

Comment author: Hyena 24 April 2011 01:26:59AM 6 points [-]

Comprehensive self-awareness that we're familiar with as humans.

In fact, turning this off is one of the first things we do, we just tend to call it "the zone" or whatever else. We're actually much more productive without it. Nick Bostrom actually posited a world wherein this dynamic prevails in his outsourcing scenario.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 24 April 2011 03:32:16AM *  4 points [-]

In fact, turning [comprehensive self-awareness ] off is one of the first things we do, we just tend to call it "the zone" or whatever else. We're actually much more productive without it.

I think flow is the technical term.

Comment author: Will_Sawin 23 April 2011 10:56:18PM 1 point [-]

I can think of groups but I am not sure if they count as similarly different from me.

I experience fear and hostility but it is dissimilar and weaker. I consciously suppress it because I am aware that it is silly. It sometimes takes me a period of time to realize that a specific instance is silly.

It seems like the question at issue is whether fringe Christian groups are different enough that it is right to fear them or whether they are similar enough that it is wrong to fear them.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 23 April 2011 11:15:17PM *  18 points [-]

So when you catch yourself feeling fear and hostility towards some demographically expanding group that is not a fringe Christian group, so that in polite society it would be seen as disreputable and extremist to dislike and fear them, you start with the a priori assumption that it is silly and wrong to fear them and you try to suppress your fear consciously. In contrast, when it comes to demographically expanding fringe Christian groups, you start with the a priori assumption that it is eminently reasonable to dislike and fear them. And it doesn't seem to you like there might be some slight bias there?

(I tried to come up with a more charitable interpretation of your comment, but this looks like the plain meaning of what you wrote.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 23 April 2011 10:28:53PM 1 point [-]

I wasn't referring simply to biological evolution.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 23 April 2011 10:42:56PM 2 points [-]

Fair enough, but that's basically what I also mean when I say that the scenario is possible in principle but extremely unlikely in practice.

Comment author: Will_Sawin 23 April 2011 10:28:17PM 10 points [-]

Genuinely nice people who still prevent people who, like me and (presumably) you, are cognitively atypical, from finding similar people across the world to socialize with.

and the thousand other awesome things about the world we have created for ourselves.

and the thousand other awesome things about the world we will create.

I don't want to tile the world with tiny genuinely nice people.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 23 April 2011 10:38:22PM 13 points [-]

Consider various other groups that are presently in the process of demographic and migratory expansion, and whose typical members are similarly different from you, but whom it is low-status to rail against (and apt to invoke accusations of bigotry and extremism), unlike when it comes to fringe Christian groups. Does contemplating them fill you with similar fear and hostility?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 23 April 2011 10:09:06PM *  4 points [-]

Theoretically, it is possible that a wealthy society might be in a Malthusian equilibrium because people would like to reproduce more but have very high minimum standards for per-capita family wealth.

This society would not be evolutionarily stable since the members with the lowest standards will reproduce more causing the minimum standard to decrease. This process will continue until it reaches the point where standards are so low that any additional children would simply starve to death.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 23 April 2011 10:20:58PM *  1 point [-]

Yes, but evolution is much slower than cultural change. In principle, it is possible that a society might have very high and very uniform standards for the minimum wealth per child, so that it would take a very long time before evolution undermined these standards noticeably. In the meantime, it would make sense to speak of a Malthusian equilibrium.

In reality, of course, such a situation is highly improbable and (to my knowledge) not attested historically. So it's not really a mistake to equate a Malthusian equilibrium with awful poverty and constant threat of famine. (The latter would of course also have its analogues in a Malthusian upload society, which are not hard to imagine.)

Comment author: Will_Sawin 23 April 2011 06:45:42PM 7 points [-]

I find the second parenthetical statement deeply, viscerally terrifying. I'm going to tap out in terms of my personal rationality on this issue, but I would just like to ask all the interesting questions this raises:

Will significant human natural selection happen before the extinction of the human race? If it were to happen, would it be a very bad thing?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 23 April 2011 09:59:57PM 10 points [-]

I find the second parenthetical statement deeply, viscerally terrifying.

Relax. These are genuinely nice people, even though they dress funny.

Comment author: gwern 23 April 2011 05:46:55PM *  9 points [-]

Am I misreading you, or are you actually comparing the living standards of Kiryas Joel with a Malthusian equilibrium?!

Kiryas Joel is, by definition, not in a Malthusian equilibrium because their population is expanding.*

However, they are far closer to Hanson's future Malthusian equilibrium than your average American community; probably they are the closest**. And so they are interesting from the utilitarian welfare point of view.

I'm not sure you understand Malthusian economics very well. A 'subsistence wage' is an arbitrary culturally set wage anywhere above whatever amount is required to not starve to death. Subsistence wages can vary dramatically, and can even fall over time. (Gregory Clark in Farewell to Alms points out that some African countries are actually worse off in per-capita wealth than they were millennia ago because modern medicine let their subsistence wage fall even further.) If I may quote one of the experts, David Ricardo, on what a subsistence wage is:

It is not to be understood that the natural price of labor, estimated even in food and necessaries, is absolutely fixed and constant. It varies at different times in the same country, and very materially differs in different countries. It essentially depends on the habits and customs of the people. An English laborer would consider his wages under their natural rate, and too scanty to support a family, if they enabled him to purchase no other food than potatoes, and to live in no better habitation than a mud cabin; yet these moderate demands of nature are often deemed sufficient in countries where 'man's life is cheap', and his wants easily satisfied. Many of the conveniences now enjoyed in an English cottage, would have been thought luxuries in an earlier period of our history.

The inhabitants of Kiryas Joel clearly have a different subsistence wage than surrounding middle-class citizens because children are not a productive investment, and children use up resources that could go to the parents' subsistence.

Their salaries and wealth are not considered enough - by the outsiders - to raise a family properly, hence the whole discussion about whether Something Ought To Be Done and whether they are really that poor. Pace Ricardo, we are the English laborers who consider the Kiryas Joel incomes too potatoey to raise a family - yet manifestly, they are doing so.

* Caveat: if I understand the models right, there are ways involving the death rate that a population can be temporarily expanding but still in an equilibrium. They wouldn't apply here.

** I wouldn't be surprised if a polygamous Mormon sect somewhere was beating Kiryas Joel. But there are better stats and articles on them.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 23 April 2011 09:48:44PM *  18 points [-]

However, they are far closer to Hanson's future Malthusian equilibrium than your average American community; probably they are the closest**. And so they are interesting from the utilitarian welfare point of view.

Looking for a community in modern-day U.S. that is the closest to a Malthusian equilibrium is kind of like looking at the members of a billionaire country club and asking whose circumstances are closest to those of a homeless beggar. Technically, the question might have a well-defined answer, but it won't give you any insight into the life of actual beggars.

Hell, I've lived in circumstances that make Kiryas Joel look like a billionaire country club in comparison, and it would be delusional for me to draw conclusions about Malthusian life based on my experiences.

I'm not sure you understand Malthusian economics very well. A 'subsistence wage' is an arbitrary culturally set wage anywhere above whatever amount is required to not starve to death.

I understand that. (In fact, the insight goes back even before Ricardo and Malthus, at least back to Adam Smith's concept of "the lowest [wage] rate which is consistent with common humanity.")

However, this wage is "culturally set" insofar as people may limit their reproduction because they have a culturally set minimum standard for forming families. Theoretically, it is possible that a wealthy society might be in a Malthusian equilibrium because people would like to reproduce more but have very high minimum standards for per-capita family wealth. (Note that this is distinct from the still largely mysterious reasons for the modern demographic transition.) However, in practice, every historical society stuck in a Malthusian equilibrium has been unspeakably poor by the modern developed world standards, and the future Hansonian uploads would be in an even worse situation, given the incentive to multiply them to use up every bit of the available resources. (As John Derbyshire once quipped, "The past was pretty awful; the future will be far worse. Enjoy!")

Thus, looking for someone in modern-day U.S. whose experience might give you insight into the historical Malthusian life, let alone the Malthusian life of future uploads, really is like looking for that poorest billionaire in a country club when you want insight into the life of beggars.

Comment author: lessdazed 23 April 2011 04:49:27AM 3 points [-]

The only essential difference is that their culture has solved the problem of collective action when it comes to various burdensome signaling arms races that are de rigueur in the mainstream society, so they don't bother to keep up with those.

Ever shopped for an esrog?

Even that has some parallels, such as thousand dollar melons in Japan.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 23 April 2011 09:03:51PM *  9 points [-]

Ever shopped for an esrog?

I did write that I don't know how burdensome their own peculiar signaling competitions are in comparison. The important point is that a lot of what seems like poverty and low living standards in the lives of these people is not actual deprivation, but a genuine lack of incentive to acquire the things in question, since they are not locked in the signaling arms race that motivates acquiring them in the mainstream. When it comes to things they care about, they're not any worse off than the regular middle classes.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 23 April 2011 03:48:11AM 13 points [-]

. The Kiryas Joel folks are just specializing in a form of rent-seeking where their culture gives them a strong competitive advantage (since it solves the coordination problem). If that source of income dried up, I have no doubt that they'd be smart and enterprising enough to come up with something else -- which might well be some productive work, as it probably would be even nowadays in a society where rent-seeking is harder and less lucrative.

I don't think we're seeing anything that smart going on here. They are essentially just adopting that the MO the charedim use in Israel to the United States.

(Besides, as the article suggests, the lack of social pathologies in their community means that they might not be such devourers of public funds after all, and they do some productive work, so the net balance isn't that clear.)

The social pathology is there, it just is getting covered up and not addressed. Among the ultra-Orthodox there are terrible stigmas associated with mental illness for example. Similarly, spousal abuse is just not discussed. They try to cover up these issues since they can hurt status in the community and ruin the chances for arranged marriages. The evidence is that everything is underreported among the ultra-Orthodox, from eating disorders to child abuse. It is true that they aren't using up public resources when those events aren't reported, but that's a small comfort.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 23 April 2011 08:45:20PM *  7 points [-]

I don't think we're seeing anything that smart going on here. They are essentially just adopting that the MO the charedim use in Israel to the United States.

Well, yes, I don't think that their rabbis have studied The Encyclopedia of Public Choice and gleefully deduced an ingenious plan for hacking the American political system. However, even though their MO has had a complex and curious cultural evolution and draws on prior art from Israel, it works in both countries because the relevant aspects of their political systems are similar. It really is a workable plan for rent-seeking in any system that values disciplined voting blocks.

Also, do you think these ultra-Orthodox groups would not be able to adapt to participation in the regular economy if their sources of government support dried up? I have the impression that they would be able to adapt very well, and are presently just taking advantage of their exceptionally favorable position to take advantage of government support. However, I'm sure you know more about them than I do, so I'd be curious to hear what you think.

The social pathology is there, it just is getting covered up and not addressed.

Obviously, they don't live in a utopia; some pathologies are the inevitable lot of every human society. However, when it comes to those measures of social pathology that do vary a lot among different communities, most notably violent crime and breakdown of public order, it seems like they are doing exceptionally well.

Also, I should note that when it comes to some kinds of inevitable social pathologies, I have a very unfavorable view of the ways they are handled by modern institutions, so this could make me biased in favor of more traditional communities. But these are complex and difficult issues.

Comment author: Alicorn 23 April 2011 07:12:49PM 1 point [-]

What is your evidence that my pointlessness criterion is arbitrary?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 23 April 2011 07:29:47PM *  10 points [-]

Such criteria are always arbitrary, since there is no universally agreed definition. How exactly do you decide whether the presence and participation of a person in a group is "pointless" or not? Ask five different people, and you'll get five different answers. Yes, you can point to extreme examples where almost all would agree, but the problem is that things are often not that clear.

The "protected" criterion is similarly arbitrary, except that the government gets to define that one. Even then, if you ask for a precise definition of when some category is considered protected in a given context, you must refer to a whole library of case law. (And you should also consult an expert lawyer who is knowledgeable about the unwritten norms and informal intricacies that usually apply.)

Unsurprisingly, humans being what they are, when they use such arbitrary criteria to answer problematic questions of law, ethics, etc., what they end up with are rationalizations for attitudes held for different reasons. Again, please note that I'm talking about something that practically everyone engages in, not some personal vice of yours.

Comment author: BenAlbahari 23 April 2011 03:28:40AM 2 points [-]

A website has a specific goal that it's trying to uniquely achieve, and a general goal that places it within a community of like-minded websites. Less Wrong's specific goal is to refine the art of human rationality, and its general goal is to raise the sanity waterline. If other websites are successfully raising the sanity waterline, it behooves Less Wrong to link to them.

I don't like this idea. The choice of websites to put on the sidebar is likely to be contentious. What exactly qualifies a website to be endorsed by LW? How should a website be judged considering the various PR implications of endorsing it? Also, who exactly stands behind the endorsement, considering that LW is a group blog?

I agree that there's genuine challenges in selecting which websites to link to, especially for a community blog. But a community blog, if it meets those challenges, actually has the greater potential to choose a good set of links. Less Wrong should strive to have a better set of links than its sister site, Overcoming Bias. These links matter. It's a standard feature of blogs, and for good reason. I've discovered many great websites this way. Unfortunately, never via Less Wrong.

What's more, LW members already have the option to put website links in their profiles, and the websites authored or endorsed by prominent LW contributors are thus already given significant promotion.

While I think high-karma Less Wrong users deserve promotion, it's not the only criteria for which promotion is justified. If there's a great sanity waterline raising website out there, it should be linked to, whether or not there's a high-karma Less Wrong user running it. On my own website I link to Wikipedia's argument fallacy list and cognitive bias list. Without digressing into a debate as to whether Less Wrong should link to these lists too, I'll merely point out that with the criteria you're suggesting, such links would necessarily have zero value. I think JGWeissman's proposal would choose the appropriate value for such links.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 23 April 2011 07:18:11PM *  17 points [-]

What I dislike most about the idea is that it gives some sort of official collective endorsement to external websites. One thing I like about LW is that except for the institutions that historically gave rise to it (OB and SIAI), it has no official doctrine and official endorsements. There are issues of broad consensus, but they are never officially presented as such. Thus, even if I have some disagreements with the majority on these issues, I can always voice my arguments without the unpleasant feeling that I'm invading the forum as an outsider trying to pick arguments over matters of consensus. (Which would constitute borderline trolling even if I'm right.)

Now, if there is a list of officially LW-endorsed websites, and I think some of them are bad and I don't want to endorse them by any means, raising such concerns would mean picking fruitless and frustrating arguments with the majority. And frankly, I think it is quite plausible that some websites hit enough "applause lights" that they might find themselves on the LW endorsement list, even though their intellectual standards leave much to be desired.

If individual LW members wish to promote external websites, I'm all for it. They can post links in discussions, and by all means allow them to post links in their profiles more conspicuously and prominently than now, not just to their own websites but also to a list of favorite websites. But please don't insist on an official list of collectively endorsed links.

Comment author: Alicorn 23 April 2011 03:12:53AM 9 points [-]

AdeleneDawner is correct. I do not like it when people announce that they wish to form communities I would be unwelcome in because of a "protected" feature (sex/sexuality/race/whatever). (This is importantly different from forming communities based on non-protected features, like willingness to pay membership dues or expertise in a topic, and also importantly different from forming communities in which my presence would be pointless, e.g. I would have no reason whatsoever to be at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 23 April 2011 06:55:00PM *  7 points [-]

Using an arbitrary and subjective "pointlessness" exception, you can derive any conclusions you like. Just apply the general principle consistently as long as you like the conclusions, and otherwise proclaim that the "pointlessness" exception applies. And voila, you can bask in the glow of your high principles, which just happen to imply conclusions to your complete liking. (Of course, the general principle would produce absurd and impractical results if really applied consistently, so someone who subscribes to it has to operate with some such unprincipled exceptions.)

The distinction between "protected" and "non-protected" characteristics is of course similarly arbitrary and ultimately serves a similar purpose, though you don't have personal control over that one, as the power of defining it is a prerogative of the state.

That said, I don't mean to point a finger specifically at you by pointing this out. This mode of thinking is all-pervasive in modern society, and nobody is immune to it completely. But on a forum dedicated to exposing biases and fallacies, it should be pointed out.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 23 April 2011 12:37:19AM 18 points [-]

Kiryas Joel functions to some extent in a model much like the charedim in Israel, relying on the outside world to provide necessary economic infrastructure and support. The most relevant example paragraphs in that article are:

.Because the community typically votes as a bloc, it wields disproportionate political influence, which enables it to meet those challenges creatively. A luxurious 60-bed postnatal maternal care center was built with $10 million in state and federal grants

and

Most children attend religious schools, but transportation and textbooks are publicly financed. Several hundred handicapped students are educated by the village’s own public school district, which, because virtually all the students are poor and disabled, is eligible for sizable state and federal government grants.

I'm not sure their happiness is terribly relevant, even if they are happy, it is a deeply unsustainable situation.

I'm not sure that this is at all similar to Hanson's hypothetical. In his hypothetical the uploads don't have any rights or recourse. Here the people have political pull. The situation for uploads could be much worse.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 23 April 2011 03:31:39AM *  10 points [-]

I like to look at this as a vindication of efficient markets. As the Times reporter shrewdly remarks, democracy offers profit opportunities for groups that can coordinate to form disciplined voting blocks. The coordination problem here is very difficult, but we nevertheless see an example of a group that has solved it with amazing success, so that the profit opportunities are not left unexploited despite the collective action problem!

As for the unsustainability, well, a whole lot of high-status people live off rent-seeking these days, except that it tends to be couched in elaborate rationalizations and smug moralizing. The Kiryas Joel folks are just specializing in a form of rent-seeking where their culture gives them a strong competitive advantage (since it solves the coordination problem). If that source of income dried up, I have no doubt that they'd be smart and enterprising enough to come up with something else -- which might well be some productive work, as it probably would be even nowadays in a society where rent-seeking is harder and less lucrative.

(Besides, as the article suggests, the lack of social pathologies in their community means that they might not be such devourers of public funds after all, and they do some productive work, so the net balance isn't that clear.)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 23 April 2011 03:02:13AM *  25 points [-]

Am I misreading you, or are you actually comparing the living standards of Kiryas Joel with a Malthusian equilibrium?!

These people are as far from a Malthusian bare-subsistence situation as the regular developed world middle classes. The only essential difference is that their culture has solved the problem of collective action when it comes to various burdensome signaling arms races that are de rigueur in the mainstream society, so they don't bother to keep up with those. (That said, I don't know how onerous their own peculiar signaling arms races are. It does seem to me like they have it better, but maybe it's just that the grass looks greener on the other side.)

There is of course the issue that they seem to live off rent-seeking to a large degree. However, nowadays the same can be said for a considerable proportion (arguably a majority) of high-status people. The Kiryas Joel folks at least mind their own business and do nothing destructive, unlike so many prestigious rent-seekers who enjoy public accolades. 

Comment author: Alicorn 22 April 2011 02:58:09AM *  5 points [-]

What's more, LW members already have the option to put website links in their profiles, and the websites authored or endorsed by prominent LW contributors are thus already given significant promotion.

It's not that significant. I watch my site traffic like a hawk and I get almost no hits from here.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 22 April 2011 03:10:15AM 3 points [-]

I think I've clicked on all profile links posted by people on the top contributors list at one time or another (and many others as well), but I guess I'm an exception then. What could be done is to make people's profile links more conspicuous and directly accessible, perhaps as a part of making profiles generally more informative for those who wish to make them so. (I think someone already mentioned the idea of merging them with wiki profiles.)

Comment author: BenAlbahari 22 April 2011 02:31:55AM *  2 points [-]

Blogroll / Side Bar Section for Links to Rationality Related Websites. I love Overcoming Bias, but it seems a bit biased that Overcoming Bias is the only other website linked from here.

Reply to this comment with a comment for each website nomination?

Hmm... maybe with this feature new links could be added by users (presuming a minimum karma criteria), and then each link other users could vote up and down, so that the ordering of the list was organic.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 22 April 2011 02:57:14AM *  7 points [-]

Blogroll / Side Bar Section for Links to Rationality Related Websites. I love Overcoming Bias, but it seems a bit biased that Overcoming Bias is the only other website linked from here.

I don't like this idea. The choice of websites to put on the sidebar is likely to be contentious. What exactly qualifies a website to be endorsed by LW? How should a website be judged considering the various PR implications of endorsing it? Also, who exactly stands behind the endorsement, considering that LW is a group blog?

What's more, LW members already have the option to put website links in their profiles, and the websites authored or endorsed by prominent LW contributors are thus already given significant promotion.

Comment author: jsalvatier 21 April 2011 02:49:53AM 17 points [-]

An example would help this comment.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 22 April 2011 01:46:45AM *  4 points [-]

You can take any area of life where you could be faced with tough and uncertain choices, where figuring out the optimal behavior can't be reduced to a tractable technical problem, and where the truth about how things really work is often very different from what people say about it in public (or even in private). For example, all kinds of tough choices and problems in career, education, love, investment, business, social relations with people, etc., etc.

In all these areas, it may happen that you're being offered advice by someone who is smart and competent, has a good relevant track record, and appears to be well-intentioned and genuinely care about you. My point is that even if you're sure about all this, you may still be better off dismissing the advice as nonsense. Accordingly, when you dismiss people's advice in such circumstances with what appears as an irrationally arrogant attitude, you may actually be operating with a better heuristic than if you concluded that the advice must be good based on these factors and acted on it. Even if the advice-giver has some stake in your well-being, it actually takes a very large stake to motivate them reliably to cut all bias and nonsense from what they'll tell you.

Of course, the question is how to know if you're being too arrogant, and how to recognize real good advice among the chaff. To which there is no easy and simple answer, which is one of the reasons why life is hard.

Comment author: Prismattic 21 April 2011 12:59:36AM 2 points [-]

I'm a native English speaker, I started studying Russian at age 19, and I was fluent enough to converse with native speakers in a non-annoying way by age 21. Granted, circumstantial evidence from peers does suggest I'm something of an outlier. I've also found that learning a third, fourth, etc. language is much easier once you've already become fluent in a second language. Indeed, when I studied subsequent languages, I would usually take my notes in Russian, to cut the native-language-favoring wiring in my brain out of the process to the extent possible.

I agree to a degree about the practicality of learning the languages, with the caveats that a) there are interesting people to interact with in the world that do not speak English, and knowing more languages expands the set of interesting people one may interact with, and b)if you enjoy reading, literature is generally much better in the original than in translation.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 21 April 2011 10:26:50PM *  3 points [-]

I'm a native English speaker, I started studying Russian at age 19, and I was fluent enough to converse with native speakers in a non-annoying way by age 21.

That's a pretty impressive accomplishment. How much time did you dedicate to studying Russian during that period?

I agree that literature is much better in the original, but learning a language so well that you can appreciate good literary style in it is a very ambitious goal, far more difficult than just learning it well enough to converse competently.

Comment author: jsalvatier 21 April 2011 06:07:46AM 5 points [-]

Economists are broadly of the opinion that economic activity makes people better off in general. For example, if you invested in your friend's new store, you're helping him (try to) be more productive. He benefits; you benefit, and his customers benefit. His competitors may suffer, but the benefits to others are larger than those losses.

Unless you're investing in something that has a large negative impact (say creating lots of smog) you are probably making the world a better place.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 21 April 2011 09:54:57PM *  1 point [-]

What you write may be true, but it's far from certain. If you keep your money in a mattress instead of investing it, you are not hoarding any actual resources that might be put to a productive use. You are only hoarding green pieces of paper whose value and usefulness from an individual's perspective is perfectly clear, but whose aggregate role in the economy is complicated and ill-understood. The question of what consequences for the whole economy follow when you empty your mattress and invest the dollars is not at all easy, and I'm not sure if anyone is able to give a full and accurate answer.

(Not that any of this should matter for an investor, but your reasoning in the above comment does seem fallacious to me.)

Comment author: AlexMennen 21 April 2011 04:17:44AM 2 points [-]

I think many 40-year-olds would prefer working during retirement age over saving for a 75-year retirement. Consider revising #19.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 21 April 2011 06:47:07PM *  8 points [-]

That's assuming you'll be employable long past the retirement age, which is by no means certain. Even if you are, chances are that the jobs you'll be able to get will be much worse paid and lower-status that what you did during your regular career -- and even if they're not so bad by some absolute standards, such a status hit is likely to lead to deep unhappiness.

Of course, this doesn't hold if future anti-aging medicine allows you to keep your physical and mental powers intact for a longer time. But the present trends are mainly towards prolonging deep old age in which your abilities are severely diminished.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 21 April 2011 02:29:02AM *  13 points [-]

Being able to accept and consider advice from other people who think you're doing something stupid, without lashing out at them; and the more you show them this is true, and the more they can trust you not to be offended if you're frank with them, the better the advice you can get. (Yes, this has a failure mode where insulting other people becomes a status display. [...])

It also has a more subtle and counterintuitive failure mode. People can derive status and get much satisfaction by handing out perfectly honest and well-intentioned advice, if this advice is taken seriously and followed. The trouble is, their advice, however honest, can be a product of pure bias, even if it's about something where they have an impressive track record of success.

Moreover, really good and useful advice about important issues often has to be based on a no-nonsense cynical analysis that sounds absolutely awful when spelled out explicitly. Thus, even the most well-intentioned people will usually be happier to concoct nice-sounding rationalizations and hand out advice based on them, thus boosting their status not just as esteemed advice-givers, but also as expounders of respectable opinion. At the end, you may well be better off with a rash "who is he to tell me what to do" attitude than with a seemingly rational, but in fact dangerously naive reasoning that you should listen to people when they are clearly knowledgeable and well-intentioned. (And yes, I did learn this the hard way.)

Things are of course different if you're lucky to know people who have the relevant knowledge and care about you so much that they'll really discard all the pious rationalizations and make a true no-nonsense assessment of what's best for you. You can expect this from your parents and perhaps other close relatives, but otherwise, you're lucky if you have such good and savvy friends.

In response to comment by Vladimir_M on Book reviews
Comment author: steven0461 20 April 2011 08:53:10PM 1 point [-]

I think what's going on is you're getting annoyed by naive applications of utilitarian reasoning such as Yvain's in the offense thread, then improperly generalizing that annoyance to even sophisticated applications.

In response to comment by steven0461 on Book reviews
Comment author: Vladimir_M 21 April 2011 12:11:28AM *  4 points [-]

On the contrary, it is the "sophisticated" applications that annoy me the most.

I don't think it's reasonable to get annoyed by people's opinions expressed in purely intellectual debates such as those we have here, as long as they are argued politely, honestly, and intelligently. However, out there in the real world, among the people who wield power, influence, and status, there is a great deal of hubristic and pernicious utilitarian ideas, which are dangerous exactly because they have the public image of high status and sophistication. They go under all sorts of different monikers, and can be found in all major ideological camps (their distribution is of course not random, but let's not go there). What they all have in common is this seemingly smart, sophisticated, and scientific, but in fact spectacularly delusional attitude that things can be planned and regulated on a society-wide (or even world-wide) scale by some supposedly scientific methods for maximizing various measures of aggregate welfare.

The most insane and dangerous of such ideas, namely the old-school economic central planning, is fortunately no longer widely popular (though a sizable part of the world had to be wrecked before its craziness finally became undeniable). The ones that are flourishing today are less destructive, at least in the short to medium run, but they are at the same time more difficult to counter, since the evidence of their failure is less obvious and easier to rationalize away. Unfortunately, here I would have to get into sensitive ideological issues to provide more concrete analysis and examples.

Comment author: dugancm 20 April 2011 09:11:28AM *  2 points [-]

for just about any language there are huge numbers of native speakers who speak professional-level English

Exception: Sign Languages, though they have relatively small populations.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 20 April 2011 09:56:36PM 5 points [-]

I haven't seen any statistics, but I suspect that there is a significant number of hearing people born to deaf parents who are natively bilingual in English and various Anglospheric sign languages.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 20 April 2011 07:07:11PM 13 points [-]

Also, it would be nice to have a preview option for comments.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 20 April 2011 07:06:26PM 72 points [-]

One thing I'd really like to see: make the total number of upvotes and downvotes visible separately instead of just the difference. That way controversial posts and comments will stand apart from uninteresting ones.

Comment author: [deleted] 20 April 2011 10:24:18AM 1 point [-]

Ah, I missed that!

In response to comment by [deleted] on Insufficiently Awesome
Comment author: Vladimir_M 20 April 2011 04:47:13PM 2 points [-]

Note also that while kids will pick up languages faster, more spontaneously, and with better results (the ability to pick up a flawless accent and perfect command of finer points of grammar usually disappears in late childhood), they will also forget them unbelievably quickly and thoroughly without active use. As an adult, your command of a language may get rusty, but it will never fall to zero as long as your brain is functioning decently. On the other hand, kids who change environments may forget even their first native language so thoroughly that they'll be barely able to recall a single word.

Comment author: [deleted] 20 April 2011 07:40:58AM 0 points [-]

It takes an enormous amount of time and effort to learn a language well enough to do anything useful or productive with it

Unless the learner is a child - or so I've heard.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Insufficiently Awesome
Comment author: Vladimir_M 20 April 2011 08:28:34AM 3 points [-]

Note the "adult" qualification in the first sentence of my comment.

In response to Genes are overrated
Comment author: Nic_Smith 20 April 2011 07:01:32AM -2 points [-]

"Genes influence everything but determine almost nothing on their own." -- David Shenk, "The Truth About IQ." A somewhat related article.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 20 April 2011 08:27:21AM *  5 points [-]

That's a pretty awful article. It cherry-picks the literature for convenient soundbites, and then proceeds to put even more spin on top of them. It also misinterprets various findings that demonstrate nothing except the restriction of range effect, etc., etc.

Trusting science reporters in the popular press is generally a bad idea, and when it comes to especially charged topics such as this one, they are probably less than worthless on average.

Edit: Just as one example, the authors of that 1987 German study about chess and intelligence themselves explain the result as a restriction of range effect. ("Dieses Ergebnis wird auf die Homogenität der Spielstärke der Bundesligaspieler zurückgeführt." -- "The result is explained by the homogeneity of the skill level of Bundesliga players.")

And if the author of the Atlantic article had spent a few more minutes googling for newer results, he would have found this 2006 study stating that:

Correlation and regression analyses revealed a clear-cut moderate relationship between general (and in particular numerical) intelligence and the participants’ playing strengths, suggesting that expert chess play does not stand in isolation from superior mental abilities.

In response to Genes are overrated
Comment author: HonoreDB 20 April 2011 03:46:43AM 2 points [-]

Surely any characteristic that has been created or optimized by natural selection must be highly heritable. How would, say, human intelligence have evolved otherwise?

The rate of evolutionary change in humans has accelerated since the development of civilization (2007 study). To me that can only mean that, for the past 20,000 years, fitness-relevant human traits have been highly heritable. There's no reason to expect that to have changed since the development of genetic testing.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 20 April 2011 04:08:50AM *  20 points [-]

Surely any characteristic that has been created or optimized by natural selection must be highly heritable.

That's not true. On the contrary, heritability is defined as the part of the observed variation in a trait that is due to genetic differences, and if there has been intense natural selection on some trait, it may be that only those organisms with the same favorable genes for that trait have survived it, so that now there is almost no genetic variation at all.

Note that saying that a trait is heritable and that it's determined genetically in some general sense are two very different things. A trait can be under almost exclusive control of genes, with next to zero environmental influences, but if all the organisms of the species have the same relevant genes, its heritability will be zero. For example, humans are clearly genetically predisposed to develop two arms, but the variation in the number of arms is almost wholly environmental -- people lose arms in accidents, wars, etc. much more often than they get born armless due to genetic causes. So if you calculated the heritability of this trait (the number of arms), it would be near zero, and yet it's clearly absurd to say that the number of your arms is not genetically determined.

In response to comment by hwc on Insufficiently Awesome
Comment author: Cayenne 20 April 2011 01:21:14AM *  2 points [-]

Learning a language is a good idea! I've heard that Esperanto isn't hard to learn... hm.

Edit - please disregard this post

Comment author: Vladimir_M 20 April 2011 03:33:25AM *  18 points [-]

Actually, if you're an adult English speaker, learning foreign languages is probably not worth its opportunity cost. It takes an enormous amount of time and effort to learn a language well enough to do anything useful or productive with it, or even just to be able to talk to native speakers in a way that won't be annoyingly incompetent.

What's more, for just about any language there are huge numbers of native speakers who speak professional-level English, including natively bilingual kids of immigrants, so you're not developing any rare and precious combination of skills. (There are exceptions, such as e.g. knowledge of some languages combined with a security clearance that's hard to obtain if you're not a native citizen, but they are few and far between.)

Of course, if you find learning languages a fun hobby, go for it. But unless it's a greater source of fun and enjoyment than other things you might be doing, it's quite pointless. (And I say that as someone who can find his way around in at least five different languages.)

Comment author: [deleted] 20 April 2011 01:25:52AM 1 point [-]

I hadn't thought of that! Is there any independent reason to believe that intelligence is "naturally" distributed this way?

In response to comment by [deleted] on Genes are overrated
Comment author: Vladimir_M 20 April 2011 01:36:25AM *  14 points [-]

To answer that question, you first have to specify how the number that serves as the measure of intelligence is obtained. Unlike with height, there is no obvious simple way to come up with a number, and elaborate methods can always be engineered so as to change the resulting distribution.

In fact, at the time when I delved into the IQ research literature to try and make some sense out of these controversies, one of my major frustrations was that nobody, to my knowledge, asks the following question. Once a test has been normed to produce a normal distribution for a given population, what exact patterns of deviation from normal distribution do we see when we try to apply it to different populations (or to various non-representative subpopulations)? It seems to me that a whole lot of insight about the Flynn effect and other mysterious phenomena could be gained this way, and yet as far as I know, nobody has done it.

In response to Genes are overrated
Comment author: Vladimir_M 20 April 2011 01:16:45AM 39 points [-]

I am only an amateur in all the relevant areas of expertise, but I have invested quite a bit of effort trying to make sense of these controversies. I have to say that your post is very confused, and you seem to lack familiarity with many important facts that would have to be considered before pronouncing such a sweeping judgment.

The lack of obvious correlations between genes and phenotypes implies only that the phenotypes in question are not determined by the genotype in a simple way. If they are determined by complex interactions between genes, then straightforward association studies won't detect this connection. To make an imperfect but relevant analogy, if you took the machine code of various computer programs and did a statistical association study between these codes and the resulting behavior of the computer, while being ignorant of the way the instructions are actually decoded and executed -- as we are still largely ignorant of the relevant biochemistry, which is also far more complicated -- you could easily end up with no observable correlations.

Similarly, if some trait can be influenced by environmental factors strongly and rapidly, it is still a total fallacy to conclude that it is therefore determined purely by environmental factors. To take a trivial example, nobody disputes that hair color is highly heritable, but the development of cheap and convenient hair dyes has changed the average hair colors in the population dramatically. The behavior of computer programs is highly dependent on what you give them as input, but it doesn't mean that the program code is irrelevant.

As for heritability studies, you are certainly right that there is a lot of shoddy work, and by necessity they make a whole lot of wildly simplifying assumptions. If there existed only a handful of such studies, one would be well advised not to take them very seriously. However, the amount of data that has been gathered in recent decades is just too overwhelming to dismiss, especially taking into account that often there have been considerable ideological incentives to support the opposite conclusions.

On the whole, you are making a wholly unsubstantiated sweeping conclusion.

In response to comment by Vladimir_M on Book reviews
Comment author: steven0461 19 April 2011 09:59:39PM 1 point [-]

To a decent first approximation, you're not allowed to use the words "hubris" and "guaranteed" in the same sentence.

In response to comment by steven0461 on Book reviews
Comment author: Vladimir_M 19 April 2011 10:21:31PM 3 points [-]

A fair point, but given the facts of the matter, I'd say that the qualification "guaranteed" needs to be toned down only slightly to make the utterance reasonably modest. (And since I'm writing on LW, I should perhaps be explicit that I'm not considering the hypothetical future appearance of some superhuman intelligence, but the regular human social life and organization.)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 19 April 2011 08:57:16PM 2 points [-]

A while ago, Bryan Caplan considered the Albert and Mary scenario and concluded that Albert was right:
http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2008/01/how_can_guys_be.html

In response to Learned Blankness
Comment author: JGWeissman 19 April 2011 02:32:54AM 6 points [-]

Sometimes my critical contribution to helping another programmer solve a problem basically consists of reading the fascinating error message. (Well, the fact that I also programmed the library they are using to show the error message is arguably a critical contribution as well.)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 19 April 2011 07:38:33PM 2 points [-]

Sometimes my critical contribution to helping another programmer solve a problem basically consists of reading the fascinating error message.

If you can figure out the problem from a syntax error message with C++ templates, your contribution is certainly far from trivial!

In response to comment by Cayenne on Learned Blankness
Comment author: Dustin 19 April 2011 06:11:49PM 2 points [-]

My 'acid test' of a general-purpose cookbook is if it has a real recipe for cream of mushroom soup or if it just says 'add 1 can'.

Why is this? It seems that people often cling to the "old way" of doing things even if the new way is faster and better because of some emotional attachment to the way they have always done things. No idea if this applies to you, but as someone who never cooks I'm wondering if this makes some real difference.

In response to comment by Dustin on Learned Blankness
Comment author: Vladimir_M 19 April 2011 07:32:29PM *  4 points [-]

It seems that people often cling to the "old way" of doing things even if the new way is faster and better because of some emotional attachment to the way they have always done things.

With cooking, the trouble is that it doesn't scale, or rather, the economies of scale come at the inevitable expense of quality. A home-made meal prepared by a skilled cook and with well chosen ingredients is guaranteed to be superior even to the output of restaurants, let alone to something produced on an industrial scale. (Especially when you consider that the home-made meal can be subtly customized to your taste.)

In response to comment by Vladimir_M on Book reviews
Comment author: PhilGoetz 17 April 2011 02:30:14PM *  0 points [-]

Saying "but you can't bring hurt down to zero" is an invalid objection because it is irrelevant, and a pernicious one, because people use that form of objection routinely to defend their special interests at the cost of social welfare.

You speak of "social welfare" as if it were an objectively measurable property of the real world. In reality, there is no such thing as an objective social welfare function, and ideologically convenient definitions of it are dime a dozen.

Note the position of "social welfare" in that sentence. It's in a subordinate clause, describing a common behavior that I use as justification for taking special exception to something you said. So it's two steps removed from what we're arguing about. The important part of my sentence is the first part, "Saying 'you can't bring hurt down to zero' is an invalid objection." "Hurting people is bad" is not very controversial. You're taking a minor, tangential subordinate clause, which is unimportant and not worth defending in this context, and replying as if you were objecting to my point.

I don't mean that you're trying to do this, but this is a classic Dark Arts technique - if your goal is to say "hurting people is bad" is controversial, you instead pick out something else in the same sentence that is controversial, and point that out.

I also didn't mean to say that you are pernicious or have ill-intent - just that the objection I was replying to is one that upsets me because it is commonly used in a Dark Arts way.

I'd probably word it a bit differently myself, but I think (a) and (b) are in fact true.

Fair enough - it implies (a) and (b), whether true or false.

I say it isn't theoretically possible for utilitarianism to have more problems than any other approach, because any other approach can be recast in a utilitarian framework, and then improved by making it handle more cases. A "non-utilitarian" approach just means an incomplete approach that leaves a mostly random set of possible cases unhandled, because it doesn't produce a complete ordering of values over possible worlds. It's like having a rule that's missing most of the markings.

In response to comment by PhilGoetz on Book reviews
Comment author: Vladimir_M 19 April 2011 07:24:54PM 3 points [-]

I say it isn't theoretically possible for utilitarianism to have more problems than any other approach, because any other approach can be recast in a utilitarian framework, and then improved by making it handle more cases.

"Improved" is a tricky word here. If you're discussing the position of an almighty god contemplating the universe, then yes, I agree. But when it comes to practical questions of human social order and coordination and arbitration of human interactions, the idea that such questions can be answered in practice by contemplating and maximizing some sort of universal welfare function, i.e some global aggregate utility, is awful hubris that is guaranteed to backfire in complete disaster -- Hayek's "fatal conceit," if you will.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 19 April 2011 02:33:32PM 0 points [-]

Do you have strategies for distinguishing between game theoretic exaggeration of offense vs. natural offense?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 19 April 2011 06:52:28PM 9 points [-]

The question is better phrased by asking what will be the practical consequences of treating an offense as legitimate and ceasing the offending action (and perhaps also apologizing) versus treating it as illegitimate and standing your ground (and perhaps even escalating). Clearly, this is a difficult question of great practical value in life, and like every such question, it's impossible to give a simple and universally applicable answer. (And of course, even if you know the answer in some concrete situation, you'll need extraordinary composure and self-control to apply it if it's contrary to your instinctive reaction.)

Comment author: TheOtherDave 18 April 2011 12:05:04AM 1 point [-]

I agree that some people do treat as moral failings many practices that, to my mind, are better treated as mistakes.

I also think that some people react to that by defending practices that, to my mind, are better treated as mistakes.

Regarding the supposed biases arising due to gendered language, do you think that they exist to a significant degree in practice?

I'm not sure.

One way I might approach the question is to teach an experimental subject some new words to denote new roles, and then have the subjects select people to fill those roles based on resumes. By manipulating the genderedness of the name used for the role (e.g., "farner," "farness," or "farnist") and the nominal sex of the candidate (e.g., male or female), we could determine what effect an X-gendered term had on the odds of choosing a Y-sexed candidate.

I have no idea if that study has been performed.

So, for example, would I expect English-speakers (on average) selecting a candidate for the role of "farness" to select a female candidate more often than for the role of "farner"?

Yes, I think so. Probably not a huge difference, though. Call it a 65% confidence for a statistically significant difference.

What's your estimate? (Or, if you'd rather operationalize the question differently, go for it.)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 19 April 2011 06:41:21PM 4 points [-]

What's your estimate?

I was going to write a more detailed reply, but seeing the literature cited in the book linked by Conchis, I should probably read up on the topic before expressing any further opinions. It could be that I'm underestimating the magnitude of such effects.

That said, one huge difficulty with issues of prejudice and discrimination in general is that what looks like a bias caused by malice, ignorance, or unconscious error is often in fact an instance of accurate statistical discrimination. Rational statistical discrimination is usually very hard to disentangle from various factors that supposedly trigger irrational biases, since all kinds of non-obvious correlations might be lurking everywhere. At the same time, a supposed finding of a factor that triggers irrational bias is a valuable and publishable result for people researching such things, so before I accept any of these findings, I'll have to give them a careful look.

Comment author: XiXiDu 18 April 2011 09:11:02AM *  17 points [-]

Ask a Korean!: When is it OK to Make Eye Contact?

Never, never, NEVER look into the eyes of someone who is in a superior position than you are. This includes everyone who is older than you, even by one year, family or not. This also includes people who are higher than you in a workplace or social hierarchy, regardless of age. (For example, your boss, a judge, etc.) In practical terms, this means that you are pretty safe with not looking into anyone's eyes when you are in Korea.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 18 April 2011 03:12:08PM 8 points [-]

Also, in places with a lot of ne'er do well young men roaming around and where the enforcement of public order leaves something to be desired, making eye contact with strangers in public can be seen as a challenge to a fist-fight (or worse).

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 April 2011 01:53:23AM *  8 points [-]

As for beliefs, obviously there is a lot that doesn't stand up to rational scrutiny, though like in any long-standing tradition, many things that may seem irrational or backward are in fact closer to reality than various modern fashionable beliefs. (Clearly, a simple blog comment can't do justice to this topic.)

I'd recommend Nick Szabo's essay Objective Versus Intersubjective Truth as a good first explanation of the topic.

Note: The website appears to be down at the moment, Google cache available here.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 18 April 2011 02:12:32AM 4 points [-]

Yes, I second that recommendation. It's a magnificently good essay.

Comment author: multifoliaterose 17 April 2011 11:06:35PM 3 points [-]

Just out of curiosity, in what sense are you Catholic (heritage, culture, belief)? (No need to answer if you prefer not to.)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 18 April 2011 01:10:52AM *  10 points [-]

Just out of curiosity, in what sense are you Catholic (heritage, culture, belief)?

Well, legally, I am a Catholic in good standing (I'm baptized, and I've never renounced it nor been excommunicated). In my practices, I am largely lapsed, though I value the heritage, the art, the community, and the folkways a lot. As for beliefs, obviously there is a lot that doesn't stand up to rational scrutiny, though like in any long-standing tradition, many things that may seem irrational or backward are in fact closer to reality than various modern fashionable beliefs. (Clearly, a simple blog comment can't do justice to this topic.)

What I would point out however is that I often find the North American (presumably Protestant) attitudes in this regard quite alien and strange. What I mean is the tendency to see one's belonging to a church as an either-or matter, and breaking with it as a grand and dramatic event. Among Catholics, the normal thing to do is simply to adjust the level of your practices and your closeness to the community to whatever you find to your liking. (ETA: Though conversion to a different religion, as opposed to merely neglecting one's own, would be a big deal.)

Comment author: Perplexed 16 April 2011 05:18:16PM 4 points [-]

What you say is certainly true if the utility monster is simply exaggerating. But I understood VM to be discussing someone who claims offense where no offense (or negligible offense) actually exists. Or, someone who self-modifies to sincerely feel offended, though originally there was no such sensitivity.

But in any case, the real source of the problem in VM's scenario is adhering to an ethical system which permits one to be exploited by utility monsters - real or feigned. My own ethical system avoids being exploited because I accept personal disutility so as to produce utility for others only to the extent that they reciprocate. So someone who exaggerates the disutility they derive from, say, my humming may succeed in keeping me silent in their presence, but this success may come at a cost regarding how much attention I pay to their other desires. So the would-be utility monster is only hurting itself by feeding me false information about its utility function.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 17 April 2011 11:27:52PM 15 points [-]

But I understood VM to be discussing someone who claims offense where no offense (or negligible offense) actually exists.

The crucial point is that the level of offense at a certain action -- and I mean real, sincerely felt painful offense, not fake indignation -- is not something fixed and independent of the incentives people face. This may seem counterintuitive and paradoxical, but human brains do have functions that are not under direct control of the conscious mind, and are nevertheless guided by rational calculations and thus respond to incentives. People creating drama and throwing tantrums are a prime example: their emotions and distress are completely sincere, and their state of mind couldn't be further from calculated pretense, and yet whatever it is in their brains that pushes them into drama and tantrums is very much guided by rational strategic considerations.

Comment author: endoself 17 April 2011 04:03:18AM 12 points [-]

If someone goes around desecrating Torahs, you would be completely rational to conclude that he probably has an issue with Jews in general and feel threatened.

Here's a possible litmus test: how would you feel about another former Orthodox Jew desecrating a Torah scroll as a symbol of eir change in belief.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 17 April 2011 11:02:31PM *  6 points [-]

Here's a possible litmus test: how would you feel about another former Orthodox Jew desecrating a Torah scroll as a symbol of eir change in belief.

"Another"? I assume this question is directed at Joshua Z. I am not a former Orthodox Jew, nor any other kind of Jew for that matter. I'm Catholic.

That said, as I wrote in my above comment, clearly the context of an offensive/blasphemous act or utterance matters a lot. As for the concrete scenario you list, I find it hard to imagine that a Jew who has left the religion would symbolically desecrate Torah -- the act has such a strong connotation of anti-Jewish pogroms that I'd imagine even a non-religious Jew would find it scary, almost like brandishing swastikas. That's my outsider's impression at least; I'd be curious to hear the opinion of someone more knowledgeable.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 17 April 2011 04:25:54PM 7 points [-]

(shrug) "Evil" confuses the issue.

Just to get away from the politics around real-world examples, suppose I speak a language that genders its verbs based on the height of the object -- that is, there are separate markings for above-average height, below-average height, and average height.

It's an empirical question whether, if I'm figuring out who to hire for a job, asking the question "Whom should we tall-hire?" makes me more likely to hire a tall person than asking "Whom should we short-hire?" If it's true, it is; evil doesn't enter into it under most understandings of evil. It's just a fact about the language and about cognitive biases.

If the best available candidate for the job happens to be tall, but I ask myself whom I should short-hire, the way I'm talking about the job introduces bias into my hiring process that makes me less likely to hire the best available candidate. This also isn't evil, but it's a mistake.

If my language's rules are such that this height-based gender-marking is non-optional, then this mistake is non-optional. My native language is, in that case, irreparably bias-ridden in this way.

Suppose I want to hire the best candidates. What can I do then?

Well, one thing I might do is deliberately alternate among "short-hire," "tall-hire," and "average-hire" in my speech, so as to reduce the systematic bias introduced by my choice of verb. Of course, if my language forces me to use "short-hire" for an unspecified-height target, then doing that is ungrammatical.

Another option is to make up a new way of speaking about hiring... perhaps borrow the equivalent verb from another language, or make up new words, so I can ask "whom should I hire?" without using a height-based gender marking at all. But maybe, inconveniently, my language is such that foreign loan verbs must also be marked in this way.

A third option is to systematically train myself so I am no longer subject to the selection bias that naive speakers of my language demonstrate. But there are opportunity costs associated with that training process, and maybe I don't want to bother.

Ultimately, what I do will depend on how important speaking grammatically is to me, how important hiring optimal employees is, and so forth. If I lose significant status or clarity by speaking ungrammatically, I may prefer to hire suboptimal employees.

Should I get offended if someone points that out? Again, it depends on my goals. If I want to improve my ability to choose the best available candidate, then getting offended in that case is counter-productive. If I want to defend my choice to speak traditionally, then getting offended works reasonably well.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 17 April 2011 10:23:54PM *  2 points [-]

My above comment was made in a bit of jest, as I hope is clear. Still, some people do make a deep moral issue over "sexist" language, and insofar as they do, moral condemnation of much more heavily gendered languages than English is an inevitable logical consequence.

Regarding the supposed biases arising due to gendered language, do you think that they exist to a significant degree in practice? While it's not a watertight argument to the contrary, I still think it's significant that, to my knowledge, nobody has ever demonstrated any cross-cultural correlation between gender-related norms and customs and the linguistic role of gender. (For what that's worth, of all Indo-European languages, the old I-E gender system has been most thoroughly lost in Persian, which doesn't even have the he-she distinction.)

Also, when I reflect on my own native language and the all-pervasive use of masculine as the default gender, I honestly can't imagine any plausible concrete examples of biases analogous to your hypothetical example with height. Of course, I may be biased in this regard myself.

Comment author: Emile 17 April 2011 09:12:30PM -2 points [-]

A bit of a side note, but from what I've read/heard from Muslims, what they object to isn't the drawing of Mohammed per se, but the mocking of Mohammed. I've also heard some express annoyance that the media would misrepresent their view as if the problem was a religious edict against drawing Mohammed and not the mocking (I don't think the media represents the views of Muslims any more faithfully than it represents the views of Singularitarians).

If you're American want a better idea of how Muslims feel, imagine if for some reason Chinese people had a national "draw Martin Luther King with big lips eating watermelon" day. Would the reactions be very different?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 17 April 2011 09:51:40PM *  7 points [-]

A bit of a side note, but from what I've read/heard from Muslims, what they object to isn't the drawing of Mohammed per se, but the mocking of Mohammed.

As far as I know, there are significant differences in this regard between different Islamic denominations, sects, schools, and folk practices, but many Muslims consider even respectful portrayal of Mohammed as unacceptable because it constitutes idolatry. Basically, anyone wishing to portray Mohammed is in a Catch-22 situation: if it's done in a spirit of veneration, it's idolatry, and otherwise it's mocking and disrespectful.

Comment author: byrnema 17 April 2011 07:19:29PM *  0 points [-]

I recall reading somewhere that there are different sources of moral rules, I think things being sacred was one of them, 'purity' might have been another one or the same one, and if anyone remembers the three things I would appreciate knowing.

So by rejecting sacred cows, does this mean you would eliminate the whole category of moral rules that depend on something bring sacred? (I don't think this is necessarily so from what you've said.)

I ask myself if I attach moral weight to anything sacred and I'm not sure.

Actually, I think so -- I can think of some things that I care about symbolically, rather than just at the object level -- but I attach the morality to my relationship with this thing rather than other people's, so I'm not easily as offended. (though I can now think of some cases where I am)

So I'm confused on the topic. What do you think of 'sacred' in general?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 17 April 2011 07:44:39PM *  5 points [-]

I recall reading somewhere that there are different sources of moral rules, I think things being sacred was one of them, 'purity' might have been another one or the same one, and if anyone remembers the three things I would appreciate knowing.

You probably have in mind the theories of Jonathan Haidt.

I am skeptical towards his theories, though. There may be some truth in them, but his approach is extremely ideologized and, in my opinion, biased accordingly. (On the other hand, I do appreciate that he is explicit and upfront about his ideology and its role in his work. It is certainly a welcome contrast to what is commonly seen in academia.)

Comment author: XiXiDu 17 April 2011 11:21:03AM *  0 points [-]

From what I've heard, these days there are attempts to condemn man in German as sexist.

True (because it is pronounced the same way as "Mann"), but what can we do about such problems? It seems that using "made up" pronouns until they are integrated is the most natural way of fixing the problem?

You could also work around the problem though, but it requires some effort:

The victim should judge whether ey believes the offense causes more pain to em than it does benefit to the offender; if so, ey should nonjudgmentally request the offender stop while applying the Principle of Charity to the offender, and if ey wants the maximum chance of the offense stopping, ey should resist the urge to demand an apology or do anything else that could potentially turn it into a status game.

versus

Victims should judge whether they believe the offense causes more pain to them than it does benefit to the offender; if so, they should nonjudgmentally request the offender stop while applying the Principle of Charity to the offender, and if they want the maximum chance of the offense stopping, they should resist the urge to demand an apology or do anything else that could potentially turn it into a status game.

Or you simply use "an agent" so that you can use "it"...

Comment author: Vladimir_M 17 April 2011 12:02:25PM *  7 points [-]

In the grammars of Slavic languages, including my native one (Croatian), grammatical gender is so pervasive that it would be altogether impossible to speak without using the masculine gender as the default. For example, in the past tense even verbs have gender, so if you want to ask, say, "who was that?", you have to say "who masculine-was that?" Asking "who feminine-was that?" is ungrammatical, even if the answer is certain to be female. There are countless such situations where you simply have to accept that the male subsumes the female to be able to speak at all.

Therefore, when someone claims that using masculine by default is evil, he (hah!) is thereby claiming that my native language is evil, and irreparably so. Should I get offended?

Comment author: XiXiDu 17 April 2011 10:22:04AM *  5 points [-]

I always use "one" as an indefinite pronoun, similar to how I would do it in German. Is that wrong?

...and only if one thinks this has a real chance of stopping the offending behavior either in this case or in the future.

or

...if so, one should nonjudgmentally request the offender stop while applying the Principle of Charity to the offender, and if one wants the maximum chance of the offense stopping, one should resist the urge to demand an apology or do anything else that could potentially turn it into a status game.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 17 April 2011 10:50:19AM *  12 points [-]

I always use "one" as an indefinite pronoun, similar to how I would do it in German.

From what I've heard, these days there are attempts to condemn man in German as sexist.

In English, I also like using "one" but it's often too clumsy. As for those "ey" and "eir" pronouns, I find them not just extremely ugly, but also a very annoying obstruction while reading.

Comment author: Yvain 16 April 2011 09:32:24PM 2 points [-]

We may be talking at cross-purposes. Are you arguing that if someone says something I find offensive, it is more productive for me to respond in the form of "You are a bad person for saying that and I demand an apology?" than "I'm sorry, but I was really hurt by your statement and I request you not make it again"?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 16 April 2011 10:05:44PM *  7 points [-]

It depends; there is no universal rule. Either response could be more appropriate in different cases. There are situations where if someone's statements overstep certain lines, the rational response is to deem this a hostile act and demand an apology with the threat of escalation. There are also situations where it makes sense to ask people to refrain from hurtful statements, since the hurt is non-strategic.

Also, what exactly do you mean by "productive"? People's interests may be fundamentally opposed, and it may be that the response that better serves the strategic interest of one party can do this only at the other's expense, with neither of them being in the right in any objective sense.

Comment author: Yvain 16 April 2011 08:43:34PM *  40 points [-]

Okay. I formally admit I'm wrong about the "should usually stop offensive behavior" thing (or, rather, I don't know if I'm wrong but I formally admit my previous arguments for thinking I was right no longer move me and I now recognize I am confused.)

I still believe that if you find something offensive, a request to change phrased in the language of harm-minimization is better than a demand to change phrased in the language of offense, but I don't know if anyone is challenging that.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 16 April 2011 09:29:25PM *  4 points [-]

I still believe that if you find something offensive, a request to change phrased in the language of harm-minimization is better than a demand to change phrased in the language of offense, but I don't know if anyone is challenging that.

I see at least two huge problems with the harm-minimization approach.

First, it requires interpersonal comparison of harm, which can make sense in very drastic cases (e.g. one person getting killed versus another getting slightly inconvenienced), but it usually makes no sense in controversial disputes such as these.

Second, even if we can agree on the way to compare harm interpersonally, the game-theoretic concerns discussed in this thread clearly show that naive case-by-case harm minimization is unsound, since any case-by-case consequences of decisions can be overshadowed by the implications of the wider incentives and signals they provide. This can lead to incredibly complicated and non-obvious issues, where the law of unintended consequences lurks behind every corner. I have yet to see any consequentialists even begin to grapple with this problem convincingly, on this issue or any other.

Comment author: Yvain 16 April 2011 07:30:15PM *  2 points [-]

I'm not sure people can voluntarily self-modify in this way. Even if it's possible, I don't think most real people getting offended by real issues are primarily doing this.

Voluntary self-modification also requires a pre-existing desire to self-modify. I wouldn't take a pill that made me want to initiate suicide attacks on people who insulted the prophet Mohammed, because I don't really care if people insult the prophet Mohammed enough to want to die in a suicide attack defending him. The only point at which I would take such a pill is if I already cared enough about the honor of Mohammed that I was willing to die for him. Since people have risked their lives and earned lots of prison time protesting the Mohammed cartoons, even before they started any self-modification they must have had strong feelings about the issue.

If X doesn't offend you, why would self-modify to make X offend you to stop people from doing X, since X doesn't offend you? I think you might be thinking of attempts to create in-group cohesion and signal loyalty by uniting against a common "offensive" enemy, something that I agree is common. But these attempts cannot be phrased in the consequentialist manner I suggested earlier and still work - they depend on a "we are all good, the other guy is all evil" mentality.

Thus, someone who responded with a cost/benefit calculation to all respectful and reasonable demands to stop offending, but continued getting touchy about disrespectful blame-based demands to stop offending, would be pretty hard to game.

One difference between this post and the original essay I wrote which more people liked was that the original made it clearer that this was more advice for how people who were offended should communicate their displeasure, and less advice for whether people accused of offense should stop. Even if you don't like the latter part, I think the advice for the former might still be useful.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 16 April 2011 08:52:35PM *  33 points [-]

If X doesn't offend you, why would self-modify to make X offend you to stop people from doing X, since X doesn't offend you?

It's a Schellingian idea: in conflict situations, it is often a rational strategy to pre-commit to act irrationally (i.e. without regards to cost and benefit) unless the opponent yields. The idea in this case is that I'll self-modify to care about X far more than I initially do, and thus pre-commit to lash out if anyone does it.

If we have a dispute and I credibly signal that I'm going to flip out and create drama out of all proportion to the issue at stake, you're faced with a choice between conceding to my demands or getting into an unpleasant situation that will cost more than the matter of dispute is worth. I'm sure you can think of many examples where people successfully get the upper hand in disputes using this strategy. The only way to disincentivize such behavior is to pre-commit credibly to be defiant in face of threats of drama. In contrast, if you act like a (naive) utilitarian, you are exceptionally vulnerable to this strategy, since I don't even need drama to get what I want, if I can self-modify to care tremendously about every single thing I want. (Which I won't do if I'm a good naive utilitarian myself, but the whole point is that it's not a stable strategy.)

Now, the key point is that such behavior is usually not consciously manipulative and calculated. On the contrary -- someone flipping out and creating drama for a seemingly trivial reason is likely to be under God-honest severe distress, feeling genuine pain of offense and injustice. This is a common pattern in human social behavior: humans are extremely good at detecting faked emotions and conscious manipulation, and as a result, we have evolved so that our brains lash out with honest strong emotion that is nevertheless directed by some module that performs game-theoretic assessment of the situation. This of course prompts strategic responses from others, leading to a strategic arms race without end.

The further crucial point is that these game-theoretic calculators in our brains are usually smart enough to assess whether the flipping out strategy is likely to be successful, given what might be expected in response. Basically, it is a part of the human brain that responds to rational incentives even though it's not under the control of the conscious mind. With this in mind, you can resolve the seeming contradiction between the sincerity of the pain of offense and the fact that it responds to rational incentives.

All this is somewhat complicated when we consider issues of group conflict rather than individual conflict, but the same basic principles apply.

Comment author: orthonormal 16 April 2011 03:46:16PM 1 point [-]

Westerners feel they must treat any attempt to deny their rights as a Schelling Point.

I don't understand this use of Schelling point- could you explain?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 16 April 2011 07:30:57PM *  17 points [-]

I don't understand this use of Schelling point- could you explain?

When there is a potential for conflict over some issue, people can communicate and negotiate as much as they like, but the most important piece of information is hard to communicate reliably and credibly: namely, the line that one is committed to defend without backing off, even if the cost is higher than the value of what's being defended. (Such commitment is usually necessary to defend anything effectively, since if you defend only when the cost of defense is lower than the value defended, the opponent can force you to back off without fighting by threatening an all-out attack whose cost is disproportionate to the prize, and which would not be profitable if you defended at all costs.)

The key insight is that such commitment is easier to assert credibly by drawing the line at a conspicuous focal point, which will enable both parties to come to a tacit mutual agreement. However, if you're not really committed to defend a particular focal point and your opponent senses that, he has the incentive to mount an attack that will make defense too costly and make you back off. And you can't back off from a focal point by giving just a small concession -- you can only withdraw to the next conspicuous focal point, and even then, it will be harder to assert commitment to defend it given your history.

I recommend this essay by David Friedman, which explains how the concept of Schelling point applies to property rights, in a way that's clearly generalizable to all other issues of rights and social norms:
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Property/Property.html

Comment author: komponisto 16 April 2011 04:43:05PM 2 points [-]

My getting offended if you disrespect my cultural icons has to do with my (true) belief that I am a member of the culture being disrespected

Yes -- but my feeling is that if you no longer believe X, you should accept the fact that you're no longer a member of the culture-defined-by-belief-in-X.

In general I am suspicious of the often-heard argument that religion is not really about belief. You only hear this from people looking for an excuse to remain in a tribe they've been in their whole life, because (understandably) it's psychologically difficult to leave a tribe. But sometimes it has to be done -- and I see religion, quite frankly, as one of the clearest examples of a case where one simply needs to let go and be over with it.

That's not to say you can't embrace your identity as a former religionist. But that's a distinct cultural identity, involving your fond memories of formerly being offended by sacrilegious acts, as opposed to still currently being offended by them.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 16 April 2011 06:43:18PM *  8 points [-]

That's not to say you can't embrace your identity as a former religionist. But that's a distinct cultural identity, involving your fond memories of formerly being offended by sacrilegious acts, as opposed to still currently being offended by them.

Trouble is, your identity is about much more than that in practice. It's deeply entangled with your way of life, your family, community, and social network, and also with the way others see and treat you. An offensively blasphemous act may (note: may, depending on the situation) be a credible signal that someone is hostile towards the group you identify with, and given the power to do so, would act so as to endanger your way of life, your community, and perhaps also your personal well-being. (This could range anywhere from making your life miserable in petty ways to outright violence.) In many cases, you must also take into account that those hostile to your group see it as your inherent identity that you can't disown and escape from even if you wanted to.

With this in mind, often it is irrational to get riled up over some provocative act that is best ignored, or that isn't even meant to be provocative but has it as an unwanted side-effect. However, sometimes it is also irrational to ignore clear signs of genuine hostility, some of which can plausibly translate into real danger. In the latter case, the visceral reaction is well adapted to reality.

(There are of course also various other cases where it's less clear if a visceral reaction can be reasonably called "rational," such as when some instrumental goal is best furthered by throwing a tantrum and creating drama to extract concessions.)

Comment author: JoshuaZ 16 April 2011 03:06:45PM 9 points [-]

This strikes me as a bad analogy. Seeing pictures of Mohammed is only offensive to Muslims because of their conviction in a poorly evidenced falsehood, whereas punching someone in the face is an offense regardless of what they believe.

I don't think this is completely true. Speaking as a former Orthodox Jew, the idea of someone desecrating a Torah scroll fills with me with deep emotional pain even though I know that there's nothing at all holy or sacred about it. Once that sort of offense becomes ingrained it is very hard to remove even when one understands that it isn't based on any actual part of reality.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 16 April 2011 05:26:53PM *  10 points [-]

Speaking as a former Orthodox Jew, the idea of someone desecrating a Torah scroll fills with me with deep emotional pain even though I know that there's nothing at all holy or sacred about it. Once that sort of offense becomes ingrained it is very hard to remove even when one understands that it isn't based on any actual part of reality.

I don't think this offense is without any basis in reality. If someone goes around desecrating Torahs, you would be completely rational to conclude that he probably has an issue with Jews in general and feel threatened. Even if you no longer believe in Judaism, and even if you no longer identify as a Jew, this doesn't mean that Jew-haters will leave you off the hook. You may disown your religious, ethnic, or tribal affiliations, but this doesn't mean others will stop perceiving and treating you as still bound by them. (As many found out the hard way in Germany in the 1930s, to give only the most dramatic example.)

To get back to the question from the original post, this also implies that it may be rational for Muslims to sense hostility and feel threatened by people who go around committing blasphemy according to their norms, and similar for every other religion. However, it still doesn't mean that every feeling of offense is a legitimate response to hostility -- as with any human interaction where interests clash, we see a complicated interplay of signaling, Schellingian strategy, and dancing around focal points looking for ways to move them in a favorable direction. Of course, things also depend on the more explicit relations of power, wealth, status, alliances, etc. between the parties involved.

The error of the original post is to assume that these complex and highly situation-dependent questions can be analyzed with a naive consequentialist approach, but it would also be an error to simply reverse its conclusion. In different situations when offense is felt and expressed, many different scenarios may be taking place.

Comment author: BillyOblivion 16 April 2011 12:01:52AM -1 points [-]

I think psycho's point is that not only would they have to notice it, they'd have to care.

And since (1) We're talking about people already adjudicated guilty, and (2) almost always NOT the party paying the lawyer there is no real incentive for the lawyer to win, just to present a credible (Professional) case. Most convicts have little money, and even if they had a private lawyer for the court case, they gave him most of their money and their now-ex wife spent the rest on booze and pool boys before the divorce, so now he's got a public defender who gets the same check win or lose.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 16 April 2011 04:38:57AM 1 point [-]

And since (1) We're talking about people already adjudicated guilty, and (2) almost always NOT the party paying the lawyer there is no real incentive for the lawyer to win, just to present a credible (Professional) case.

Even if only a small percentage of prisoners seeking parole pay for their own lawyers, that still constitutes a market whose participants have the incentive to figure out the informal intricacies of parole hearings and adapt to them.

In response to comment by Vladimir_M on Book reviews
Comment author: PhilGoetz 16 April 2011 03:44:26AM *  1 point [-]

But in fact, there's going to be plenty of hurting in any realistic human society. Attempts to argue in favor of an ideology because it has a vision for minimizing (or even eliminating) hurting get into all the usual problems with utilitarianism and social engineering schemes, both theoretical and practical

This is an invalid objection. Hurting people is bad; therefore, we want to minimize hurting people. Saying "but you can't bring hurt down to zero" is an invalid objection because it is irrelevant, and a pernicious one, because people use that form of objection routinely to defend their special interests at the cost of social welfare.

Also, referring to the "usual problems with utilitarianism and social engineering" literally says that there are problems with utilitarianism and social engineering (which is true), but falsely implies that (a) utilitarianism has more or even as many problems as any other approach, and (b) that attempting to optimize for something is more like "social engineering" than other alternatives.

In response to comment by PhilGoetz on Book reviews
Comment author: Vladimir_M 16 April 2011 04:26:17AM 2 points [-]

Saying "but you can't bring hurt down to zero" is an invalid objection because it is irrelevant, and a pernicious one, because people use that form of objection routinely to defend their special interests at the cost of social welfare.

You speak of "social welfare" as if it were an objectively measurable property of the real world. In reality, there is no such thing as an objective social welfare function, and ideologically convenient definitions of it are dime a dozen. (And even if such a definition could be agreed upon, there is still almost unlimited leeway to argue over how it could be best maximized, since we lack central planners with godlike powers.)

If we're going to discuss reworking of the social contract, I prefer straight talk about who gets to have power and status, rather than attempts to obscure this question by talking in terms of some supposedly objective, but in fact entirely ghostlike, aggregate utilities at the level of the whole society.

Also, referring to the "usual problems with utilitarianism and social engineering" literally says that there are problems with utilitarianism and social engineering (which is true), but falsely implies that (a) utilitarianism has more or even as many problems as any other approach, and (b) that attempting to optimize for something is more like "social engineering" than other alternatives.

I'd probably word it a bit differently myself, but I think (a) and (b) are in fact true.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 16 April 2011 01:36:31AM *  7 points [-]

This is a really good essay that makes some interesting points. The salmon example is a really clever way of separating some of the issues.

I think you underestimate the slipperiness of the slope in question. If for example, some religious people find that simply saying their religion is false is painful to them in the same way should that be outlawed? Note that this isn't a hypothetical, many countries have anti-blasphemy laws and many European countries have laws against criticizing religion or include such remarks under hate crimes statutes. Consider the case of a certain fellow in England, Harry Taylor, who was forbidden to carry anti-religious literature (and yes, there's no question that his behavior was jerkish but that's not the point). And it just gets worse from there. There are ultra-Orthodox Jews who don't want anyone to say anything negative about their Rebbes.

There seem to be two distinct issues here are also, how should potential victims and offenders act, and whether there should be government regulation. These are related but distinct questions. You start off talking about the first and end by talking about the second.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 16 April 2011 02:26:46AM *  41 points [-]

The salmon example is a really clever way of separating some of the issues.

I think the salmon example is seriously misleading, and in a way that shows a very common pattern of fallacies in consequentialist reasoning. It presents a thought experiment that is contrived to be free of any game-theoretic concerns, and then this example is used as a rhetorical sleight of hand by positing a superficial analogy with a real-life example, in which the game-theoretic concerns are of supreme importance.

Subsequently, these concerns are dismissed with another misleading observation, namely that people rarely fake offense. Well, yes, but the whole point is that people's sincerely felt emotions are very much directed by their brains' game-theoretic assessment of the situation, which may well indicate that a seemingly irrational extreme emotional response is in fact quite rational given the circumstances. Those who ignore this point should read up on their Schelling.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 16 April 2011 02:04:38AM 28 points [-]

Another unpleasant implication of the consequentialist attitude towards offense is that societies should be as homogeneous as possible with regards to people's values and beliefs. (And I'm not talking about Aumann-agreement here!) As the diversity of a society increases, the set of statements and acts that can be done in public without offending one group or another necessarily shrinks, which implies an inevitable trade-off between the pain of offense and the pain of people who have their freedom curtailed and are increasingly forced to walk on eggshells. I'll leave the more concrete implications in the context of today's politics as an exercise for the reader.

It also implies that a certain level of isolation between societies is desirable, in direct opposition to the present trends of globalization. What is regular business in one society may well be extremely offensive in another. So, if there's an intense mutual interest and exchange of information between societies, we get the same problem as within a single diverse society. This can be mitigated only by isolating these societies from each other so that their members are not exposed to the painful sight of the offensive alien customs.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 16 April 2011 01:50:28AM *  98 points [-]

Yvain:

The offender, for eir part, should stop offending as soon as ey realizes that the amount of pain eir actions cause is greater than the amount of annoyance it would take to avoid the offending action, even if ey can't understand why it would cause any pain at all.

In a world where people make decisions according to this principle, one has the incentive to self-modify into a utility monster who feels enormous suffering at any actions of other people one dislikes for whatever reason. And indeed, we can see this happening to some extent: when people take unreasonable offense and create drama to gain concessions, their feelings are usually quite sincere.

You say, "pretending to be offended for personal gain is... less common in reality than it is in people's imaginations." That is indeed true, but only because people have the ability to whip themselves into a very sincere feeling of offense given the incentive to do so. Although sincere, these feelings will usually subside if they realize that nothing's to be gained.

Comment author: Sniffnoy 15 April 2011 06:17:56AM 1 point [-]

Oh, I see. So you're replacing the usual completenes axiom for sets with a completeness schema for predicates. I hadn't considered that. Presumably that works. Never mind. I was interpreting it as actually using sets and thereby introducing either second-order stuff or set theory.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 15 April 2011 11:56:00PM *  4 points [-]

Hm... looking at the literature, it seems like I was wrong after all. (My knowledge of this stuff is very rusty.)

There is indeed something essentially second-order about the completeness axiom. Namely, the second-order quantification over sets of reals uniquely characterizes real numbers in a way that is impossible for any first-order theory, because it eliminates countable models, which every first-order theory with countably many axioms must have as per Loewenheim-Skolem. So turning the second-order completeness axiom into a first-order axiom schema does change things.

Reading a bit further about the decision procedures for the theory of real numbers, I notice that all these sources use a different axiomatization that replaces the completeness axiom with two axioms, namely one stating that every non-negative number has a square root and a schema stating that every polynomial of odd degree has a zero. Now, the question is: is this theory equivalent to the first-order one in which the second-order completeness axiom is replaced by a first-order schema as I imagined? If not, then what I wrote above is completely wrong. I'll have to read more about this.

Edit: According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on second-order logic:

Suppose that, by analogy, we start from our second-order axiomatization of the ordered field of real numbers, and replace the second-order least-upper-bound axiom by the corresponding schema. The result is an infinite set of first-order axioms, assuring that any definable set that is non-empty and bounded has a least upper bound. The models of this are called real-closed ordered fields.

The same term "real-closed ordered fields" is used in the literature for the above mentioned axiomatization that replaces the second-order completeness axiom with the square-root axiom and the odd-order polynomial zero axiom schema. This would suggest that they are equivalent after all. However, I was unable to find a clear and explicit statement confirming this anywhere, which I find puzzling.

Comment author: Psychohistorian 15 April 2011 07:37:54PM *  6 points [-]

"But the market should fix everything!" is something you only get to say when you actually have a decent notion of the market in question. It is apparent that you do not, at least with respect to lawyers doing parole hearings (which may often not involve lawyers in the States).

There is no money to be made here. Most of these attorneys are being paid by the state. The ones that are not do not generally disclose their past records in an indexed, searchable database. There is no scalability - there's a finite number of after-meal time slots. There are no (or virtually no) large law firms working in this field. Lawyers as a group are not scientists and are generally relatively innumerate. I could probably go on for pages on how lawyer's interests really aren't that closely aligned with positive outcomes; a thousand times more so when their clients aren't the ones paying the bill.

It's one thing to say, "But if you figured this out, you could dominate the market!" It's another thing to articulate how to actually dominate the market with this knowledge. If you can't do that, the EMH doesn't really do much for you.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 15 April 2011 08:03:51PM *  3 points [-]

EDIT: You've edited your comment substantially since the time I posted this reply, so now it looks like I'm writing with disregard to your arguments, and I'm thus editing my reply too.

I certainly don't have an idealized view of the legal system in general, or criminal defense lawyers in particular -- on the contrary. If there really is a complete disconnect between the lawyers' incentives and the destiny of their clients, then I can imagine that they wouldn't notice correlations like these (though I'd still find it implausible, given the purported magnitude of the effect).

However, if such incentives do exist, then I find it absurdly implausible that lawyers would be unable to figure out these correlations and take advantage of them. (Even if they're theoretically unable to influence the scheduling, no bureaucratic system is immune to manipulation if there are smart and determined people with the right incentives.) As innumerate as they might be, there's no way lawyers could be so incompetent that a few social scientists could just show up and point out that they've been doing their job suboptimally because they're unable to put two and two together about such a simple issue.

On the whole, when you argue that the interests of lawyers and their clients are misaligned, I find that a plausible claim. But when you argue that they'd be unable to figure this out even if they had the incentive, that's a far more extreme and implausible assertion.

Comment author: Psychohistorian 15 April 2011 07:12:44PM 5 points [-]

Very easily. You wouldn't see a lot of data points, and you wouldn't be looking for it. You'd have on parole hearing maybe every few weeks. It'd be extremely hard to piece together that the time of day had a significant effect on the outcome, especially when you want credit for good results (and generally want to blame the judge for bad results). You probably don't have many lawyers in a position to observe enough parole hearings to really form a suspicion.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 15 April 2011 07:23:11PM 6 points [-]

I can imagine that individuals might be unable to spot the correlation. But if the lawyering industry is competitive to any significant degree, it would be strikingly implausible if none of the competitors ever stumbled onto it and proceeded to take advantage of it. Especially considering that larger law firms, and even individual lawyers with long experience, could easily data-mine their past record for such correlations. Are they all really too stupid to think of that?

Whenever social scientists -- a phrase I'm always tempted to put into scare quotes -- claim that they've found something that indicates unexploited profit opportunities if true, it is likely that they're either talking nonsense or that they've reinvented some wheel that is however infeasible or forbidden to use in practice (at least openly) for other reasons. Otherwise, it would violate the weak efficient markets hypothesis, in which I certainly have far more confidence than in "social science."

Comment author: JoshuaZ 14 April 2011 08:27:51PM 15 points [-]

The study states that no one in the profession they talked to (judges or lawyers) expected this bias. So such a deliberate scheduling explanation seems unlikely.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 15 April 2011 05:11:29PM 5 points [-]

How likely is it that lawyers never noticed an effect of such magnitude? I find that rather implausible, assuming that there is some minimal competitiveness in the profession.

Comment author: Sniffnoy 15 April 2011 03:41:10AM *  4 points [-]

It depends on the theory you're working with. The set of real numbers can be axiomatized using thirteen axioms that merely say that it's a totally ordered field whose every non-empty subset has a least upper bound. These 13 axioms allow you to prove a whole lot of interesting stuff about real numbers, and yet they constitute a decidable theory, though with wildly intractable complexity. However, this theory makes it impossible to formulate a predicate saying "x is an integer" (unless you move to second-order logic).

Technical nitpicking - this doesn't quite make sense; one of the axioms needed to characterize R is the existence of least upper bounds, which if you're only talking about R rather than set theory is second order. Of course the resulting first-order theory can't distinguish integers, but let's note that without set theory you have to allow second-order logic to see just what this first-order theory consists of.

Of course, at a first-order level, R is indistinguishable from any real closed field, so you could do a true first-order axiomatization that way.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 15 April 2011 06:00:10AM *  1 point [-]

Yes, of course, barring second-order logic, the "13 axioms" are in fact twelve plus a countably infinite set of axioms generated by the completeness axiom scheme, just like the Peano axiom of induction is in fact an axiom scheme generating an infinite set of axioms.

However, I'm not sure I understand what you mean when you say that "without set theory you have to allow second-order logic to see just what this first-order theory consists of." The theory is meant to have the set of real numbers as its universe of discourse, and sets of real numbers correspond to its formulas with one free variable, for which you instantiate the custom completeness axioms in proofs as necessary. What exactly do you need set theory or second-order logic for?

(Also, on a more careful reading, I was a bit loose with terminology in my earlier comment. In first-order logic, you cannot "define predicates," since their number is fixed in the given language. What I meant is constructing a formula N(x) with one free variable that is satisfied by, and only by, natural numbers.)

In response to comment by [deleted] on Gödel and Bayes: quick question
Comment author: prase 14 April 2011 01:11:09PM 1 point [-]

Interesting. Does it mean that e.g. a proposition "there is an integer x which solves the equation exp x=57.24" can't be formulated inside a theory of real numbers because there is no way how to encode the word "integer"? Or is the problem more subtle?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 15 April 2011 03:16:19AM *  4 points [-]

It depends on the theory you're working with. The set of real numbers can be axiomatized using thirteen axioms that merely say that it's a totally ordered field whose every non-empty subset has a least upper bound. These 13 axioms allow you to prove a whole lot of interesting stuff about real numbers, and yet they constitute a decidable theory, though with wildly intractable complexity. However, this theory makes it impossible to construct a formula saying "x is an integer" (unless you move to second-order logic).

On the other hand, you can start with set theory, use it to construct natural numbers (i.e. define a set and a relation which can be proven to satisfy the Peano axioms), and then use that to construct a set that can be shown to satisfy the thirteen real-number axioms. This can be done in several ways, for example via Dedekind cuts (in which case the reals are defined as partitions of the set of rational numbers, which are in turn equivalence classes of pairs of integers, which are themselves equivalence classes of pairs of natural numbers). Here, of course, you can talk about natural numbers and integers, but you've been working all along in set theory, which is undecidable.

(More precisely, when you construct real numbers in set theory, you end up with multiple isomorphic sets satisfying Peano axioms: the "original" natural numbers, and the subsets of the subsequently defined integers, rationals, and reals that are isomorphic to them. However, at each step, you can construct formulas that will distinguish the subsets corresponding to the previously defined sets in the newly constructed one.)

So, basically, expressing propositions of the sort "there exists x such that x is an integer and P(x)" is possible with real numbers constructed in the undecidable set theory, but it's not possible in the decidable theory of real numbers based on the 13 axioms.

In response to comment by lukeprog on Book reviews
Comment author: PhilGoetz 14 April 2011 10:45:27PM *  6 points [-]

I agree with what you wrote; but I don't think you singled out what's going wrong in The Moral Landscape.

Sam Harris has an argument against absolute moral relativism. There really are absolute moral relativists out there, who say that any moral code is as good as any other, and no one should think poorly of Jeffrey Dahmer because he likes to murder men and screw their corpses. I think there are even people reading LW who think they think that. And Sam says, That kind of talk should not be admitted into the discussion. If you can't pass the bar of saying "hurting people is bad", then you shouldn't be allowed to help work out the social contract. We should all be able to agree that hurting people is bad.

Furthermore, the people who are hurting other people badly and systematically, really do believe that hurting people is bad; they just have demonstrably false beliefs, religious or political, that cause them to think that their actions are helping people in the long run. This is largely true, though I don't think Sam understands the mentality of believers as much as he thinks he does.

So, much pain and suffering could be prevented if we said, Hey, you say we need to do X because Y, so let's figure out whether Y is true... with SCIENCE!

The problem is, this is not enough material to write a book. So Harris makes his claim much more sweeping than it is. He throws people who say that different societies can have different values in together with absolute relativists, to make it seem like Harris is a lone voice crying in the wilderness. He argues, erroneously, that his one simple principle is enough to build a moral code upon. When I got to the part where Harris takes the correct objection that minimizing total harm may be unjust - and instead of agreeing, argues that minimizing total harm will happily work out to be perfectly just because deep inside everyone is unselfish and wants other people to be happy - I gave up and stopped reading.

In response to comment by PhilGoetz on Book reviews
Comment author: Vladimir_M 14 April 2011 11:10:36PM *  -1 points [-]

Sam Harris has an argument against absolute moral relativism. There really are absolute moral relativists out there, who say that any moral code is as good as any other, and no one should think poorly of Jeffrey Dahmer because he likes to murder men and screw their corpses.

The way you put it obscures one extremely important difference, namely that between individuals who behave in ways that could never be a general norm in a stable and functional society and societies that are functional and stable even though their norms are extremely different from ours. As far as I see, the supposed relativists who wish to excuse Jeffrey Dahmer are just a conveniently ridiculous strawman for cultural relativism that applies only to other functional and stable societies distant in space or time, which is much more difficult (if at all possible) to refute.

Now you say:

If you can't pass the bar of saying "hurting people is bad", then you shouldn't be allowed to help work out the social contract. We should all be able to agree that hurting people is bad.

But in fact, there's going to be plenty of hurting in any realistic human society. Attempts to argue in favor of an ideology because it has a vision for minimizing (or even eliminating) hurting get into all the usual problems with utilitarianism and social engineering schemes, both theoretical and practical.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 14 April 2011 09:04:02PM 0 points [-]

Yes, this is a plausible interpretation. It seems that the quote is just very ambiguous about what was intended. It is functioning more as an inkblot for us than anything else (and yes, I know that test actually doesn't work but the point should be clear).

In response to comment by JoshuaZ on Arational quotes
Comment author: Vladimir_M 14 April 2011 09:13:48PM 2 points [-]

I looked for the context of the quote, and it was an impromptu answer to a question from the audience. Clearly, on such occasions it's hard to expect anything else from a professional politician.

Comment author: [deleted] 14 April 2011 06:41:10PM 4 points [-]

I am baffled as to what elements of irrationality you (and those who upvoted the comment) find in it

So you are baffled by both quotes.

I offer the hypothesis that the function of the repetition of these quotes down the years has been to signal tribal affiliation. This being the case, the fact that outsiders are baffled may be a strength, because this reveals them as non-tribe-members. The quotes then serve a function similar to that of an inside joke.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Arational quotes
Comment author: Vladimir_M 14 April 2011 09:06:14PM *  2 points [-]

I offer the hypothesis that the function of the repetition of these quotes down the years has been to signal tribal affiliation.

Your hypothesis seems clearly true to me, and I have thought of it myself. However, with these quotes, I was really unable to figure out which exact bad-faith misinterpretation was being suggested. (Admittedly, as I note in my response to Joshua Z., my own original interpretation of the Bush quote may have been too favorable, though even in that case, it still requires a hostile over-stretching to make the quote a remarkable exhibit of irrationality.)

Comment author: JoshuaZ 14 April 2011 05:27:00PM 0 points [-]

It seems that an implicit part of the quote is that having certainty is a good thing because it makes decisions easier even when they might be difficult. I am however worried by the prevalence of quotes (granted only two right now) of quotes from a specific end of the political spectrum. This is a thread that could easily go into mind-killing territory.

In response to comment by JoshuaZ on Arational quotes
Comment author: Vladimir_M 14 April 2011 09:01:51PM *  4 points [-]

Hm... it is possible that my English comprehension has failed me.

I interpreted the phrase "which way the wind is blowing" to mean the prevailing fashion and majority opinion, so that the quote would contrast making decisions based on principled conviction with bowing down to momentary fashion and popular pressure. (This phrase, i.e. its literal translation, is commonly used in this sense in my native language.) However, looking it up, now I see that this is not its usual meaning in English, though such meaning is attested to some degree.

So the question is, did Bush actually use the phrase "which way the wind is blowing" with this somewhat unusual meaning? It's hard for me to tell. (Even if this meaning is unusual or archaic, I can think of at least one other occasion when Bush was derided by many people for using what they thought was a bizarrely incorrect word, but the joke was in fact on them and their ignorance, since the word is nowadays unusual and archaic, but perfectly standard and well-attested. I have in mind the occasion when he referred to "Grecians.")

In any case, even if Bush didn't have this meaning in mind, the quote can be interpreted as making the assertion that in matters of politics firm and consistent principles provide a better guide for action than frantic and futile attempts to analyze each particular situation better than is actually possible, which leads to overthinking and indecisiveness. Whether or not one agrees with this, it's certainly not something deserving of being included into a chrestomathy of human irrationality.

Comment author: ArisKatsaris 14 April 2011 01:06:16PM 1 point [-]

If the quote instead concluded with "The Marines verifiably know they do make a difference." there wouldn't be much wrong with it, other than what Nancy said below -- (one should strive for a positive difference, not just a difference).

But as it stands the quote just says the Marines no longer wonder about this, and presents it for a good thing. A surgical removal of all independent thought and/or all concepts of morality would just as easily lead to the same result. "Do not wonder about things, just trust your leaders." Pfft.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 14 April 2011 05:33:54PM *  11 points [-]

You're giving the quote a bizarre and implausible reading. Of course that Reagan (if he really said this) meant it to imply that a marine does make a difference, and a positive one. Any normal person interpreting the quote in good faith would make that assumption, whether or not they agree with the premise.

(Besides, googling for the source of this quote, I can't find any reference to a concrete time and place where it was uttered, nor to the rest of the speech or dialog whose part it was. This strongly suggests that it might be apocryphal, though of course I can't conclude this with certainty.)

In response to Arational quotes
Comment author: nhamann 14 April 2011 04:04:06AM 5 points [-]

Is it hard to make decisions as president? Not really. If you know what you believe, decisions come pretty easy. If you’re one of these types of people that are always trying to figure out which way the wind is blowing, decision making can be difficult.

-- George W. Bush

In response to comment by nhamann on Arational quotes
Comment author: Vladimir_M 14 April 2011 05:21:57PM *  8 points [-]

This quote sounds somewhat trite, but its message is straightforward, clear, and coherent, and while one may disagree with the opinion it expresses, it is at the very least plausible prima facie. As with the Regan quote in the earlier comment, I am baffled as to what elements of irrationality you (and those who upvoted the comment) find in it, let alone what makes it so remarkable that it's worth quoting years after it was said.

In response to Arational quotes
Comment author: Dr_Manhattan 14 April 2011 01:00:42AM 3 points [-]

Saw this hanging in someone''s office; I thought it was pernicious enough to inspire this thread.

"Some people spend an entire lifetime wondering if they made a difference in the world. But, the Marines don't have that problem. Ronald Reagan"

Comment author: Vladimir_M 14 April 2011 06:43:33AM *  9 points [-]

I'm honestly lost as to what is supposed to be pernicious about this quote, or what makes it remarkable enough to be cited and upvoted.

Comment author: steven0461 13 April 2011 11:52:25PM 4 points [-]

It's only preference utilitarianism that aggregates individual vN-M utility functions. Other kinds of utilitarianism can use other measures of quality of life, such as pleasure minus pain; these measures have their own difficulties, but they don't have this particular difficulty.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 14 April 2011 06:38:27AM *  3 points [-]

You're right, it's not true that all sorts of utilitarianism require aggregation of vN-M utility functions. That was an imprecise statement on my part. However, as far as I can tell, any sort of utilitarianism requires comparing, adding, or averaging of some measure of utility across individuals, and I'm not aware of any such measure for which this is more meaningful than for the vN-M utility functions. (If you know of any examples, I'd be curious to hear them.)

In response to Arational quotes
Comment author: steven0461 14 April 2011 04:02:18AM 0 points [-]

I don't understand the context of the first quote. What does he want people to invert and in what circumstances?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 14 April 2011 06:31:01AM *  6 points [-]

The context is algebra, and I think the message is that you can improve your insight by thinking in terms of reciprocal values of various quantities that you normally use. (So, for example, you may get to understand certain problems in mechanics better if you think in terms of time elapsed per distance traveled rather than speed.)

Comment author: TimFreeman 13 April 2011 01:35:38AM *  0 points [-]

Individual vN-M utility functions therefore cannot be compared, aggregated, or averaged across individuals, which is what any flavor of utilitarianism requires one way or another (and which invariably leads into nonsense, in my opinion).

Estimates of individual utility functions can be averaged, if you do it right, so far as I can tell. A possible estimate of everybody's utility is a computable function that given a person id and the person's circumstances, returns a rational number in the interval [0,1]. Discard the computable functions inconsistent with observed behavior of people. Average over all remaining possibilities weighing by the universal prior, thus giving you an estimated utility for each person in the range [0, 1]. We're estimating utilities for humans, not arbitrary hypothetical creatures, so there's an approximate universal minimum utility (torturing you and everyone you care about to death) and an approximate maximum utility (you get everything you want). We're estimating everybody's utility with one function, so an estimate that says that I don't like to be tortured will be simpler than one that doesn't even if I have never been tortured, because other people have attempted to avoid torture.

Does that proposal make sense? (I'm concerned that I may have been too brief.)

Does anything obvious break if you average these across humans?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 13 April 2011 10:27:29PM *  4 points [-]

As far as I see, your proposal is well-defined and consistent. However, even if we ignore all the intractable problems with translating it into any practical answers about concrete problems (of which I'm sure you're aware), this is still only one possible way to aggregate and compare utilities interpersonally, with no clear reason why you would use it instead of some other one that would favor and disfavor different groups and individuals.

Comment author: Ian_Ryan 13 April 2011 04:17:24AM *  0 points [-]

However, there are thousands of human languages, which have all been changing their pronunciation for (at least) tens of thousands of years in all kinds of ways, and they keep changing as we speak. If such a happy fixed point existed, don't you think that some of them would have already hit it by now?

No, I don't. Evolution is always a hack of what came before it, whereas scrapping the whole thing and starting from scratch doesn't suffer from that problem. I don't need to hack an existing structure; I can build exactly what I want right now.

Here's an excellent example of this general point: Self-segregating morphology. That's the language construction term for a sound system where the divisions between all the components (sentences, prefixes, roots, suffixes, and so on) are immediately obvious and unambiguous. Without understanding anything about the speech, you know the syntactical structure.

That's a pretty cool feature, right? It's easy to build that into an artificial language, and it certainly makes everything easier. It would be an important part of having a stable sound system. The words wouldn't interfere with each other, because they would be unambiguously started and terminated within a sound system where the end of every word can run smoothly against the start of any other word. If I were trying to make a stable sound system, the first thing that I would do is make the morphology self-segregating.

But if a self-segregating morphology is such a happy point, why hasn't any natural language come to that point? Well, that should be pretty obvious. No hack could transform a whole language into a having a self-segregating morphology. Or at least I don't know of such a hack. But even then, it's trivially easy to make one if you start from scratch! Don't you accept the idea that some things are easier to design than evolve (because perhaps the hacking process doesn't have an obvious way to be useful throughout every step to get to the specific endpoint)?

The exact mechanisms of phonetic change are still unclear, but a whole mountain of evidence indicates that it's an inevitable process.

That whole mountain of evidence concerns natural languages with irregular sound systems. A self-segregating morphology that flows super well would be a whole different animal.

Look at it this way: the fundamental question is whether your artificial language will use the capabilities of the human natural language hardware. If yes, then it will have to change to be compatible with this hardware, and will subsequently share all the essential properties of natural languages (which are by definition those that are compatible with this hardware, and whose subset happens to be spoken around the world). If not, then you'll get a formalism that must be handled by the general computational circuits in the human brain, which means that its use will be very slow, difficult, and error-prone for humans, just like with programming languages and math formulas.

Per my points above, I still don't see why using the capabilities of the natural language hardware would lead to it changing in all sorts of unpredictable ways, especially if it's not used for anything but trying to reproduce your thought in their head, and if it's not used by anybody but a specific group of people with a specific purpose in mind. I still imagine an engine well-built to drive its own evolution in a useful way, and avoid becoming an irregular mess.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 13 April 2011 07:05:57AM *  1 point [-]

That whole mountain of evidence concerns natural languages with irregular sound systems. A self-segregating morphology that flows super well would be a whole different animal.

How do you know that? To support this claim, you need a model that predicts the actually occurring sound changes in natural languages, and also that sound changes would not occur in a language with self-segregating morphology. Do you have such a model? If you do, I'd be tremendously curious to see it.

Comment author: komponisto 13 April 2011 05:46:09AM 2 points [-]

From my experience with learning several foreign languages, morphological irregularities look scary in the beginning, but they completely pale in comparison with the complexity and irregularity of syntax and semantics.

I agree. However, making something look less scary in the beginning still constitutes an improvement from a pedagogical point of view. The more quickly you can learn the basic morphology and lexicon, the sooner you can begin the process of intuiting the higher-level rules and social conventions that govern larger units of discourse.

However, the whole point is that in order to speak in a way that will sound natural and grammatical to fluent speakers, you have to internalize all those incredibly complicated points of syntax and semantics, which have developed naturally with time.

Due to a large amount of basic structure common to all human language, it's usually not that hard to learn how to sound grammatical. The difficult part of acquiring a new language is learning how to sound idiomatic. And this basically amounts to learning a new set of social conventions. So there may not be much that language-planning per se can do to facilitate this aspect of language-learning -- which may be a large part of your point. But I would emphasize that the issue here is more sociological than linguistic: it isn't that the structure of the human language apparatus prevents us from creating languages that are easier to learn than existing natural languages -- after all, existing languages are not optimized for ease of learning, especially as second languages. It's just that constructing a grammar is not the same as constructing the conventions and norms of a speech community, and the latter may be a more difficult task.

(Even when it comes to inflectional morphology, assuming a lively community of Esperanto speakers persists into the future, how long do you think it will take before common contractions start grammaticalizing into rudimentary irregular inflections?)

This kind of drift will presumably happen given enough time, but it's worth noting that (for obvious reasons) Esperantists tend to be more disciplined about maintaining the integrity of the language than is typical among speakers of most languages, and they've been pretty successful so far.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 13 April 2011 06:52:33AM *  4 points [-]

I agree. However, making something look less scary in the beginning still constitutes an improvement from a pedagogical point of view. The more quickly you can learn the basic morphology and lexicon, the sooner you can begin the process of intuiting the higher-level rules and social conventions that govern larger units of discourse.

That is true. One of my pet theories is that at beginner and intermediate levels, simple inflectional morphology fools people into overestimating how good they are, which gives them more courage and confidence to speak actively, and thus helps them improve with time. With more synthetic languages, people are more conscious of how broken their speech is, so they're more afraid and hesitant. But if you somehow manage to eliminate the fear, the advantage of analytic languages disappears.

Due to a large amount of basic structure common to all human language, it's usually not that hard to learn how to sound grammatical. The difficult part of acquiring a new language is learning how to sound idiomatic.

Here I disagree. Even after you learn to sound idiomatic in a foreign language, there will still be some impossibly convoluted issues of grammar (usually syntax) where you'll occasionally make mistakes that make any native speaker cringe at how ungrammatical your utterance is. For example, the definite article and choice of prepositions in English are in this category. Another example are the already mentioned Slavic verbal aspects. (Getting them wrong sounds really awful, but it's almost impossible for non-native speakers, even very proficient ones, to get them right consistently. Gallons of ink have been spent trying to formulate clear and complete rules, without much success.)

I don't know if any work has been done to analyze these issues from an evolutionary perspective, but it seems pretty clear to me that the human brain has an in-built functionality that recognizes even the slightest flaws in pronunciation and grammar characteristic of foreigners and raises a red flag. (This generalizes to all sorts of culture-specific behaviors, of course, including how idiomatic one's speech is.) I strongly suspect that the language of any community, even if it starts as a constructed language optimized for ease of learning by outsiders, will soon naturally develop these shibboleth-generating properties. (These are also important when it comes to different sociolects and registers within a community, of course.)

Comment author: Nisan 13 April 2011 12:34:18AM 7 points [-]

It's pretty ridiculous that SIAI thinks it's a good idea to use Lojban to teach programs about ethics. The distinctive feature of Lojban is that it's easy to parse; but nowadays we have kinda decent natural language parsers. I used a constructed language to communicate with my class project in college, but only because I didn't want to bother with figuring out how to use an English parser, and because I knew no one but me would ever talk to it.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 13 April 2011 04:06:17AM *  6 points [-]

nowadays we have kinda decent natural language parsers.

In my opinion, these still have a long way to go. (Panel #3 is my personal favorite.)

Comment author: Ian_Ryan 13 April 2011 03:18:24AM *  3 points [-]

If you build an artificial word language, you could make it in such a way that it would drive its own evolution in a useful way. A few examples:

  • If you make a rule available to derive a word easily, it would be less likely that the user would coin a new one.
  • If you also build a few other languages with a similar sound structure, you could make it super easy to coin new words without messing up the sound system.
  • If you make the sound system flow well enough, it would be unlikely that anybody would truncate the words to make it easier to pronounce or whatever.

I don't understand how you could dismiss it out of hand that you could build a language that wouldn't lose its superior qualities. There are a ton of different ways to make the engine defend itself in that regard. People mess with the English sound system only to make it flow better, and there's no reason why you couldn't just make an artificial language which already flows well enough.

Also, I'm not gonna try to convert the masses to my artificial language. In normal life, we spend a lot of our time using English to try to do something other than get the other person to think the same thought. We try to impress people, we try to get people to get us a glass of water, etc. I'm not interested in building a language for that kind of communication. All I'm interested in is building a language for what we try to do here on LW: reproduce our thought process in the other person's head.

But what that means is that the "wild" needn't be so wild. If the only people who use the artificial language are 1,000 people like you and me, I don't see why we couldn't retain its superior structure. I don't see why I would take a perfectly good syntax and start messing with it. It would be specialized for one purpose: reproducing one's thoughts in another's head, especially for deep philosophical issues. We would probably use English in a lot of our posts! We would probably use a mix of English and the artificial language.

My response ("how are you so sure of all that stuff") probably wasn't very constructive, so I apologize. Perhaps I should have asked for an example of an artificial language that transformed into an irregular natural one. Since you probably would have mentioned Esperanto, I'll respond to that. Basically, Esperanto was a partially regularized mix and match of a bunch of different natural language components. I have no interest in building a language like that.

Languages like Esperanto are still in the "natural language paradigm"; they're basically just like idealized natural languages. But I have a different idea. If I build an artificial word language, its syntax won't resemble any natural language that you've seen. At least not in that way. Actually, it would probably be more to the point to simply say that Esperanto was built for a much different reason. It's a mix and match of a bunch of natural language components, and people use it like they use a natural language. It's not surprising that it lost some of its regularity.

I'm getting pretty messy in this post, but I simply don't have a concise response to this topic. Everywhere I go, people seem to have that same idea about artificial language. They say that we're built for natural language, and either artificial language is impossible, or it would transform into natural language. I really just don't know where people get that idea. How could we conceive of and build an artificial language, but at the same time be incapable of using it? That seems like a totally bizarre idea. Maybe I don't understand it or something.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 13 April 2011 03:56:04AM 3 points [-]

If you plan to construct a language akin to programming languages or mathematical formulas, i.e. one that is fully specified by a formal grammar and requires slow and painstaking effort for humans to write or decode, then yes, clearly you can freeze it as an unchangeable standard. (Though of course, devising such a language that is capable of expressing something more general is a Herculean task, which I frankly don't consider feasible given the present state of knowledge.)

On the other hand, if you're constructing a language that will be spoken by humans fluently and easily, there is no way you can prevent it from changing in all sorts of unpredictable ways. For example, you write:

People mess with the English sound system only to make it flow better, and there's no reason why you couldn't just make an artificial language which already flows well enough.

However, there are thousands of human languages, which have all been changing their pronunciation for (at least) tens of thousands of years in all kinds of ways, and they keep changing as we speak. If such a happy fixed point existed, don't you think that some of them would have already hit it by now? The exact mechanisms of phonetic change are still unclear, but a whole mountain of evidence indicates that it's an inevitable process. Similar could be said about syntax, and pretty much any other aspect of grammar.

Look at it this way: the fundamental question is whether your artificial language will use the capabilities of the human natural language hardware. If yes, then it will have to change to be compatible with this hardware, and will subsequently share all the essential properties of natural languages (which are by definition those that are compatible with this hardware, and whose subset happens to be spoken around the world). If not, then you'll get a formalism that must be handled by the general computational circuits in the human brain, which means that its use will be very slow, difficult, and error-prone for humans, just like with programming languages and math formulas.

Comment author: komponisto 13 April 2011 02:49:22AM 3 points [-]

This contains a kernel of truth, but is also highly misleading in some important respects. Esperanto is extraordinarily simple and regular; the famous Sixteen Rules, while obviously not a complete description of the grammar of the language, still hold today as much as they did in 1887. To an uninformed reader, your comment may imply that Esperanto has perhaps since then evolved the same kind of morphological irregularities that we find in "natural" languages, but this isn't the case. There are no irregular inflections (e.g. verb conjugations or noun declensions), and the regular ones are simple indeed by comparison with many other languages. This significantly cuts down on the amount of rote memorization required to attain a working command of the language; and this is without mentioning the freedom in word-building that is allowed by the system of compounds and affixes.

What is true is that there are many linguistic features of Esperanto that aren't systematically standardized. But these are largely the kinds of features that only linguists tend to think about explicitly; L.L. Zamenhof, the creator of Esperanto, was a 19th-century oculist and amateur philologist, not a 20th-century academic linguist. As a result, he simply didn't think to invent things like a systematic phonology or register conventions for Esperanto; and so these things have been developed by speakers of the language over time, in the way they naturally do among humans. The thick grammar books you speak of are no doubt descriptions of such features. But these aren't the kind of books people use to learn any language, Esperanto included; and if you compare actual pedagogical books on Esperanto to those on "natural" languages, you will find that they are simpler.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 13 April 2011 03:21:34AM *  4 points [-]

To an uninformed reader, your comment may imply that Esperanto has perhaps since then evolved the same kind of morphological irregularities that we find in "natural" languages, but this isn't the case.

From my experience with learning several foreign languages, morphological irregularities look scary in the beginning, but they completely pale in comparison with the complexity and irregularity of syntax and semantics. There are many natural languages with very little morphological complexity, but these aren't any easier to learn to speak like a native. (On the other hand, for example, Slavic languages have very complicated and irregular inflectional morphology, but you'll learn to recite all the conjugations and declensions back and forth sooner than you'll figure out how to choose between the verbal aspects even approximately right.)

The thick grammar books you speak of are no doubt descriptions of such features. But these aren't the kind of books people use to learn any language, Esperanto included; and if you compare actual pedagogical books on Esperanto to those on "natural" languages, you will find that they are simpler.

However, the whole point is that in order to speak in a way that will sound natural and grammatical to fluent speakers, you have to internalize all those incredibly complicated points of syntax and semantics, which have developed naturally with time. Of course that nobody except linguists thinks about these rules explicitly, but fluent speakers judge instinctively whether a given utterance is grammatical based on them (and the linguist's challenge is in fact to reverse-engineer these intuitions into explicit rules).

(Even when it comes to inflectional morphology, assuming a lively community of Esperanto speakers persists into the future, how long do you think it will take before common contractions start grammaticalizing into rudimentary irregular inflections?)

Comment author: Ian_Ryan 13 April 2011 02:17:30AM *  0 points [-]

How are you so sure of all that stuff?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 13 April 2011 02:48:01AM 2 points [-]

If you specify in more detail which parts of what I wrote you dispute, I can provide a more detailed argument.

As the simplest and most succinct argument against artificial languages with allegedly superior properties, I would make the observation that human languages change with time and ask: what makes you think that your artificial language won't also undergo change, or that the change will not be such that it destroys these superior properties?

Comment author: curiousepic 13 April 2011 01:49:00AM 2 points [-]

I don't propose a widely-used language, only a highly specialized one created to work on FAI, and/or dissolving "philosophical" issues, essentially.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 13 April 2011 02:06:29AM *  2 points [-]

As far as I see, the closest thing to what you propose is mathematical notation (and other sorts of formal scientific notation). Sure, if you can figure out a more useful and convenient notation for some concrete problem, more power to you. However, at least judging by the historical experience, to do that you need some novel insight that motivates the introduction of new notation. Doing things the opposite way, i.e. trying to purify and improve your language in some general way hoping that this will open or at least facilitate new insight, is unlikely to lead you anywhere.

Comment author: Ian_Ryan 13 April 2011 12:33:38AM *  0 points [-]

For a few years now, I've been working on a project to build an artificial language. I strongly suspect that the future of the kind of communication that goes on here will belong to an artificial language. English didn't evolve for people like us. For our purpose, it's a cumbersome piece of shit, rife with a bunch of fallacies built directly into its engine. And I assume it's the same way with all the other ones. For us, they're sick to the core.

But I should stress that I don't think the future will belong to any kind of word language. English is a word language, Lojban is a word language, etc. Or at least I don't think the whole future will belong to one. We must free ourselves from the word paradigm. When somebody says "language", most people think words. But why? Why not think pictures? Why not diagrams? I think there's a lot of potential in the idea of building a visual language. An artificial visual language. That's one thing I'm working on.

Anyway, for the sake of your rationality, there's a lot at stake here. A bad language doesn't just fail to properly communicate to other people; it systematically corrupts its user. How often do you pick up where you left off in a thought process by remembering a bunch of words? All day every day? Maybe your motto is to work to "improve your rationality"? Perhaps you write down your thoughts so you can remember them later? And so on. It's not just other people who can misinterpret what you say; it's also your future self who can misinterpret what you present self says. That's how everybody comes to believe such crazy stuff. Their later selves systematically misinterpret their sooner selves. They believe what they hear, but they hear not what they meant to say.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 13 April 2011 01:45:39AM *  6 points [-]

For a few years now, I've been working on a project to build an artificial language.

I don't want to sound disrespectful towards your efforts, but to be blunt, artificial languages intended for communication between people are a complete waste of time. The reason is that human language ability is based on highly specialized hardware with a huge number of peculiarities and constraints. There is a very large space for variability within those, of course, as is evident from the great differences between languages, but any language that satisfies them has roughly the same level of "problematic" features, such as irregular and complicated grammar, semantic ambiguities, literal meaning superseded by pragmatics in complicated and seemingly arbitrary ways, etc., etc.

Now, another critical property of human languages is that they change with time. Usually this change is very slow, but if people are forced to communicate in a language that violates the natural language constraints in some way, that language will quickly and spontaneously change into a new natural language that fits them. This is why attempts to communicate in regularized artificial languages are doomed, because a spontaneous, unconscious, and irresistible process will soon turn the regular artificial language into a messy natural one.

Of course, it does make sense to devise artificial languages for communication between humans and non-human entities, as evidenced by computer programming languages or standardized dog commands. However, as long as they have the same brain hardware, humans are stuck with the same old natural languages for talking to each other.

Comment author: erratio 12 April 2011 10:45:53PM 9 points [-]

It really bothers me when I see proposals to 'fix' language because as far as I'm concerned, natural languages are well-adapted to their environment.

  • The purpose of language, insofar as it has a specific purpose, is to get other people to do things. To get you to think of a concept the same way I do, to make you feel a specific emotion, to induce you to make me a sandwich, or whatever.

  • People's brains don't operate using strict logic. We're extremely good at pattern matching from noisy and ambiguous data, in a way that programs have yet to approach. eg. Google's probabilistic search correction does well at guessing what you meant to type when you produce an ambiguous or malformed string, but it can't infer that since all your searches in the last few minutes were all clustered around the topic of clinical psychology, your current search term of "hysterical" is probably meant to refer to the old psychiatric concept and not the modern usage of hysterical = funny. A human would have much less trouble working that out because they have a mental model of the current conversation that indicates that the technical definition of the word is relevant.

  • This is why it's not only ok, but in fact good for language to have a lot of built-in ambiguity - given the hardware that it runs on, it's much more efficient for me to rattle off an ambiguous sentence whose meaning is made clear through context, than it is for me to construct a sentence which is redundantly unambiguous due to our shared environment. Furthermore, my communicating in a sentence which is redundantly unambiguous carries the connotation that I have a low opinion of your ability to understand me, otherwise why would I put myself out so much to encode my meaning?

  • Lojban isn't nearly as unambiguous and logical as its creators wanted it to be. While it's true that its syntax is computer-readable, there is little to no improvement on the semantic level. And the pragmatic level of language is completely language-independent - there is always going to be a way to be unnecessarily vague, to be sarcastic, to misdirect, and so on, because those devices allow us to communicate nuances about our attitudes towards the subject of conversation and signal various personal traits in a way that straightforward communication doesn't support. So despite Lojban having the capacity to be clearer than most natural language, that's not how it will be used conversationally by any fluent speakers. And the same goes for any future constructed languages.

  • Taboos and neologisms don't work in the long-term, because human language evolves over time. Consider a few topics that we currently have taboos about: sex and defecation, and how many euphemisms we have to talk about them. The reason we have so many is that as each euphemism reaches peak usage, its meaning becomes too closely connected to the concept it was meant to stand in for. It's then replaced by a new untainted euphemism and the process repeats. Similarly, neologisms, once released into the wild, will take on new connotations or change meaning altogether.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 13 April 2011 01:26:25AM *  2 points [-]

And of course, if humans actively use some language that's very different from natural languages in any important respect, it will soon get creolized until it looks like just another ordinary human language.

This is what happened to e.g. Esperanto: it was supposed to be extraordinarily simple and regular, but once it caught up with a real community of speakers, it underwent a rapid evolution towards a natural language compatible with the human brain hardware, and became just as messy and complicated as any other. (Esperantists still advertise their language as supposedly specified by a few simple rules, but grammar books of real fluent Esperanto are already phone book-thick, and probably nowhere near complete.)

Comment author: TheOtherDave 12 April 2011 05:05:19PM 4 points [-]

Well, it might conceivably be worth asking the question "Does the Singularity hypothesis share enough features with religious hypotheses that organizations dedicated to thinking about it run a significant risk of demonstrating other attributes of religious/theological organizations?"

Along with the related "If so, would that be a bad thing, and what could we do to mitigate that risk?"

That said, my own answers are "Not especially, although some of the same sorts of people who would otherwise be attracted to religious concept-clusters will become attracted to Singularitarian concept-clusters for this reason, as the latter become more popular." and "It's not ideal, but it's tolerable. As long as we're careful to distinguish between reasoning and confabulating, we should be OK."

And if I'm right, then this isn't a particularly important question to devote energy to.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 12 April 2011 07:44:55PM *  8 points [-]

And if I'm right, then this isn't a particularly important question to devote energy to.

You're forgetting the most important aspect of the issue. If there is a problem with technology-related existential risk, then it's important to get high-status people to understand it and take it seriously. However, if the issue is automatically associated in the public mind with low-status people and presumed crackpots, this will become far more difficult. It doesn't matter how good a case you have that the problem is serious, if its very mention will trigger people's crackpot heuristics and make them want to distance themselves from you for fear of low-status contamination.

Comment author: Randaly 10 April 2011 01:10:46AM *  11 points [-]

It's worth noting that most of the Nazi superiority in technology wasn't actually due to Nazi efforts, but rather due to a previous focus on technological and scientific development; for example, Germans won 14 of the first 31 Nobel Prizes in Chemistry, the vast majority of initial research into quantum mechanics was done by Germans, etc. But Nazi policies actually did actively slow down progress, by e.g. causing the emigration of free-thinking scientists like John von Neumann, Hans Bethe, Leo Szilard, Max Born, Erwin Schrodinger, and Albert Einstein, and by replacing empirically based science with inaccurate political ideology. (Hitler personally believed that the stars were balls of ice, tried to avoid harmful "earth-rays" mapped out for him with a dowsing rod, and drank a toxic gun-cleaning fluid for its supposed health benefits, not to mention his bizarre racial theories.) Membership in the Society of German Natural Researchers and Physicians shrank nearly in two between 1929 and 1937; during World War II, nearly half of German artillery came from its conquered neighbors, its supply system relied in part on 700,000-2,800,000 horses, its tanks and aircraft were in many ways technologically inferior to those of many of its neighbors, etc.

"If they hadn't been ruled by an insane dictator they would have done much better. Similarly, if they had expanded just as much but waited to start the serious discrimination and genocide until after they already had won they would have likely won."

But that's Deutch's entire point- that that's what the "bad guys" do, what makes them the "bad guys". Sure if Hitler hadn't been Hitler, or somehow not been human, German science wouldn't have been at a massive disadvantage. But I don't see much evidence that the "bad guys" have an advantage; at best, if you assume best case conditions and that the "bad guys" don't act like humans, you get an equal playing field.

(And we see similar things among the other "bad guys" of history- Lysenkoism, the Great Leap Forwards, etc.)

"Or to use a different, but potentially more controversial example, in North America and in Australia, the European colonizers won outright, despite having extremely violent, expansionist policies."

Conditions then no longer hold; nations are no longer isolated, the ideas of science/democracy/capitalism are fairly generally known, etc. And it's also worth noting that the colonizers have generally been transformed into "good guys".

Comment author: Vladimir_M 12 April 2011 03:18:11AM 7 points [-]

during World War II, nearly half of German artillery came from its conquered neighbors, its supply system relied in part on 7,000 horses,

According to this article published by the German Federal Archives, 2.8 million horses served in the German armed forces in WW2. The article also notes how successfully the German wartime propaganda portrayed the Wehrmacht as a high-tech motorized army, an image widely held in the public to this day, while in reality horses were its main means of transport.

Comment author: Desrtopa 11 April 2011 07:37:25PM 0 points [-]

That was a position she had attributed to her in a book in which I first read about her; I no longer remember the details and may have been mistaken.

In any case, the development of new technology and naturalistic knowledge based on empirical investigation and mathematics declined in the Dark ages. Whether I was mistaken about Hypatia's position in particular or not doesn't change the issue of whether an inferior tradition of intellectual investigation replaced a superior one.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 12 April 2011 02:40:53AM *  5 points [-]

[An empirical outlook] was a position she [Hypatia] had attributed to her in a book in which I first read about her; I no longer remember the details and may have been mistaken.

Was it by any chance Cosmos by Carl Sagan? His treatment of the topic is complete nonsense. (I understand Sagan is held in some respect by many people here, but he definitely wasn't above twisting facts and perpetuating myths to advance his agenda.) A good debunking of the whole "Hypatia as a rationalist martyr" myth can be found on Armarium Magnum.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 09 April 2011 10:40:46PM *  4 points [-]

The basic reason "good guys" make progress faster than "bad guys" (in the sense of: immoral guys, like prone to violence) is that they have more stable, peaceful, cooperative societies that are better suited to making progress. It's because good values are more effective in real life.

This sort of claim seems to run into historical problems. A lot of major expansionist violent empires have done quite well for themselves. In modern times, some of the most "bad" groups have done well as well. The Nazis in many ways had much better technology than the Allies. If they hadn't been ruled by an insane dictator they would have done much better. Similarly, if they had expanded just as much but waited to start the serious discrimination and genocide until after they already had won they would have likely won. Similarly, in WW2, Japan did quite well for itself, and if a handful of major battles had gone slightly differently, the outcome would have been very different.

Or to use a different, but potentially more controversial example, in North America and in Australia, the European colonizers won outright, despite having extremely violent, expansionist policies. In North America, you actually had multiple different European groups fighting amongst themselves as well and yet they still won.

Overall, this is a pleasant, optimistic claim that seems to be depressingly difficult to reconcile with actual history.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 12 April 2011 01:38:54AM *  10 points [-]

Similarly, in WW2, Japan did quite well for itself, and if a handful of major battles had gone slightly differently, the outcome would have been very different.

You are wrong about this. Even if every single American ship magically got sunk at some point in 1941 or 1942, and if every single American soldier stationed outside of the U.S. mainland magically dropped dead at the same time, it would only have taken a few years longer for the U.S. to defeat Japan. Once the American war production was up and running, the U.S. could outproduce Japan by at least two orders of magnitude and soon overwhelm the Japanese navy and air force no matter what their initial advantage. Starting the war was a suicidal move for the Japanese leadership, and even the sane people among them knew it.

I think you're also overestimating the chances Germans had, and underestimating how well Hitler did given the circumstances, though that's more controversial. Also, Germany lost the technological race in pretty much all theaters of war where technology was decisive -- submarine warfare, cryptography, radars and air defense, and nuclear weapons all come to mind. The only exceptions I can think of are jet aircraft and long-range missiles, but even in these areas, they produced mostly flashy toys rather than strategically relevant weapons.

Overall, I think it's clear that the insanity of the regimes running Germany and Japan hampered their technological progress and also led to their suicidal aggressiveness. At the same time, the relative sanity of the regimes running the U.K. and the U.S. did result in significant economic and technological advantages, as well as somewhat saner strategy. Of course, that need not have been decisive -- after all, the biggest winner of the war was Stalin, who was definitely closer to the defeated sides in all the relevant respects, if not altogether in the same league with them.

Comment author: PhilGoetz 10 April 2011 01:00:50AM 0 points [-]

I'm pretty sure all you mean by "utilitarian" is that our values, whatever they are, should be/are encoded into a utility function.

Yes.

The standard definition of a utilitarian is someone who thinks we should maximize the aggregate utility of all humans/morally relevant agents, and it comes with a whole host of problems.

I don't think that's standard anymore. The terms "total utilitarian" and "average utilitarian" are generally recognized, where "total utilitarian" means what you called "utilitarian".

Comment author: Vladimir_M 11 April 2011 11:28:14PM *  6 points [-]

Maybe I'm misreading this exchange, but there seems to be some confusion between individual utility functions and utilitarianism as an ethical system. An individual utility function as per von Neumann and Morgenstern is defined only up to a constant term and multiplication by a positive factor. Individual vN-M utility functions therefore cannot be compared, aggregated, or averaged across individuals, which is what any flavor of utilitarianism requires one way or another (and which invariably leads into nonsense, in my opinion).

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 11 April 2011 01:41:26PM -1 points [-]

I'm inclined to agree with you-- the prison-industrial complex affects the number of people in prison in the US, but it's not the only way that sort of thing can happen.

As for the US, it's not just the guards' unions, though the unions have lobbied for "tough on crime" measures-- there's money in constructing prisons and in for-profit prisons. Also, prisons can be a major source of employment in rural areas, and prisoners count as residents for counties (I think-- it might be at some other organizational level) to get Federal aid, but the money need not be spent on them.

History of treating teenagers like adult criminals

Comment author: Vladimir_M 11 April 2011 02:54:08PM *  4 points [-]

the prison-industrial complex affects the number of people in prison in the US

Surely its effect is above zero, but I'm highly suspicious of how significant it really is. I wasn't around back then, but from what I know, it seems pretty evident that the crime wave of the sixties, seventies, and eighties produced a genuine popular sentiment in favor of tougher criminal law, which hasn't subsided to this day. In fact, this is one of the few major political trends in recent decades that looks like an authentic democratic response to popular demand.

Comment author: jimrandomh 10 April 2011 02:02:05AM *  5 points [-]

Which exact imperative languages are you taking as benchmarks of performance here? The lower-level ones like C or Fortran where you can squeeze out amazing performance if the compiler is any good, or the fancier ones with garbage collection, dynamic typing, bounds checking, and other features with large overheads?

To give one example pair, Java (imperative) and Scala (functional) share a significant amount of compiler infrastructure and end up being pretty much the same speed.

In practice, the answer to how fast languages are is pretty complex, and sometimes counterintuitive. For example, one of the "large overheads" you mentioned, bounds checking, isn't a significant overhead at all. Modern compilers are very aggressive about removing bounds checks when it can be proven that they'll never fail (which is true for almost all good code), and moving them out of loops. C programs, for security reasons, are generally run past a theorem prover (splint) to ensure that they have bounds checks where they're needed, which means that C programs and Scala programs end up with the same set of bounds checks in the compiled output, with differences due to different features of the respective theorem provers/optimizers, which operate on intermediate representations that look nothing like the original languages anyways. Similarly, garbage collection has a reputation as an expensive feature, because of bad garbage collectors, but a good compiler can prove when most objects will leave scope, and take them out of the garbage collector's domain; it doesn't have to be expensive. Again for dynamic typing; most dynamically typed programs can have type inference performed on them to make statically-typed programs, it's just that the compilers aren't always good enough to do that. (But sometimes they are. And there are plenty of dynamically typed imperative languages around, so it's not a functional/imperative thing.)

Fortran's reputation for speed, as far as I can tell, is mainly due to the LINPACK linear algebra library, which started in the Fortran world but is actually written in assembly to use funky vector instruction sets these days anyways. C is great for interfacing with hardware and writing schedulers and memory allocators, because it maps so closely to assembly language; and more work has been put into C compilers than compilers for any other language. But on the sort of code that compilers are good at, it's the same speed as OCaml or Scala, because they all end up compiling to the same thing.

(My knowledge of this subject is mainly academic; I wrote a compiler in school, and I try to keep tabs on research in the field, but I'm not an expert by any means. Take this for what it's worth.)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 10 April 2011 08:48:36AM *  1 point [-]

You make the situation with optimizing compilers sound really optimistic! Unfortunately, it seems to me that things don't work anywhere so well in practice. Yes, the practical handling of fancy language features has come a long way from naive straightforward implementations, but I'd say you exaggerate how good it is.

For example, I haven't followed closely the work in bounds checking elimination, but I know that a lot of papers are still being published about it, indicating that there are still large enough overheads to make the problem interesting. (Which is not surprising, considering that the problem is after all undecidable in general. Also, as far as I know, bounds checks are normally not added by C compilers, and there are depressing limits to what theorem provers can figure out about the usual C where you pass pointers around liberally.)

It's similar with garbage collection, dynamic type checks, and other fancy features. Their overheads can certainly be reduced greatly by smart compilers and efficient run-time operations, sometimes to the point where there is no difference from C, but definitely not always, and often not reliably and predictably.

(Fortran, by the way, has traditionally had the advantage of being highly amenable to automatic optimization, including automatic parallelization, especially when used for typical array-based numerical computations. This has in turn led to a lot of fruitful effort put into optimizing and parallelizing numerical Fortran, leading to its unprecedented performance and acceptance in these areas, and its lead has been eroded only in recent years. You can't possibly say that this is just due to a single popular library.)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 10 April 2011 12:54:38AM *  2 points [-]

I was just rummaging through some papers, and I ran into this one that seems pertinent -- it highlights some important shortcomings of fancy languages when it comes to really performance-critical work:

J. Shapiro, Programming Language Challenges in Systems Codes: Why Systems Programmers Still Use C, and What to Do About It
http://www.bitc-lang.org/docs/papers/PLOS2006-shap.pdf

Comment author: jsalvatier 09 April 2011 10:46:29PM *  0 points [-]

Do you have a sense about whether this is an inherent feature of Haskell or if this gap decrease substantially as haskell compilers improve?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 10 April 2011 12:17:10AM 6 points [-]

A gap of about 2x on a benchmark set doesn't say much, if anything. That's well within the usual variance you'll get for any single language from different compilers and from different levels of programmer skill and effort put into manual optimizations. Certainly, much more work has gone into C compilers than Haskell compilers, so one would expect that there's much more low-hanging fruit for improvement in the latter.

That said, the really interesting figures would be those for nice idiomatic Haskell, as well as figures about what percentage of code must be written using ugly hacks to achieve performance comparable to C. The power of C lies in the fact that you can write nice, manageable, and natural-looking code while having a very good idea about the machine code that comes out of each statement you write. (In fact, C was originally meant to be used with machine code directly in mind, with no need for compiler optimization, though modern architectures are too complicated for that.) Now, in almost any language, you can force a similar approach by using ugly and unnatural hacks based on the intimate knowledge of what your compiler will produce in response. However, that defeats the purpose of using a language more fancy than C, except perhaps if you can justify it by demonstrating that such ugly hacks are necessary only for a minuscule performance-critical part of the code.

Comment author: Risto_Saarelma 09 April 2011 06:39:46PM *  6 points [-]

A rather big problem that technical language discussions often miss is that language ecosystems are a big deal. The bigger the mindshare a language has, the more people there are you can hire to write stuff in the language, the more people there are writing middleware and libraries you can glue together to get what you want, the more people there are discovering bugs in the language implementation, and the more literature there is in how to effectively use the language. The bigger the existing codebase for the language is, the easier it will be to find some nice place to slot your new thing in instead of rigging up life support and a special interface with the alien outside environment. Uncommon languages face an uphill battle here, unless they can have some kind of special niche they excel in. Functional programming has been around a long time, so having referential transparency by default doesn't seem to be winning hearts and minds by itself so far. Some people think that the coming sea change from cheap sequential speedups via Moore's Law to having to actually do some very clever things with a parallel architecture is going to favor languages where you can mostly work at a level of abstraction that doesn't involve mutable state.

Thus far, the ecosystem thing seems to be a big practical damper on things. A Microsoft or Google sized entity going nuts and starting to do everything with functional programming would probably do a lot more in terms of language adoption via a growing pool of libraries, quality implementations, training, literature, career prospects and imitator companies than a very large amount of academic R&D work.

It's a neat topic in general. John Backus' Turing Award lecture (PDF) from 30 years ago was one of the early expositions of the issue, and we're still in pretty much the same situation as was described there. There are many stories on how the higher abstraction of functional programming helped with a difficult problem, but they are often characterized by the problem being quite well-specified both in its behavior and its interface to the outside world. And practical programming today is probably even less like that than it was 30 years ago. Success stories for using functional programming in the large and in anger, like you tend to end up doing when programming things people want to pay money for, are a lot rarer than stories of elegant, self-contained programs manageable by a single programmer.

There is a support group for people who want to use functional programming in the real world.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 09 April 2011 09:35:13PM *  1 point [-]

Some people think that the coming sea change from cheap sequential speedups via Moore's Law to having to actually do some very clever things with a parallel architecture is going to favor languages where you can mostly work at a level of abstraction that doesn't involve mutable state.

I've heard people saying that for years now, but from what I see in practice, the main trend driven by this situation is that parallel programming in ordinary imperative languages is becoming easier, with much better support both at language level and in terms of debuggers, profilers, etc.

If you're working with a problem that has an inherently parallel structure, you have elegant and easy to use APIs to parallelize it in pretty much any language these days. If not, I don't see where using a functional language would help you. (It could be that a good functional programmer will find it more easy to devise a parallelizable solution to a given problem than a typical imperative programmer, but is there actually some advantage that a functional programmer enjoys over someone skilled in traditional parallel programming?)

Comment author: jimrandomh 08 April 2011 11:39:23PM 3 points [-]

Generally speaking, functional programs get compiled into the same intermediate representations as imperative languages and perform the same. They're at an advantage where their objects are immutable, which lets the compiler skip alias analysis and continue to optimize in the cases where alias analysis fails, but at a disadvantage when they're dynamically typed and types can't be inferred, since they need to insert extra branches.

Some compilers are better than others and some languages are easier to write good compilers for than others, but functional/imperative is not the deciding factor.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 09 April 2011 05:32:35AM 2 points [-]

Which exact imperative languages are you taking as benchmarks of performance here? The lower-level ones like C or Fortran where you can squeeze out amazing performance if the compiler is any good, or the fancier ones with garbage collection, dynamic typing, bounds checking, and other features with large overheads? If a language like Haskell can actually be compiled to perform comparably with the former when written naturally and without expert hacks, I find that an astonishing feat.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 08 April 2011 11:13:06PM 3 points [-]

I see there are some functional programming buffs here, so I have a question. These functional programs, as pretty as they are, must be compiled into plain old machine code to actually run. Are these compilers really so smart that they can translate pretty idiomatic functional code into high-performing binaries? Or do you have to use ugly techniques based on intimate knowledge of the compiler/interpreter to squeeze out some decent performance out of these languages?

Comment author: [deleted] 08 April 2011 02:11:42AM 0 points [-]

What goals do you think you'd be unable to achieve by following these guidelines?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 08 April 2011 04:37:42PM 8 points [-]

Well, for example, take the point (1). Taken as literal and universal advice, "[s]how what you're feeling; say what you're thinking" is insane -- obviously, if you really blurt out your honest feelings and opinions to everyone at all times, you will destroy your whole life rapidly. Ah, but of course, it's not meant to be taken literally, but with subtlety and finesse. However, for those who are capable of grasping this subtlety and finesse, the advice is completely trite, and for those who aren't, it merely says "[s]how what you're feeling; say what you're thinking -- except when you shouldn't." That's not at all helpful to someone who is clueless about when he shouldn't do it, and what he should do instead in each such situation. The rest of the list is no better.

Comment author: Skatche 08 April 2011 02:35:49AM *  2 points [-]

2 - By now, if you've done as instructed, you should have a pretty interesting life. Nonetheless, I think it's worth exploring this in more detail. If there's one thing pick-up artists get right, it's the value of confidence; but it's important to remember that this doesn't mean dominance, aggressiveness, or surliness. Confidence means being comfortable in your own skin, remaining centred in a conversation, listening with calm interest but also having something interesting to say about yourself and about your projects, your passions, the adventures you've had. It means having a life of your own beyond the object of your affections, and being friendly and courteous but not too eager to please. And yeah, a bit of a teasing or arrogant streak doesn't hurt. Above all, though, you want to be self-reliant: keep your own shit together and you'll be more attractive.

1 - THIS IS THE MOST IMPORTANT POINT, not only for getting laid but also as a general principle: you must learn to communicate. Healthy communication is a very complex skill, and there's no simple formula; I may yet get around to writing a full post or two on the topic. Nevertheless, one way or another, you need to learn to be honest while still showing respect and courtesy, and you need to learn to inspire honesty in others. Try to foster this attitude in your broader community and everyone will benefit (this is how the communal house I live in still functions as well as it does, despite a number of difficult circumstances we've faced over time).

I do want to say a word about communication in the bedroom. Sex is an attempt to create a mutually enjoyable and fulfilling interaction of an intimate sort, and you simply can't do that without indicating, in some fashion, what you want and how you want it. A lot of this communication ends up being nonverbal, but you should learn to be comfortable voicing your desires. You'll also want to pay attention to what your partner wants, whether based on their vocalizations and body language or sometimes by asking questions: "Is that good?" rolls off the tongue nicely.

I should also say a word about consent. Body language and other implicit cues can only take you so far; before you hit the bedroom, you'd better make sure your partner is enthusiastic about the prospect, and that requires verbal communication. This can be a little awkward, but it becomes significantly less so with practice. Remember: this is YOUR responsibility. "I thought s/he seemed into it" or "They seemed to go along with it" is no excuse.

So there you have it: how to have a satisfying sex life - by extension of an otherwise satisfying life - in six monumental steps.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 08 April 2011 07:59:45AM *  11 points [-]

Trouble is, most of what you write is extended far beyond what's written in the original list, or it's equally vague and thus of no practical use.

Take for example your advice to "start flirting." (Which, by the way, it would be quite a stretch to see as an interpretation of the original point five, except insofar as it's vague and allegoric enough to mean anything you want to see in it.) For a man who is socially inept, or even just clueless about women, flirting is like differential equations for someone who is stumped by basic algebra -- and useful and systematic learning materials to remedy this situation can be found only you-know-where.

On all other points, you similarly extend and reinterpret the original statements creatively and liberally, but even so, the advice you give falls far short of practical usefulness. Insofar as your advice makes sense, the only men who are able to imagine some concrete and workable ideas for action based on it are those who already understand these issues well enough that they don't even need it. For those who actually have such problems, much more concrete, detailed, and practical guidance is needed, and again, I know of only one sort of venues that offer it. (And in fact, at a few places where your advice approaches something resembling useful guidelines, it says basically the same things you'll read there.)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 07 April 2011 11:21:14PM *  5 points [-]

My impression is that there are a few issues where contrarian positions will tick people off and result in undeserved downvotes unless they're extremely well written and argued. There is also a somewhat larger set of issues where posts and comments will get upvoted heavily, and sometimes stratospherically, despite being pure applause lights. However, as someone who has written many comments of varying quality criticizing various positions that are prevalent on LW, I can say that as long as they don't touch any of the few third rails, contrarian comments overwhelmingly end up with non-negative scores even if they're less than stellar.

When it comes to posts downvoted to -1, and sometimes also -2, one confounding issue are the passive-aggressive downvotes of frustrated participants in the discussion. (Scores below -2 usually indicate a wider range of downvoters.) These typically get reversed by other readers, but sometimes nobody sees it or cares enough.

On the whole, I think the present system works as well as could be reasonably expected. The only change I'd like to see is separate tracking of upvotes and downvotes, so that controversial comments would stand apart from those that are just plain uninteresting.

Comment author: [deleted] 07 April 2011 07:43:28PM *  -2 points [-]

I like Ran Prieur's treatment of this problem:

  1. Be Transparent. Show what you're feeling; say what you're thinking. Offer and accept communications at face value. Do this from the beginning, and the bad relationships will run from you like shadows from the light. Now, this doesn't mean you can't use non-verbal techniques to make people feel better -- but here is the test: If you were to explain everything you are doing and why, would the other person feel exploited, or honored?

  2. Become Skilled at Being Single. Learn to make good food, pay your bills, motivate yourself, stay sane, and get sexual release, by yourself and with help from friends. Then why do you even need a partner? Exactly. But you might still appreciate a partner, which is a stronger position.

  3. Embrace the Friend Zone. Having friends is a good thing. The suffering of the "friend zone" is an illusion created by desire. Let go of desire and the prison becomes paradise -- or the false friendship is exposed. Of course, you might still fantasize about another kind of relationship. The key is that you are not holding tension between where you are and where you are not.

  4. Broaden Your Standards. Typically, guys who complain that women are attracted to assholes, are themselves attracted to asshole women. (Actually, this explains a lot about pickup artist culture.) Remember that nice person who you rejected for not being sexy enough? That's karma: you must follow the rules you make. At the same time, nobody wants to be settled for. Practice valuing qualities that are valuable.

  5. Be Like Water. Do not push anything, but move instantly to fill any opening. This will not generate nearly as much sex as aggressive seduction, but it will make it better, by filtering out sex for the sake of proving something, and leaving only sex based on strong mutual attraction.

  6. Sex Is Not the Goal. There is no goal. There is only the process: be who you are, and engage with what you encounter on that road.

(Sorry it's not in the official quotation format, but it was messing with the numbering for some reason.)

The context this appears in is also interesting. It's the entry for May 17, 3/4 of the way down the page.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 07 April 2011 10:31:55PM 16 points [-]

I see this list is getting upvoted, even though it could serve as an exhibit for the classic "Applause Lights" article. As far as I see, each point sounds like deeply wise and useful advice, but on closer examination turns out to be trivial, absurd, or outright meaningless (or some mix of these).

If anyone thinks otherwise, I challenge them to translate any of these guidelines into some specific instructions for action in a concrete situation that are both non-trivial and useful.

Comment author: pjeby 06 April 2011 04:15:17PM 0 points [-]

Could you point to the concrete articles that supposedly dissolve this question? I find the question of what "computation" means as still very much open, and the source of a whole lot of confusion.

Please note that I did not say the sequence explains "computation"; merely that it dissolves the illusion the intuitive notion of a meaningful distinction between a "computation" or "simulation" and "reality".

In particular, an intuitive understanding that people are made of interchangeable particles and nothing else, dissolves the question of "what happens if somebody makes a simulation of you?" in the same way that it dissolves "what happens if there are two copies of you... which one's the real one?"

That is, the intuitive notion that there's something "special" about the "original" or "un-simulated" you is incoherent, because the identity of entities is an unreal concept existing only in human brains' representation of reality, rather than in reality itself.

The QM sequence demonstrates this; it does not, AFAIR, attempt to rigorously define "computation", however.

This is best seen when people attempt to define what constitutes "real" computation as opposed to mere table lookups, replays, state machines implemented by random physical processes, etc.

Those sound like similarly confused notions to me -- i.e., tree-sound-hearing questions, rather than meaningful ones. I would therefore refer such questions to the "usage of words" sequence, especially "How an Algorithm Feels From The Inside" (which was my personal source of intuitions about such confusions).

Comment author: Vladimir_M 06 April 2011 04:22:54PM *  1 point [-]

Please note that I did not say the sequence explains "computation"; merely that it dissolves the illusion the intuitive notion of a meaningful distinction between a "computation" or "simulation" and "reality".

Fair enough, though I can't consider these explanations as settled until the notion of "computation" itself is fully clarified. I haven't read the entire corpus of sequences, though I think I've read most of the articles relevant for these questions, and what I've seen of the attempts there to deal with the question of what precisely constitutes "computation" is, in my opinion, far from satisfactory. Further non-trivial insight is definitely still needed there.

Comment author: pjeby 06 April 2011 03:35:46PM 2 points [-]

What I'm saying is there might be a difference between the computation of a thing and the thing itself. It's basically an argument against the inevitability of Tegmark IV.

I think you mean, it's the skeleton of an argument you could advance if there turned out to actually be some meaning to the phrase "difference between the computation of a thing and the thing itself".

Or at least I've not been convinced that it's a logical impossibility for it to be otherwise;

Herein lies the error: it's not up to anybody else to convince you it's logically impossible, it's up to you to show that you're even describing something coherent in the first place.

Really, this is another LW-solved philosophical problem; you just have to grok the quantum physics sequence, in addition to the meanings-of-words one: when you understand that physics itself is a machine, it dissolves the question of what "simulation" or "computation" mean in this context. That is, you'll realize that the only reason you can even ask the question is because you're confusing the labels in your mind with real things.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 06 April 2011 03:51:27PM 7 points [-]

Really, this is another LW-solved philosophical problem; you just have to grok the quantum physics sequence, in addition to the meanings-of-words one: when you understand that physics itself is a machine, it dissolves the question of what "simulation" or "computation" mean in this context.

Could you point to the concrete articles that supposedly dissolve this question? I find the question of what "computation" means as still very much open, and the source of a whole lot of confusion. This is best seen when people attempt to define what constitutes "real" computation as opposed to mere table lookups, replays, state machines implemented by random physical processes, etc.

Needless to say, this situation doesn't give one the license to jump into mysticism triumphantly. However, as I noted in a recent thread, I observe an unpleasant tendency on LW to use the notions of "computation," "algorithms," etc. as semantic stop signs, considering how ill-understood they presently are.

Comment author: Normal_Anomaly 06 April 2011 11:54:36AM 0 points [-]

By "success" I meant successfully doing useful research/getting money to charity/spreading rationality. Which I think is closer to "value creation" or "positive externalities" than what you seem to be calling "success," namely personal welfare.

All I meant was that if he would create an above average amount of value in one area, but even more in another, relative to the rest of the labor pool, he should go with the one where he's best by comparison.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 06 April 2011 03:31:47PM 0 points [-]

By "success" I meant successfully doing useful research/getting money to charity/spreading rationality. Which I think is closer to "value creation" or "positive externalities" than what you seem to be calling "success," namely personal welfare.

Actually, I didn't mean only personal welfare. What I wrote certainly applies to career success that brings money and power, but also to all other kinds of accomplishments that are commonly seen as worthy and admirable.

In fact, often it's even more difficult to judge the latter accurately. People are used to arguing whether someone who profits from success has deserved it, and they're normally willing to listen to someone who argues either way in some particular case. However, when it comes to accomplishments that are seen as selfless idealism, it's much more difficult to criticize those without being perceived as weird or malicious. This despite the fact that these can be about signaling games, rent-seeking, and unaccounted externalities just as much as any for-profit endeavor, no matter how admirable and high-status they are commonly perceived.

In response to What Should I Do?
Comment author: Normal_Anomaly 06 April 2011 01:35:24AM 6 points [-]

I'm holding off on proposing a solution. The Law of Comparative Advantage is a relevant concept here, because whatever you end up doing would have been done by someone else if you had made a different choice. You should pick the thing where you are the most above average in expected success, because that's where the marginal gain to the world from you doing it is highest.

My other advice is, don't forget to do something you'll enjoy. For a start, it will make you more motivated. You'll be doing good in the world whatever you pick--and while you can't be sure which thing will do the most good, you have a better chance at figuring out what you'll most enjoy.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 06 April 2011 02:10:41AM *  3 points [-]

You should pick the thing where you are the most above average in expected success, because that's where the marginal gain to the world from you doing it is highest.

You're assuming perfect equivalence between success and value creation. That is a very shaky assumption in any realistic human society. Success may stem from creating value and trading it, but also from winning zero- or negative-sum games such as signaling arms races and rent seeking contests, and even the created value can be offset by the negative externalities you generate. Humans are amazingly capable of rationalizing away such unpleasant observations when it comes to themselves and people they like and admire, as well as exaggerating them when it comes to those they dislike, so evaluating any concrete success scenario accurately is a very difficult problem.

(Of course, if you're altruistic, you'd also care about your positive externalities for which you capture no benefit, and similar caveats apply there too.)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 05 April 2011 08:11:00AM 6 points [-]

Considering your knowledge about the topic, the usual level of care and effort you put into your writing, and your apparent enthusiasm for the task, I am pretty sure that you'll do a better job than at least 99% of reviewers in practice.

In my experience from inside the academic sausage factory, most peer reviews are quite awful. (Bryan Caplan is one academic who openly agrees.) This is not very surprising considering that the work is difficult, tedious, unpaid, uncredited, without any penalties for doing a bad job, and usually passed on to otherwise overworked, underpaid, and apathetic grad students. If you just manage to understand the paper and offer any sensible criticism and suggestions, that will be magnificent by the usual standards.

With this in mind, these papers you cite strike me as rather detached from how things really work in practice. Such high and elaborate intellectual standards might be realistic for reviewers writing publicly and with some incentive to do a good job, but definitely not for the way anonymous peer review works presently.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 05 April 2011 01:58:42AM 1 point [-]

Yes Means Yes is the book I meant-- I haven't found another book with the same title.

As for the rest of your post, I want to think a little longer before I reply.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 05 April 2011 02:19:58AM *  1 point [-]

Yes Means Yes is the book I meant-- I haven't found another book with the same title.

This one has the same title, and apparently deals with similar topics:
http://books.google.com/books?id=tZH5aRrxtgEC&dq

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 04 April 2011 12:24:00PM 6 points [-]

I'm not talking about the history of the world, I'm talking about recent American culture.

Sally's desire or lack of it really wasn't present in the story. Try imagining a gender-reversed version of the story and see whether it looks odd to you.

I recommend reading Yes Means Yes-- you will probably find the politics annoying and I don't sign on to them myself, but the personal viewpoints could give you an additional angle on the world.

I find it interesting that there was a shift (Victorian?) from the stereotype of Woman the Temptress to Man the Pursuer. It makes me wonder if no one knows what they're talking about in regards to sex in general-- possibly the case, considering that no one has a large random sample of behavior and there's a lot of shame on the subject.

It's possible that we have a sufficiently strong norm of telling the truth on questionnaires to have found out a little bit-- at least for people who are willing to answer questionnaires.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 04 April 2011 09:39:19PM *  3 points [-]

I'm not talking about the history of the world, I'm talking about recent American culture.

Sally's desire or lack of it really wasn't present in the story. Try imagining a gender-reversed version of the story and see whether it looks odd to you.

The gender-reversed version would have to look very different to be realistic because, among other reasons, there are very strong and very asymmetrical signaling and reputational issues involved. (I'm just noting this as the de facto state of affairs, separate from the discussion of why it might be so.) If these issues weigh more heavily than the considerations of lust for one of the parties, but less so for the other, it doesn't mean that the former's lust is being unrealistically neglected.

Now, I don't know much about what American culture a few decades back really looked like, and I do have some reason to believe that the way it's popularly imagined nowadays is heavily distorted. However, if this culture really was oblivious about female lust, this would lead to some odd predictions -- for example, that people (or men at least) would lack the usual traditional inclination for chaperoning and strong reputational discipline of women, believing that they'd behave with saintly chastity if left uncontrolled. Was this really the case?

I recommend reading Yes Means Yes-- you will probably find the politics annoying and I don't sign on to them myself, but the personal viewpoints could give you an additional angle on the world.

Which one of the books under this title do you have in mind? Google Books lists at least two that look like they might be pertinent for this discussion. (I have no problem with annoying politics, no matter how extreme, if there is some insight to be found alongside it.)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 04 April 2011 09:00:51AM *  11 points [-]

The meme ‘don’t pass judgement on other people’ is, I think, pretty widespread in North America and maybe more so in Canada [...]

Insofar as it actually exists, this is a very context-dependent principle. As someone who grew up in a moderately alien culture, I perceive a strong note of frightfully stern judgmentalism in the Anglo-American culture. (Of course, the exact range of issues on which this judgmentalism is manifested depends on people's ideological position.)

In fact, the way it is expressed in North America, even the "don't pass judgment" attitude itself paradoxically often strikes me as sternly judgmental. Admittedly, sometimes I perceive it as an expression of a pleasant and easygoing disposition, but more often, it looks more like a harsh moralistic condemnation of those who differ ideologically and thus express disapproval of different things.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 03 April 2011 07:28:01PM 13 points [-]

Your example reminds me of a chapter from Yes Means Yes-- the idea that women have actual lust is still so blanked out in the culture, that it's quite possible to forget about it even when you're trying to construct a sex-positive example.

Sally thinks sex is normal. Sally thinks Bob is cute. Bob makes the first move, and doesn't seem to be abusive.

Does Sally want sex with Bob? Maybe. Maybe not. Her desires (as distinct from her concern about whether she's doing the right thing) don't seem to be part of the story.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 04 April 2011 08:44:31AM *  3 points [-]

Your example reminds me of a chapter from Yes Means Yes-- the idea that women have actual lust is still so blanked out in the culture, that it's quite possible to forget about it even when you're trying to construct a sex-positive example.

This view strikes me as absurd. Why have traditional cultures always had all those stringent checks on women's behavior, if the general assumption was that there is no such thing as female lust? Not to even mention how frequent and all-pervasive the motive of female lust has always been in art.

Comment author: Alicorn 03 April 2011 10:04:53PM 3 points [-]

Supposing for the sake of inquiry that Sally is ambivalent about or indifferent to the presence or absence of sex in her relationships (but suitably enthusiastic once it's been introduced), and just wants to minimize the probability that she'll be dumped, what should she do? It's hardly unheard of for women to be dumped for not putting out, even if the model you offer of Bob's subsequent loss of interest is accurate.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 04 April 2011 08:26:56AM *  7 points [-]

Before even getting into any tactical considerations, Sally should try to make a cool-headed strategic judgment of whether there is in fact a significant chance of not getting dumped. For women, it's easy to get delusional in this regard because as a general rule, the attractiveness of men a woman can get for casual sex and non-serious relationships is significantly higher than the attractiveness of those she can get to really commit. From what I've observed, women get dumped and heartbroken much more often because of such strategic blindness leading to relationships where they are doomed from day one than because of tactical missteps.

Comment author: cousin_it 03 April 2011 10:53:15PM 0 points [-]

I don't understand your comment. There can be many Pareto optimal outcomes. For example, "Alice gives Bob a million dollars" is Pareto optimal, even though it makes Alice worse off than the other Pareto optimal outcome where everyone keeps their money.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 03 April 2011 11:06:20PM *  2 points [-]

Yes, this was a confusion on my part. You are right that starting from a Pareto-optimal state, a pure transfer results in another Pareto-optimal state.

Comment author: cousin_it 03 April 2011 06:55:41PM 0 points [-]

I suppose I meant "Pareto-suboptimal". Sorry.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 03 April 2011 09:33:28PM *  1 point [-]

I suppose I meant "Pareto-suboptimal".

How does that make sense? You are correct that under sufficiently generous Coasian assumptions, any attempt at predation will be negotiated into a zero-sum transfer, thus avoiding a negative-sum conflict. But that is still a violation of Pareto optimality, which requires that nobody ends up worse off.

Comment author: cousin_it 02 April 2011 11:08:17PM *  10 points [-]

Negative-sum conflicts happen due to factual disagreements (mostly inaccurate assessments of relative power), not value disagreements. If two parties have accurate beliefs but different values, bargaining will be more beneficial to both than making war, because bargaining can avoid destroying wealth but still take into account the "correct" counterfactual outcome of war.

Though bargaining may still look like "who whom" if one party is much more powerful than the other.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 03 April 2011 12:06:28AM 9 points [-]

How strong perfect-information assumptions do you need to guarantee that rational decision-making can never lead both sides in a conflict to precommit to escalation, even in a situation where their behavior has signaling implications for other conflicts in the future? (I don't know the answer to this question, but my hunch is that even if this is possible, the assumptions would have to be unrealistic for anything conceivable in reality.)

And of course, as you note, even if every conflict is resolved by perfect Coasian bargaining, if there is a significant asymmetry of power, the practical outcome can still be little different from defeat and subjugation (or even obliteration) in a war for the weaker side.

Comment author: cousin_it 02 April 2011 09:17:18PM *  16 points [-]

Wha? There's no law of nature forcing all my goals to be egotistical. If I saw a kitten about to get run over by a train, I'd try to save it. The fact that insectoid aliens may not adore kittens doesn't change my values one bit.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 02 April 2011 10:49:35PM *  7 points [-]

That's certainly true, but from the regular human perspective, the real trouble is that in case of a conflict of values and interests, there is no "right," only naked power. (Which, of course, depending on the game-theoretic aspects of the concrete situation, may or may not escalate into warfare.) This does have some unpleasant implications not just when it comes to insectoid aliens, but also the regular human conflicts.

In fact, I think there is a persistent thread of biased thinking on LW in this regard. People here often write as if sufficiently rational individuals would surely be able to achieve harmony among themselves (this often cited post, for example, seems to take this for granted). Whereas in reality, even if they are so rational to leave no possibility of factual disagreement, if their values and interests differ -- and they often will -- it must be either "good fences make good neighbors" or "who-whom." In fact, I find it quite plausible that a no-holds-barred dissolving of the socially important beliefs and concepts would in fact exacerbate conflict, since this would become only more obvious.

Comment author: DanielLC 02 April 2011 04:00:01AM 1 point [-]

Start a business that does it right. If you can get past the regulators and such, and there are enough rational customers, you'd do better than everyone else, and they'd start copying you.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 02 April 2011 05:14:38AM *  3 points [-]

Start a business that does it right. If you can get past the regulators and such, and there are enough rational customers, you'd do better than everyone else, and they'd start copying you.

Well, good luck getting past regulators in a profession that operates as a self-regulating guild!

In my opinion, the only mechanism of competition that could conceivably ameliorate the systematic problems of medicine is the international medical tourism. However, I'm far from certain that free competition has much potential for preventing medicine from drifting away from reality, considering how much people are prone to biased and even outright magical thinking on this subject, even when all the incentives to get things right are in place.

Comment author: wedrifid 01 April 2011 03:54:03AM *  1 point [-]

You're confusing Christian monarchs with monarchs in general.

No, I'm not. The reproductive advantages do not scale with wealth and power in general.

You seem to be confusing monarchs in general with a particular instance of a conquerer that was not born of a monarch, the a founder of a monarchy or in any way a king or prince.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 02 April 2011 04:12:57AM *  6 points [-]

The reproductive advantages do not scale with wealth and power in general.

You seem to be confusing monarchs in general with a particular instance of a conquerer that was not born of a monarch, the a founder of a monarchy or in any way a king or prince.

Rulers who used their power and wealth to acquire enormous harems and then reproduced like crazy, leaving hundreds or even thousands of children, are not at all uncommon historically. Furthermore, the children of regular royal concubines were typically not in danger of starvation, and thus had a decent chance of reproducing themselves, while the most favored sons would normally become powerful enough to amass their own harems with time. This seems like pretty good scaling.

The Christian idea that the ruler is bound by the same moral standards of monogamy as his ordinary subjects is a huge outlier among human cultures. (In fact, I can't even think of any other similar historical example, though someone more knowledgeable could probably find it.) Certainly, if you look at almost any other place and time, you'll find rulers reproducing at rates unthinkable even to their high-ranking subjects.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 02 April 2011 02:46:05AM 23 points [-]

Scott Adams made this observation in a blog post:

Years ago I worked with a young intern at Crocker Bank who believed his first step toward success was to find a place to live in a prosperous suburb. His theory was that the external environment would program his brain for the sort of success that his neighbors would have already found. I remember mocking him for his offbeat and naive theory. Now I think he's a genius for understanding at such an early age that his environment was a tool for programming his brain. I lost touch with him, but 'll bet he's a millionaire now.

This is definitely one lesson I should have learned earlier than I did.

Comment author: PhilGoetz 31 March 2011 10:14:22PM 1 point [-]

Fascinating and horrifying. But how could that be stable? Wouldn't the brothers figure out ahead of time that they were going to be killed, and all try to kill each other as soon as they realized it?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 31 March 2011 11:15:14PM *  2 points [-]

From what I understand, in the earlier rough and martial times, sultans were mostly busy campaigning and had relatively few sons, who would occupy various military and government posts when they reached adulthood. Upon sultan's death, the sons were expected to fight it out to determine the successor, and this occasional period of instability or even civil war was considered normal. I suppose the brothers would prepare for that moment as best they could.

As the rulers became more decadent and started spending more time siring numerous children with their harems, while the government system became less hands-on, their sons effectively became prisoners of palace factions, which were the real powers clashing over succession on sultan's death. Once in charge, the new sultan would have no problem killing his captive and powerless brothers. (Sometimes, if he was without sons, he'd keep them alive until he got a son to make sure the dynasty doesn't die out.) Often the slaughter was extended to other family members as well, just to make sure.

Later the custom was made more merciful, and the brothers would be kept imprisoned for life instead. This institution also served as a reserve of potential successors in case the sultan and his sons died out unexpectedly.

Comment author: rwallace 31 March 2011 11:37:46AM 2 points [-]

Hmm. Thinking about it a little more myself, it seems to me the social is much more important than the material in this regard. In other words, someone who secretly commits a crime and gains great material benefit therefrom, but will be punished if ever caught, is likely to feel guilty. But if the crime is known and approved of by his social circle - even if that's only a gang or terrorist group - and even if he gained no material benefit, he's much less likely to feel guilty (until and unless that social circle is broken and he finds himself in prison).

Comment author: Vladimir_M 31 March 2011 07:48:12PM 5 points [-]

As another interesting data point, in the early centuries of the Ottoman Empire, the regular succession procedure involved the new sultan killing off his brothers to eliminate any chance of usurpation preemptively. Sultans would often have numerous children with their harem of concubines, so an ascension to the throne often involved a mass killing of the new sultan's half-brothers.

As far as I know, the sultans were not known to be tormented by fratricidal guilt.

Comment author: wedrifid 31 March 2011 01:44:00PM *  2 points [-]

There was no evolution to optimize adaptations to account for such a disproportionately large gain as a monarchy with a throne.

The disproportionate gain is mostly in currency that evolution doesn't care about anyway. You do get some reproductive advantages from being a monarch but nothing remotely like in proportion to the wealth and power.

In reproductive terms you would be better off being the playboy second son of one of the wealthier minor nobility. Lower risk with a lot more time and attention to devote to promiscuity rather than those pesky things like maintaining power, and public image.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 31 March 2011 07:22:17PM 6 points [-]

You do get some reproductive advantages from being a monarch but nothing remotely like in proportion to the wealth and power.

You're confusing Christian monarchs with monarchs in general.

Comment author: Clippy 30 March 2011 04:29:52PM 7 points [-]

In a sense, apes are nothing but devices for making ape DNA.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 30 March 2011 04:32:24PM 6 points [-]

I think Richard Dawkins made that observation a while ago at book length.

Comment author: prase 29 March 2011 03:41:01PM 0 points [-]

science is nothing but experimental philosophy

Not universally. It's hard to find experiments in mathematics.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 30 March 2011 04:28:47PM 3 points [-]

It's hard to find experiments in mathematics.

In a sense, computers are nothing but devices for doing experimental mathematics.

Comment author: [deleted] 29 March 2011 10:43:16PM 5 points [-]

Is it possible that there is too much science today?

I mean, in the raw-numbers sense of number of professional scientists and number of papers published. You could, conceivably, increase the volume of "science" without increasing its accuracy. How do we know we're not doing that?

In response to comment by [deleted] on The null model of science
Comment author: Vladimir_M 30 March 2011 12:01:01AM *  5 points [-]

You could, conceivably, increase the volume of "science" without increasing its accuracy. How do we know we're not doing that?

To me it seems pretty obvious that we are doing that, and have been for many decades. But I suppose spelling out an argument for this conclusion suitable for a general audience would require bridging some significant inferential distances.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 29 March 2011 02:52:59AM 5 points [-]

Science isn't a fight. Getting science taught properly in schools IS a fight (which we are losing, at least in America. Close to 50% of us don't believe in evolution).

If one looks at the Gallup data one sees a slight trend against creationism in the US.

Since the early 1980s Gallup has asked:

Which of the following statements comes closest to your views on the origin and development of human beings 1) Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process, 2) Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God had no part in this process, 3) God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so]?

The data for that suggests that since 1982 American attitudes have been almost unchanged except that the percentage answering 2 has steadily increased with most of that being apparently accounted for in a drop of those with no opinion. I don't know what exactly that shows, but it is difficult to argue from that data that "we are losing" for most definitions of "we" and "losing".

Comment author: Vladimir_M 29 March 2011 08:25:07PM *  5 points [-]

Of course, it would be naive to assume that most people who give technically correct answers to such questions in polls have any real clue about the issues involved. They just answer the way they intuitively perceive to be high-status and ideologically correct; I'm sure most of them would easily change their opinion if these factors changed.

The primary reason people in the general public get worked up about evolution one way or another is ideological baiting and status concerns. The idea that it's somehow important for the common folk to have a correct view of scientific theories that have nothing to do with their regular business strikes me as rather absurd.

Comment author: [deleted] 29 March 2011 02:00:05AM -1 points [-]

In contrast, the economic effects of the upload scenario (or the infinite immigration in the thought experiment) are much clearer, since these feature a few simple effects that are strong enough to dominate everything else.

The only effect that I discern that dominates everything else involves hitting the Malthusian limit - which I have already allowed is a strong argument (though not, I think, decisive - but I'm putting off that discussion for some other time). The other elements of the argument look to me like a question of ignoring the unseen, of assuming that the non-obvious is trivial.

In the first case, a straightforward analysis leads to the classic Malthusian scenario, i.e. both human and robot wages are reduced to the barest subsistence

Again my response to mention of the Malthusian scenario is that I want to put off discussion of that. However, the first case as I intended it (without cheap duplication) was essentially what we have now, which is not a Malthusian scenario. I assumed all costs are the same as for humans, including duplication. So, we would simply have two kinds of human, a flesh one and a silicon/metal one (say).

Cheap duplication is the key factor, not low resource use or high productivity, because duplication is, of course, the mechanism by which a population reaches the Malthusian limit. Low resource use and high productivity don't have any clear effect one way or another, because consider the following two scenarios:

1) You have a trillion minds in a cube (hence: low resource use and high productivity).

2) You have a cube-shaped portal to another world, and on that other world there are a trillion minds.

The scenarios are (from your point of view) effectively identical. But the second scenario is just the international trade scenario. Free trade is usually better, draft horses notwithstanding.

Suppose that I were living in Manhattan and there were no Japan in the world. Then one day, I find a box, and inside that box is Japan (in fact the box is a portal to Japan which is on some other world). So now the population of Manhattan is half the (previous) population of the US, because of the people in the box. The net economic impact is positive, for the same reason that the impact of trade with Japan is positive. Rent goes up in Manhattan a bit, because of the advantage of being near the portal to Japan. But the higher rent necessarily is counterbalanced by the higher advantage of being near the portal since that is the reason for the higher rent, so that the net effect is not obviously either positive or negative (I could argue that it is actually positive). Notice that at this point there is not necessarily any displacement of Americans out of the economy, even though there are 150 million minds in a box. Displacement doesn't even begin at this point, even though the population of the box is comparable to the population of the US (i.e. half).

If this is about right, then everything happens at or near the Malthusian limit. That's what we need to look out for. Not merely the existence of masses of uploads, so long as the Malthusian limit remains far.

The cost of capital becomes equal to the cost of land (which in economic parlance also includes other natural resources) necessary to produce it

Let's specify the scenario more explicitly. We assume the ghosts are completely friendly, innumerable, will do anything we want for free, but need powered bodies to do it (they have only the minutest ability to direct physical events). I think this comes closest to the upload scenario. (If we assume the ghosts have significant psychokinetic power then the scenario is I think very different from the upload scenario). The ghosts are essentially Indian subcontractors, only much cheaper (free) and much more numerous (infinite).

Immediately I think we can see that there are fairly severe bottlenecks on the ability of uploads, sorry, ghosts to direct significant physical activity. There may be infinitely many ghosts, but there are at any given time only so many powered bodies for them to direct. Alongside these powered bodies directed by external ghosts, there are powered bodies directed by internal ghosts - namely, human bodies, which have their own ghosts. There is no upper limit on the mental work that ghosts can do, but there is a severe limit on the physical work that ghosts can do no matter how many ghosts there are. So we would have an economy which was essentially all a mind-work economy, with only a minuscule fraction (zero percent, considering the infinity of minds) of the population (human or ghost) doing any physical work.

Anyway, for there to be any Malthusian result, it seems to me that it would have to involve competition for resources between human bodies and robot bodies, not between humans and ghosts directly. But I wanted to discuss events prior to hitting any Malthusian limit.

So, all a person has to do to get a ghost to help him is to build a robot with a ghost interface and supply the robot with energy. One more specification - we suppose that ghosts will help whoever owns the bodies (that easily takes care of the decision about who they help).

In principle, once a person owns a number of ghost-directed robot bodies, the bodies can do all the work required to keep themselves (and him) alive and might furthermore be able to increase their own number (by buying raw materials on the market and constructing another body, which can then be inhabited by a new ghost).

For a long time, until the Malthusian limit is reached, it's not obvious that this would significantly affect the employability of humans. Some humans would create robots and get their robots to work for them, but not all humans would have robots, and those humans would have to trade with each other as usual. And even the humans with robots would have to trade with the wider economy to get raw materials (just as slave plantation owners did), and therefore probably trade with robotless humans. After a long time, a very long time, a Malthusian limit might be reached, but the unemployability of people before that happens seems to me to be greatly exaggerated.

However, Manhattan is situated right next to a vast and much less densely populated continent from which it's cheap to bring stuff, so that food prices in Manhattan reflect the farming land rent in these neighboring places, not Manhattan itself. If the land rents in the whole world were as high as in Manhattan, you bet there would be mass starvation.

You are again assuming that the Malthusian limit is already reached. You have relied over and over on the Malthusian argument, which in my original comment - the one that you objected to - I had already acknowledged as strong (and as not specific to uploads), and I had already said that I was not critiquing it (yet).

Initially, long before the Malthusian limit is reached, it makes sense to situate the uploads in a highly populated area, like Manhattan (a cousin of mine explained that companies are buying warehouses near Wall Street and filling them with computers, because light speed is a limiting factor; it's no good to have the trading computers situated far from Wall Street). And the effect of placing the uploads in Manhattan should be much like the effect of turning a city into an international port - which raises the local rents high only to the extent that it is made more worthwhile to be close to the port, so that the net effect of the raised rents is not obviously negative (in fact I would argue positive). Far from Manhattan rents would not be much affected, and meanwhile people would benefit to some degree, just as they would increased trade from a port.

It would be a long time before the whole world turned into one large city.

Adding one new upload box is a bit like adding one new port. Imagine that every day somebody opens a new port to a new Japan on a new planet. What's the effect? Well, suppose that there is already five ports open to five Japans within a ten mile radius, and somebody opens a new port to a new Japan right next door. You ask me, this has the aroma of diminishing marginal returns about it. The port owner tries to profit from trade to a Japan via his port, but the nearness of the other ports (and the existence of hundreds or thousands of ports further away) means that he can't charge monopolistic prices. The amount of profit that a person can make from his port to a new Japan rapidly approaches the cost of setting up the port, possibly long before the countryside is completely covered with ports to Japans, and beyond that point there is no net profit to building yet another port to yet another Japan. Since that happens long before ports to Japans completely cover the landscape, then there is still much land left over for people to live on.

In response to comment by [deleted] on How Safe are Uploads?
Comment author: Vladimir_M 29 March 2011 02:47:16AM *  1 point [-]

Cheap duplication is the key factor, not low resource use or high productivity, because duplication is, of course, the mechanism by which a population reaches the Malthusian limit.

Low resource use is by itself not a problem. If suddenly half the humanity gained the magic ability to subsist on much less resources, that wouldn't cause wages to drop, ceteris paribus. In principle, it wouldn't even have to have any visible consequences, at least in places where everyone's labor can earn wages well above subsistence so there's no need to ever test the limit.

High productivity is a mixed bag. If suddenly half the humanity magically became much more productive, it would benefit the rest by making some things cheaper (basically all stuff that can be mass-produced), but it would also hurt them by bidding up the price of zero-sum things (most notably status and land). The net effect would depend on the concrete scenario.

Cheap duplication is an express ticket to a Malthusian equilibrium. Now, the point is that in the Malthusian equilibrium, you are definitely worse off if there is other labor that is far more productive and/or capable of subsisting on less resources, because this will push your wage below your subsistence. This is why the ordinary human Malthusian situation means dire but (usually) survivable poverty, but in the robot/upload Malthusian situation humans are kaput.

Suppose that I were living in Manhattan and there were no Japan in the world. Then one day, I find a box, and inside that box is Japan (in fact the box is a portal to Japan which is on some other world). [...]

The effect of the box depends on how much you have to pay the minds in the box for their services. The problem in your example is that it fails to distinguish clearly between two scenarios:

  • The box is a portal to another rich country with its own rich endowment of land and capital and accordingly high wages, so you have to trade expensively for the labor of these folks. This won't (in general) drop the wages on the U.S. side.

  • The box contains millions of uploads willing to work for their subsistence wage of a few cents a year. In this case, the U.S. wages of people competing with them will drop significantly, and if the number of uploads is large enough, the wages will plummet asymptotically down to the upload subsistence level.

The problem with your subsequent "port to Japan" analogy is similar. If Japan is in the business of selling dirt-cheap labor that directly competes with yours, then this is certainly very bad news for you if you sell labor for a living. If it's a high-wage country in its own right, everything is great.

Regarding the ghosts, I should have been more precise about my assumptions, which were that ghosts can do any intellectual or physical labor that humans do nowadays, but they can't conjure land and resources out of nothing. So you're screwed if you don't own enough land that you can make the ghosts eke out sufficient food and lodging out of it, because your labor is worth zero, and even capital is worth only as much as the land rent opportunity cost that goes into making it.

This is very different from the upload scenario only if you assume that as the price of mental labor falls to near-zero, the price of physical labor remains high because machines adequate to replace human labor are expensive. This however seems very unlikely to me -- what are these tasks that couldn't be cheaply automated once uploads are available to control the machinery?

But I wanted to discuss events prior to hitting any Malthusian limit.

The whole point is that with uploads the Malthusian limit (and that's the nasty upload-subsistence one) is reached in the blink of an eye.

Comment author: [deleted] 28 March 2011 11:51:11PM -1 points [-]

However, if you kept adding an unlimited number of immigrants to a country at arbitrarily fast rates, including an unlimited number of immigrants skilled at each imaginable profession, the wages of all kinds of labor would indeed plummet....

That is what uploads mean, and there's no way you can extrapolate the comparably infinitesimal trends from ordinary human societies to such extremes.

One the one hand you express near certainty about what would happen (wages "would indeed plummet"), and on the other hand you caution about extrapolating from the known to the unknown.

My position, as you will recall, is not that Hanson is wrong, but that his argument is incomplete. My position is skeptical, in the sense that I see important gaps in the argument (at least as reproduced here). You are defending Hanson's prediction - the prediction about which I am expressing skepticism. Warnings about extrapolating from the known to the unknown work in favor of skepticism about predictions and against confidence in predictions, and therefore they work in my favor.

Uploads still require non-zero resources to subsist

Indeed they do, but my point is that if you look at the two ends of this spectrum - one end at which they take up the same amount of resources as humans, and the other end in which they take up nothing, at both ends there is no clear reason to believe that humans will die off. Now, this does not necessarily means that something funny won't happen in between, but since it is very common that if A causes B then more of A will cause more of B, then the fact that taking A to an extreme does not obviously cause any more B should at least make a person who reasoned that A caused B start to suspect that maybe they missed something. 

Imagining that the uploads take zero resources and charge zero for their services is unrealistic, granted - about as unrealistic as imagining that you are traveling along at the speed of light and trying to imagine what you observe. Unrealistic, yes, but not necessarily useless. It's inherently hard to think about most things, and so as an assist - a dangerous assist granted - it is useful to consider cases which are simpler to think about, as extremes often are.

You are tremendously confident in a certain prediction. I am not confident. I am objecting, pointing out why certain supposed extrapolations do not really follow because the larger picture matters - the larger picture being what you call "all kinds of complex and non-obvious effects" and which you continue to neglect and which you argue does not matter if the increase is sufficiently fast - as if increasing the speed of the transition would by magic somehow enhance the effects that you happen to have considered while negating the effects that I have pointed out.  Which is not the case. If an upload replaces a human at some task because the upload does it better for less, then the customer is immediately benefits. So the speed of that neglected effect (benefit to customer) is precisely as fast as the speed of the considered effect (harm to competitor). Speed up one by a million times, and the other also speeds up by a million times, because they are flip sides of precisely the same occurrence.

But the rent of land must be at least as high as the opportunity cost of filling it up with swarms of slaving uploads and reaping the profits, which will be many orders of magnitude above what a human can earn. It would be as if presently there existed a creature large enough to fill a whole state and requiring its entire agricultural output to subsist, but incapable of doing more productive work than a single human. 

To say that one quantity would be much larger than another does not mean that the second quantity would be absolutely low. The first quantity could be absolutely very high.

We already have a kind of land use similar to what you are describing: skyscrapers. These allow an enormous number of people to occupy a minuscule square footage. So, where is the mass starvation? Do you think that the American economy would be enhanced by blowing up skyscrapers full of people? Or do you think that the American economy would be harmed? I think the latter.

But rent would definitely be lowered in NYC if all of its buildings were blown up. So, yeah, rent is high because of the high concentration of minds. But lowering the rent would not accompany a net benefit to humanity. I don't think we would be benefited by lowering rents in NYC by means of blowing up the buildings with the people in them. So, why would we necessarily be benefited by blowing up a square yard of land with trillions of minds on it? And if we would not be benefited by their destruction, then we would not be harmed by their introduction.

How could such a creature support itself?

That scenario imagines a creature with a certain absolute size and a certain absolute productivity. Given that absolute size and that absolute productivity, the creature cannot support itself. But given only that a human is much less productive than a trillion minds in a box, then we cannot draw any conclusions about how well the human can support themselves.

In response to comment by [deleted] on How Safe are Uploads?
Comment author: Vladimir_M 29 March 2011 12:17:25AM *  2 points [-]

One the one hand you express near certainty about what would happen (wages "would indeed plummet"), and on the other hand you caution about extrapolating from the known to the unknown.

I don't caution about extrapolating from the known to the unknown in this case -- on the contrary. The economic effects of the (relatively) low rates of migration and population growth in today's world are unclear, complicated, and controversial, since these phenomena are intertwined with many others of similar magnitudes. In contrast, the economic effects of the upload scenario (or the infinite immigration in the thought experiment) are much clearer, since these feature a few simple effects that are strong enough to dominate everything else.

[I]f you look at the two ends of this spectrum - one end at which [robots/uploads] take up the same amount of resources as humans, and the other end in which they take up nothing, at both ends there is no clear reason to believe that humans will die off.

In the first case, a straightforward analysis leads to the classic Malthusian scenario, i.e. both human and robot wages are reduced to the barest subsistence, which happens to be the same for both. (This assuming robots can be multiplied cheaply and rapidly.)

The second case is more interesting. Suppose we find a way to summon magical ghosts which will do any work doable by humans for nothing in return. Now all labor becomes free, like air. The cost of capital becomes equal to the cost of land (which in economic parlance also includes other natural resources) necessary to produce it -- once you have that, you can just summon the ghosts to make whatever you want out of it. Your fate as a human depends on whether you own enough land to enable you to subsist with the help of ghosts. If not, you're screwed, since you can't sell your labor to afford the land rent to lodge and feed yourself, and even the ghosts can't summon land out of thin air.

The realistic upload scenarios are somewhere between these two grim possibilities.

We already have a kind of land use similar to what you are describing: skyscrapers. These allow an enormous number of people to occupy a minuscule square footage. So, where is the mass starvation?

However, Manhattan is situated right next to a vast and much less densely populated continent from which it's cheap to bring stuff, so that food prices in Manhattan reflect the farming land rent in these neighboring places, not Manhattan itself. If the land rents in the whole world were as high as in Manhattan, you bet there would be mass starvation. (And with uploads, it's hyper-Manhattan everywhere.)

Comment author: [deleted] 28 March 2011 09:33:32PM *  -2 points [-]

None of the technological advances in human history so far have produced machines capable of replacing human labor across the board at much lower cost.

You seem to think that the luddite fallacy depends on the possibility of substitution not being across the board. I've already answered a similar point by jimrandomh but I will answer again. Suppose that we have a series of revolutions in one sector after another in which labor-saving machines greatly increase the productivity of workers within that sector. So, what will happen? First, let's see what will happen in just one sector. According to Wikipedia, the main critique of luddism is as follows:

The term "Luddite fallacy" has become a concept in neoclassical economics reflecting the belief that labour-saving technologies (i.e., technologies that increase output-per-worker) increase unemployment by reducing demand for labour. Neoclassical economists believe this argument is fallacious because they assert that instead of seeking to keep production constant by employing a smaller and more productive workforce, employers increase production while keeping workforce size constant.

So, what will happen according to this critique is that the workforce size remains constant within the sector that has been affected by the change. Hold your horses - I know what you're going to say, but one thing at a time. Recall, we are trying to predict what will happen if there is a series of tech revolutions in one sector after another eventually covering all sectors. The result, based on the Wikipedia quote, is that all sector employment will remain the same.

Now, what you were going to say is, I think, that when labor saving devices hit a sector, labor shifts to other sectors. Am I right? We have the example of agriculture which seems to show this happening. So we want to know, what happens if labor-saving devices hit all sectors? Let's say they hit them simultaneously. If the solution to the luddite nightmare was that labor would shift to another sector, then the solution here must be that labor would shift entirely out of the economy, there not being any other sectors to shift to - right? But that does not follow.

We can reproduce the same sector-shifting phenomenon with immigration. In the US, immigrants have taken over certain sectors of the economy in many regions. In my region, Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking Latin Americans have taken over many fast food kitchens. The result has been that Americans have shifted into other sectors.

But what if immigrants came to the US and entered into every sector simultaneously? Would they totally displace Americans completely out of the economy? No, they would not. They would simply expand the economy.

So there's a puzzle here. If immigrants enter one sector, American labor shifts away from the sector. But if immigrants enter all sectors, Americans stay in place. What explains this? What explains is is that the reason for the shift is relative wages. Americans shift to sectors where wages are higher. But if wages in all sectors remain the same (which they very well might in an economy which is simply expanding) then there won't be any shifting. But here's another objection: immigrants depress wages in the sectors they enter. Therefore if they entered all sectors simultaneously, they would depress all wages simultaneously, right? But that does not at all follow. Immigrants depress wages in the sector they enter but they do so only by offering more value for money to the customer - in short, they depress wages in their sector only by boosting effective wages in other sectors. If they enter all sectors simultaneously, they depression and boosting could very well cancel out.

With uploads, in contrast, the population growth necessary to hit the Malthusian limit

Yes, the Malthusian limit. I specifically said this was a strong argument. The arguments that I answered were not Malthusian. It's not because of the Malthusian limit that uploads would supposedly replace humans, but because they are better and cheaper - which is not because of the Malthusian limit. I do have many thoughts on Hanson's Malthusian argument, but they have nothing specifically to do with uploads. I want to postpone discussion about the Malthusian limit for another time. Here I am specifically talking about uploads versus humans at a time before the Malthusian limit is reached.

why didn’t the draft horses benefit from trading with motor transport then, but ended up in slaughterhouses instead? Your entire argument can be reworded as telling an American draft horse circa 1920 that he has no reason to fear displacement by motor vehicles. What is the essential difference when it comes to human labor versus uploads supposed to be?

Every species has a natural niche in which the species is fully able to support itself, and the niche can only support so many members of that species. Draft horses greatly outnumbered their natural niche, but they did not outnumber their artificial niche - the niche created for them by humans who were supporting them in exchange for work. When humans ceased to support them, then the draft horses, which greatly outnumbered their natural niche, died out. For all I know some of the wild horses are descendants draft horses.

The niche of a species is roughly determined by the total amount of food that the species is able to produce or obtain. Draft horses obtained food from humans, and could obtain only a small fraction of that food by themselves. Humans do not outnumber their natural niche, because humans make enough food to support themselves.

In order for uploads to lead to a mass dying off of humans, uploads would have to massively reduce the total quantity of food that humans produce. This would require that the uploads take over the land. However, Hanson's upload scenario depends on uploads needing very few resources. Let's take this to the limit and suppose that uploads require zero resources and work for free, demanding absolutely nothing in return. This merely takes to an extreme the very factors that were used to argue that humans will starve to death in the upload scenario. Given uploads that use no resources and work for free, it is not obvious that uploads would take over any agricultural land. So the same amount of food can still be produced.

It had been imagined that uploads would replace doctors, academics, etc. But none of this reduces the amount of food available to humans. And actually it increases the amount of medicine, education, etc. available to humans.

In response to comment by [deleted] on How Safe are Uploads?
Comment author: Vladimir_M 28 March 2011 10:28:37PM *  4 points [-]

Constant,

What you are observing are the effects of relatively small rates of immigration, small enough that all kinds of complex and non-obvious effects are possible in a dynamic and diversified economy, especially since the skills profile of the immigrants is very different from the native population. However, if you kept adding an unlimited number of immigrants to a country at arbitrarily fast rates, including an unlimited number of immigrants skilled at each imaginable profession, the wages of all kinds of labor would indeed plummet. At some point, they would fall all the way down to subsistence, and if you kept adding extra people beyond that, they would fall even further and there would be mass famine.

Remember, we're not talking about a country that accepts an annual number of immigrants equal to 1%, or 5%, or even 10% or 20% of its population. We're talking about a magical world where the number of people can be increased by orders of magnitude overnight, with readily available skills in any work you can imagine. That is what uploads mean, and there's no way you can extrapolate the comparably infinitesimal trends from ordinary human societies to such extremes.

As for the issues of land, housing, and food production, that would also be fatal for humans. Uploads still require non-zero resources to subsist, and since the marginal cost of copying them is zero as long as there are resources available, they will be multiplied until they fill all the available resources. Now, a human requires a plot of land to produce his food and another plot of land for lodging (future technology may shrink the former drastically, but not to the level of an upload's requirements, and moreover the latter must remain substantial).

Unless the human owns enough land, he must pay the land rent to subsist (directly for the lodging land and through his food bills for the farming land). But the rent of land must be at least as high as the opportunity cost of forsaking the option to fill it up with a vast farm of slaving uploads and reap the profits, which will be many orders of magnitude above what a human can earn. It would be as if presently there existed a creature large enough to fill a whole state and requiring its entire agricultural output to subsist, but incapable of doing more productive work than a single human. How could such a creature support itself?

Comment author: Eneasz 28 March 2011 08:18:36PM 0 points [-]

uploads may well end up having their minds indoctrinated with religion and ideology, not trained in LW-style epistemic rationality

IIRC, he says that religion and ideology are symptoms of modern-day wealth/excess, and future folk won't be able to afford non-adaptive/non-correct beliefs. He calls our current position in history as "The Dreamtime"

we live in the brief but important “dreamtime” when delusions drove history. Our descendants will remember our era as the one where the human capacity to sincerely believe crazy non-adaptive things, and act on those beliefs, was dialed to the max.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 28 March 2011 09:39:06PM *  4 points [-]

IIRC, he says that religion and ideology are symptoms of modern-day wealth/excess, and future folk won't be able to afford non-adaptive/non-correct beliefs. He calls our current position in history as "The Dreamtime"

Well, it is possible that he has said inconsistent things at different times, but in the posts I linked in my above comment, he argues (in my opinion plausibly) that the social mechanisms of control and coordination for ems may well end up being based on similar (epistemically) irrational beliefs as in historical human societies, i.e. religion, ideology, strict custom, etc. ("Onward Christian robots!," as he put it.)

[Edit - forgot to add: ] And of course, adaptive and correct beliefs are not always one and the same, and it's a huge fallacy to argue as if they were.

Comment author: [deleted] 28 March 2011 06:38:50PM *  -1 points [-]

Basically, the argument goes that uploads will be able to replace large swathes of normal humans who work on cognitive tasks, such as lawyers, engineers, writers, academics, programmers, etc.

This resembles the "Luddite fallacy", which was debunked by experience, which is to say, had the Luddites been right that the majority of the workforce would be replaced by a much more productive minority working the labor-saving machines (compare: humans would be replaced by much more productive uploads), we would already be living in something like a Hansonian upload dystopia, which we are not.

What instead happened was that the labor force stayed the same and production greatly expanded, and labor reaped a large part of the benefit of the expansion.

Extending what actually happened in the Luddite scenario to the upload scenario, then we might expect the amount of work to be done to expand to fully accomodate the number of people (human and upload) available to do it.

What of the fact that uploads need much less to survive? Won't this mean that they will be willing to work for much less, and therefore drive their human competitors out of business? Well, we in the US already earn far more than we need to barely survive, which is very little. So in a sense we are already modeling the upload scenario with respect to the low requirement to survive. So it is not obvious that uploads will end up working for upload-subsistence-level.

As long as there is incentive to copy, people will copy, and supply will increase until wages go down to upload subsistence level in a wide variety of fields.

But demand will also increase. If you increase the total number of people, it's true that you are increasing the total number of potential producers (sellers), but you are also increasing the total number of consumers (buyers) by the exact same amount. You are simply expanding the population. And we have already seen the effects of this. The population of the US expanded enormously over the past 200 years, and wages have not gone down.

Am I forgetting the low subsistence level of uploads? Won't the heavy competition for jobs reduce salaries to subsistence level? Well, this is what might have been predicted for the same reason in the Luddite scenario, and it turned out not to be the case. Here is an alternative suggestion: if the number of workers increase, say, by a factor of 1000, so that the effective population balloons from 5 billion to 5 trillion, then the work will also increase by that same factor, so that the amount of work done by each person remains the same and the standard of living enjoyed by each person remains the same.

But let's assume that the following is true:

Since the subsistence level of uploads is much cheaper than natural humans, then maintaining a body is going to be ridiculously expensive, and beyond the reach of most people. Unable to support themselves, many people die, leaving mostly the uploads.

Indulge me and let's suppose a billion (non-upload) humans agree to trade only with each other and not with uploads (don't worry, I know about the instability of such arrangements and I'll relax this restriction soon enough, I just want to set up the scenario). In that case, they can continue surviving with an economy just like the pre-upload economy, in which people were after all surviving and doing quite well. Now let's relax the restriction. The humans start trading freely with uploads. We are now in the "free trade" versus "protectionism" scenario, and economists have plenty to say about that, mostly in favor of free trade as being to the mutual benefit of both populations. Vladimir has repeatedly made the point that comparative advantage is not all it's cracked up to be - but neither is it nothing. While it is probable that free trade will put some sectors of the human economy largely out of business (but couldn't they just move to a different sector?) nor was this ever denied by economists arguing for free trade (putting certain sectors largely out of business in one country is after all what must be entailed by the country's population focusing on areas where they have a comparative advantage), free trade does not lead to the entire economy going out of business and everybody starving to death.

By the way, if possible and if it is necessary to survive, I intend to become an upload. Here is my plan for increasing my own productive power beyond that of a single upload, thus increasing my standard of living. I duplicate myself many times, a thousandfold, but with constraints. The thousand copies will remain in existence for, say, an hour subjective time, during which time they will work, and then all will be deleted except for one randomly selected copy. This will not be much like death for the 999 copies; it will be much more like losing memories, memories which are likely to be lost anyway through normal forgetfulness. (See Derek Parfit Reasons and Persons Part 3 for full discussion of personal identity which I essentially agree with.) If I repeat this a few times, I will build up an intuitive expectation of survival and a willingness to keep doing it. Moreover it might be possible to merge some of my memories, minimizing loss of significant memories.

I am not saying that Hanson is wrong. I am just pointing out areas of the argument which seem to me to be incomplete. By the way, it was my understanding that Hanson's dystopia is independent of whether we upload or not. Rather, it is the very nature of life to expand, expand, expand, until a malthusian limit is reached. Now, this argument is quite a bit stronger. But I am here dealing specifically with the upload scenario.

In response to comment by [deleted] on How Safe are Uploads?
Comment author: Vladimir_M 28 March 2011 08:01:25PM *  7 points [-]

Constant:

This resembles the "Luddite fallacy", which was debunked by experience... Extending what actually happened in the Luddite scenario to the upload scenario, then we might expect the amount of work to be done to expand to fully accomodate the number of people (human and upload) available to do it.

This is not a correct comparison. None of the technological advances in human history so far have produced machines capable of replacing human labor across the board at much lower cost. Uploads would be a totally unprecedented development in this regard.

The closest historical analogy is what happened to draft horses after motor transport was invented. The amount of work in pulling things has indeed expanded, but it is no longer possible for a draft horse to earn subsistence, since machines can do it by orders of magnitude cheaper and better.

The economist Nick Rowe wrote an excellent analysis along these lines (see also the very good comment thread):
http://worthwhile.typepad.com/worthwhile_canadian_initi/2011/01/robots-slaves-horses-and-malthus.html

The population of the US expanded enormously over the past 200 years, and wages have not gone down.

That’s because the economic growth and technical progress have been too fast for the slow and fickle human reproduction to catch up. With uploads, in contrast, the population growth necessary to hit the Malthusian limit is possible practically instantaneously -- and there will be incentives in place to make it happen.

As for the remainder of your post, rather than criticizing your reasoning point by point, let me ask you: why didn’t the draft horses benefit from trading with motor transport then, but ended up in slaughterhouses instead? Your entire argument can be reworded as telling an American draft horse circa 1920 that he has no reason to fear displacement by motor vehicles. What is the essential difference when it comes to human labor versus uploads supposed to be?

Comment author: atucker 28 March 2011 03:47:58AM *  11 points [-]

I'm not incredibly familiar with Robin Hanson's arguments;

I'm going to try to summarize them (feedback on how well that works please). One relates to how uploads come to dominate humanity, and another is how ruthless resource exporters come to dominate their section of the universe.

Uploads beating Humans

  1. An upload will be as mentally capable as a human, but faster

  2. An upload will be easy to copy

  3. Uploads require much less to survive

Basically, the argument goes that uploads will be able to replace large swathes of normal humans who work on cognitive tasks, such as lawyers, engineers, writers, academics, programmers, etc.

Imagine a mathematician who has literally 100 times as much time as you do. Where you spend a day on a problem, they have months.

  • Once you have any uploads willing to be duplicated, they will be willing to be duplicated for as many tasks as they can be paid to do.

  • As supply of labor goes up, wages go down.

  • Wages can only go down to subsistence level before you can't push them any lower.

  • As long as there is incentive to copy, people will copy, and supply will increase until wages go down to upload subsistence level in a wide variety of fields. If uploads can control robots, then they number of fields they dominate is even higher.

  • Since the subsistence level of uploads is much cheaper than natural humans, then maintaining a body is going to be ridiculously expensive, and beyond the reach of most people. Unable to support themselves, many people die, leaving mostly the uploads.

Expanders beating Non-expanders

The Nash equilibrium for controlling matter in the universe is to use everything you can to the cause of getting more matter to control. When you're up against an enemy like that, they will have more stuff than you with which to destroy you and repurpose your matter.

Groups which encounter planets and turn as much as they can into probes to do more colonization will wind up reaching and controlling more planets than groups that don't.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 28 March 2011 04:48:37AM *  8 points [-]

I'd say that's a good summary. To complete the grimness of the picture, the vast swarms of uploads toiling for the absolute minimum subsistence would be massively annihilated whenever they'd become even slightly obsolete or otherwise a suboptimal way to use the hardware on which they are running, and a recession in an upload economy would have a similar effect as a bad harvest leading to a cataclysmic famine among Malthusian farmers. As Hanson put it, "When life is cheap, death is cheap as well."

On top of all that, to make things even more ghastly from the perspective of LW ideals, Hanson has made the shrewd observation that in order to make their subsistence more bearable, their behavior more productive and cooperative, and the acceptance of their eventual demise easier, uploads may well end up having their minds indoctrinated with religion and ideology, not trained in LW-style epistemic rationality (beyond what's necessary for their main task, of course).

Comment author: Vladimir_M 27 March 2011 11:34:45PM *  16 points [-]

My question is: why would I support the SIAI instead of directing my money towards the technology needed to better understand and emulate the human brain?

You're probably familiar with Robin Hanson's writings on the economics of uploads. If you accept his arguments -- and I do find them very convincing -- this means that uploads will lead quickly and directly to an extremely grim Malthusian equilibrium. (Though Hanson himself, who accepts the Repugnant Conclusion but sees nothing repugnant about it, wouldn't characterize it as grim. Most people would however find it rather horrible -- including, I think, most people on LW too -- assuming they really understand the implications.)

I'm not at all optimistic about what awaits us if any sort of machine intelligence gets developed, but the upload scenario strikes me as especially dismal.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 27 March 2011 10:30:39PM 0 points [-]

I 'd say that making a living by gambling is ambiguous so far as status is concerned. On one hand, it's using cleverness to win again and again, and on the other, it doesn't have the compliance and stability signaling you get from being a respected professional.

Since the people who are capable of making a living at poker would have a substantial overlap of intelligence and temperament with those who can become professionals, there might well be fewer people going into gambling than could make a living at it.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 27 March 2011 11:21:37PM *  1 point [-]

That is certainly true, but if their grandiose claims are true, it still doesn't explain why they don't spend more of their free time gambling. I mean, I'm having a beer or coffee with someone who claims to be able to earn so much from gambling that, if true, this means that he's paying the opportunity cost of hundreds of dollars an hour for the pleasure of wasting time here with me and my friends instead of going gambling. That just makes no sense at all.

Comment author: [deleted] 27 March 2011 09:22:26PM *  9 points [-]

Whatever the truth might be, either I know a bunch of otherwise honest and down to Earth people who are lying or delusional about this issue, or there is actually a screaming opportunity for making money on easy arbitrage that few people bother to exploit, and even they only partly and incompletely.

Otherwise whip smart people tend to be delusional about gambling. This applies also to the stock market. Gambling is a minefield of meaningless patterns which trigger our pattern detectors. I presume that's a large part of why it's so fun.

Some people reading that will say, "yes, I already know that for most people gambling is a pandora's box of rationality-killing delusion-inducing spurious patterns, I've incorporated into my thinking, so belaboring the point is just wasting my time". But what I have found is that, however much I think I have incorporated that insight into my thinking, I did not incorporate it fully enough.

My guess about your smart acquaintances is that they have been lucky and are delusional. As for why they don't dive into their delusion, quit their day jobs and destroy their life savings, which is the point of inconsistency that's puzzling you, it may be that on some level they suspect that they may be delusional.

Point of clarification: I am not saying that it is impossible to do what is proposed here, which is to systematically study the game and come up with a winning strategy. This has been done on multiple occasions. My guess about your acquaintances is based on your describing them as "casual" players.

Reading the discussion here, I got the impression, which is consistent with my prior expectations, that with the systematic method proposed in a given hour you only win, on average and with a lot of variance, a small fraction of the amount that you bet. Whereas what you seem to be saying is that your friends are claiming enormous wins. Such big wins are probably mostly due to luck. The drip, drip, drip of slow and unsteady profitability of a systematic method applied over an extended period, does not seem to be what your friends are talking about. In short, their wins as you relay their descriptions sound like free money, whereas the systematic method (which is all I really trust to work) sounds like a job.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 27 March 2011 11:16:06PM *  4 points [-]

Otherwise whip smart people tend to be delusional about gambling. This applies also to the stock market.

Yes, in fact it happens that some of the same people I know claim to be able to beat the stock market too. I think your theory is probably true: both in gambling and on the stock market, people get deluded by occasional lucky windfalls and fail to keep track of the big picture. Yet few of them actually get deluded to the point where they'll go ahead and bankrupt themselves; the others remain rational at some level and refuse to actually put really significant sums where their mouth is, although they will brag around about their wins, possibly talking under honest delusions (but not actually acting on them, as with most beliefs that are held for signaling value).

Of course, as the EMH predicts, being smart and hard working people, if they really applied themselves to gambling systematically and full-time, they would probably be able to squeeze out something of roughly the same magnitude as what they earn in their existing day jobs. (But certainly nothing like these spectacular wins they're talking about.)

Comment author: Nornagest 27 March 2011 09:34:33PM *  7 points [-]

One of my housemates in college was able to maintain a fairly decent middle-class income playing poker, starting from a few books on professional play and a few months of experience (as well as a preexisting Magic: The Gathering habit, which may have provided some crossover skills). He was a fairly bright guy, but not a genius and not unusually rational outside the game, so it can be done; I've got a few theories as to why more people don't.

First, and probably most importantly, playing poker professionally is a job. It's often tedious, it's emotionally demanding, and since it relies on subverting the instincts that make gambling fun, it usually isn't. My friend spent ten or twelve hours a day playing, often on four tables at once, and while he was making about the same money that I now do in software, I never got the impression that he was working any less hard for it.

Second, it's not a reliable source of income over the short term. The variance in day-to-day take is astounding: some days my friend would stagger out of his room thousands of dollars the poorer, either because he'd gotten in a bad emotional state and lost rationality (the jargon is "on tilt") or just because of a run of bad luck. Indeed, professional poker players are expected to blow through their entire playing fund on a semi-regular basis. I imagine that a lot of people wouldn't want to live that way; financial stability is itself a net positive for most, as evidenced by the existence of insurance companies.

Finally, it's low-status. "Professional gambler" has a certain rough-edged glamour to it, but it occupies sort of the same mental space as "private investigator" or even "soldier of fortune": exciting but not respectable. Status considerations being as important as they are with regard to career choices, it wouldn't surprise me if this played an important role in limiting the number of people playing professionally.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 27 March 2011 11:01:15PM *  5 points [-]

Actually, the story of your housemate is precisely what the efficient markets hypothesis predicts: if you try hard to squeeze out some arbitrage profits from an efficient market, the profit you can expect will be roughly the same as what you could earn with other pursuits, including wage labor, given your talents and the amount of effort expended. So I'm not at all surprised to hear it; in fact, it would be surprising if the amount of arbitrage profits available were much less than that.

What does confuse me are the stories of people who claim that the arbitrage profits they can supposedly squeeze out are far above what they earn in their day jobs, as well as their unwillingness to spend more money and effort in gambling, which seems strikingly irrational if their stories are taken at face value.

Comment author: gwern 27 March 2011 07:24:34PM *  10 points [-]

One of the things that troubles me about poker is that it seems like a major time sink and a deeply unhealthy lifestyle if you just want to calibrate yourself; but if you are interested in making some money as well or even making it your livelihood, it's still troubling because online poker is a negative expected sum game which is receiving a lot of media exposure.

Just now the New York Times is running yet another profile of a young geeky guy making and losing millions at online poker. If this were the first one, that'd be one thing, but I've seen quite a few such articles - here, on Hacker News, in my RSS reader.

It's starting to trip my general 'bubble' pattern-recognition system. This reminds me of the original Internet Bubble where you would read about young people making ludicrous sums for crap work or no real reason at all, and so everyone piled into computer science programs (or into law schools, for that matter).

Comment author: Vladimir_M 27 March 2011 08:57:00PM *  6 points [-]

One of the things that troubles me about poker is that it seems like a major time sink and a deeply unhealthy lifestyle if you just want to calibrate yourself; but if you are interested in making some money as well or even making it your livelihood, it's still troubling because online poker is a negative expected sum game which is receiving a lot of media exposure.

I'm frankly confused about the whole issue of poker (both online and real-life). I know a lot of smart people who claim to have made ridiculous amounts of money playing poker casually in their free time. Judging from what they're saying, it would seem like there are so many suckers around playing for real money that a highly intelligent person willing to study the game can exercise a ridiculous amount of arbitrage.

But if I accept all their stories at face value, then why on Earth do all these smart people toil at difficult jobs for mediocre salaries when they could be earning much more money gambling? In particular, why do even all these people I know who boast about their earnings at poker still maintain difficult and demanding day jobs? (Of course, they can reply that gambling is only a short-term opportunity while the career is more important in the long run, but they could still invest more time in gambling while scaling down their careers temporarily with a clear net profit. And even if that's not possible, with such vast profit opportunities, one would expect they'd be playing far more even in their presently available free time.)

I don't know what to think of all this. Whatever the truth might be, either I know a bunch of otherwise honest and down to Earth people who are lying or delusional about this issue, or there is actually a screaming opportunity for making money on easy arbitrage that few people bother to exploit, and even they only partly and incompletely. Both possibilities seem to me highly implausible (but the latter more so).

Comment author: cousin_it 27 March 2011 10:36:10AM *  11 points [-]

Our moral intuitions in fact do a very good job of arbitrating and coordinating human action given the unpredictability of the real world and the complexity of the game-theoretic issues involved, which utilitarianism is usually incapable of handling. (This is one of the main reasons why attempting explicit utilitarian calculations about real-life problems is one of the surest ways to divorce one's thinking from reality.)

If you have many convincing examples of this, you should write a post and sway a lot of people from utilitarianism.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 27 March 2011 08:16:02PM 3 points [-]

Yes, that is actually one of my writing ideas on which I keep procrastinating.

In response to Inverse Speed
Comment author: Vladimir_M 27 March 2011 09:23:51AM *  14 points [-]

If you're confused by this kind of thing, you could probably give your intuitions a good training by studying the basics of electrical circuits (i.e. Ohm's law, Kirchoff's laws, the relations between current, voltage, resistance, and power, the Thevenin-Norton transformations, the series and parallel combinations of resistors, etc.). This will stretch your brain very nicely with a whole bunch of problems where you must be careful about what's being held constant or otherwise your intuition leads you into awful contradictions. (For example, power is proportional to resistance if you hold the current constant, but inversely proportional to it if you hold the voltage constant.) The concepts are very simple mathematically and don't require any background beyond very basic physics.

Comment author: [deleted] 27 March 2011 07:28:37AM 4 points [-]

I would be interested to hear, from those who regard themselves as very rational and not afraid to boast about it, how confused people are about these issues.

What is the rational response to all of the scientific proof that our moral intuition is inconsistent? Is it definitely necessary to resolve the inconsistencies? If we can describe some resolutions as "in favor of idealism" and others as resolutions "in favor of cynicism," which kind is best supported by rationality?

Many common life experiences also reveal inconsistencies in your moral intuitions. I have a feeling that there's a general trend of people resolving inconsistencies on the side of cynicism as they age -- for instance older people are more right-wing than younger people.

"Shut up and multiply" I think summarizes a resolution on the side of idealism.

Who's right? Or tell me why this isn't a useful way to look at the problem.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 27 March 2011 08:50:19AM *  10 points [-]

What is the rational response to all of the scientific proof that our moral intuition is inconsistent?

In my opinion, the trolley problems and the Singerian arguments discussed in this video are far from sufficient to show that our moral intuition is actually inconsistent (though it probably is). These examples lead to problematic results only under naive utilitarian assumptions, which are not only unrealistic, but also turn out to be much more incoherent than human folk morality on closer examination.

Our moral intuitions in fact do a very good job of arbitrating and coordinating human action given the unpredictability of the real world and the complexity of the game-theoretic issues involved, which utilitarianism is usually incapable of handling. (This is one of the main reasons why attempting explicit utilitarian calculations about real-life problems is one of the surest ways to divorce one's thinking from reality.) Singerians and other fervent utilitarians are enamored with their system so much that they see human deviations from it as ipso facto pathological and problematic, but as with other ideologues, when the world fails to conform to their system, it's usually a problem with the latter, not the former.

Comment author: XiXiDu 26 March 2011 08:31:05PM 2 points [-]

Last time this subject came up, you seemed to be embarking on learning programming through Haskell. If that's what you did, could you write about your experiences?

Read up on it, decide that it is worth it, gather tutorials and books and then postpone it because there have been and still are more important and in some cases necessary things to learn. And I didn't really want to learn programming, I still don't. I want to be able to read, understand and appreciate code and algorithms in general. I don't want to become a poet, I want to be able to read and appreciate poetry. My main interest right now is to survey human knowledge and search for unknown unknowns to be able to judge the current state of affairs and put everything into perspective. Being able to read code is like learning a foreign language, it opens up a whole new world of knowledge and installs a new cognitive toolkit. I just don't have the time and resources to concentrate enough on a single area to become proficient enough to make valuable additions to that area. And I don't think it is even necessary to be able to contribute yourself to a field to judge its importance and tell apart what is valuable from what is worthless or just wrong.

I ask myself, what do I want and how do I achieve it? What am I doing and why am I doing it? How do the answers to those questions align? What I am doing is to survey the landscape of human knowledge to establish an informed set of achievable desires. If I don't know what is out there, what is possible, how can I tell that what I want is desirable? I am trying to find out what I ought to want, which set of desires is consistent, achievable and does yield the maximal possible satisfaction given the nature of reality.

I already know the LW answer, figure out friendly AI which is then going to figure out what you want. If I'd fully accept that answer there would be no sense for me to learn to read code at all right now because I don't expect to be able to earn more money that way, money that I could then donate to the SIAI. The only reason to learn to read code that would be left then would be as recreational activity.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 27 March 2011 02:52:09AM 6 points [-]

And I didn't really want to learn programming, I still don't. I want to be able to read, understand and appreciate code and algorithms in general. I don't want to become a poet, I want to be able to read and appreciate poetry.

That's like trying to understand math without ever solving any problems with your own hand. It's not a viable way to understand anything, though I suppose it may be a viable way to fool yourself into thinking that you understand things.

Comment author: knb 26 March 2011 11:41:57PM 2 points [-]

The key point here is that the lifestyle being subsidized, as awful as it may be, is still less awful than what anyone attracted to it would be doing otherwise.

Really? You don't think anyone would decide to go through the agony of detoxification and recovery because they have to endure more of the negative effects of their addiction? No one is at that marginal point of overcoming their addiction?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 27 March 2011 12:25:08AM 2 points [-]

Seeing your reply to FAWS (for which you forgot to credit Megan McArdle), I think you're rushing too quickly to analogize a correct insight from one problem to a different one. It may be that unlike in the other case, the number of people on the relevant margin is far smaller here, possibly negligibly small, and this does sound plausible to me given the nature of the problem. You are of course welcome to disagree, but note that I merely said that I find this plausible, whereas you're coming out with very confident assertions without evidence.

Moreover, with the example you cited (subsidizing illegitimacy through welfare), there is the additional problem that one of the main costs of the behavior in question used to be the strong social stigma attached to it. For this reason, subsidizing it caused a runaway feedback process in which the increased incidence of illegitimacy due to the subsidy increasingly eroded the stigma, thus further lowering the cost, until the situation settled in a wholly different equilibrium. I don't think any such runaway feedback could occur in the wethouse case.

Comment author: knb 26 March 2011 10:45:09PM 5 points [-]

You get more of the behavior you subsidize. Opposed.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 26 March 2011 10:59:12PM *  6 points [-]

The key point here is that the lifestyle being subsidized, as awful as it may be, is still less awful than what anyone attracted to it would be doing otherwise. If true, and I find it plausible, this would invalidate your objection.

Comment author: [deleted] 26 March 2011 08:27:12PM *  6 points [-]

I'll support my case with Paraguay, one of the countries listed as being high inequality/high crime in a list in a recent comment. In Paraguay you can easily buy a stolen car for relatively little (thus participating in a crime). At the same time, your car is likely to get stolen.

So, what do people rationally do in this situation? There is, first of all, an incentive against owning any car at all because of the likelihood that it will be stolen. But this is especially strong as an incentive against paying full price to legally own a car. Because stolen cars are significantly cheaper, this gives you a strong incentive to favor buying a stolen car over a legally owned car.

I do not see any significant status element specifically tied to owning a stolen car in Paraguay. There is of course always a status element tied to owning a car, but it is not tied specifically to the crime. On the contrary, the rich in Paraguay, who are able to afford gated, protected areas to keep their cars, presumably tend to legally own cars (I infer that this is the case from personal observation, because the cars of the rich that I've seen look new; the stolen cars that my non-rich acquaintances own look pretty beat up and old). That being the case, it is presumably high status to own a car legally and low status to own a car illegally. I don't pry, but this is what I gather.

So the widespread corruption of Paraguayan society on this matter has to do with practical realities, not with status, on my analysis. Your argument is that only a tiny minority benefit from engaging in crime. But it seems to me that the ordinary Paraguayan benefits from buying a stolen car, thus participating in the crime. So there seems to be a serious gap in your argument somewhere.

Paraguay is a country in which the government is utterly corrupt. That being the case, the people are not protected - they are essentially on their own. The government is kleptocratic. I was told the sad story of someone whose business was simply seized by a member of the government. In this country, many of the rich are rich because of their connections with the government. And many of the poor are poor because they are completely unprotected from predation and therefore have little incentive to stand out.

In Paraguay, I heard that Korean grocers (who run by far the best small groceries) are filthy because they allegedly sleep in the store. If they do (which, from the one case I know, a Korean grocer who is a friend of a cousin, they do not, though as I recall they sleep in the same building just above the store) it may be because it is the only way to protect their property. Here, by the way, I have an example of a sub-population (Koreans) which is disproportionately successful and which is resented by the larger population.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Crime and punishment
Comment author: Vladimir_M 26 March 2011 09:21:17PM *  3 points [-]

You're right -- my above comment was too specifically concerned with the U.S. and other developed nations. In places that are poorer and where law enforcement is much less strong and reliable, financial incentives for crime may well be at the forefront even for low-level crooks.

On the other hand, it's also important to note that when some laws are enforced very weakly or not at all, the very notion of "crime" becomes blurry, and what would clearly be crimes under decent law enforcement may effectively become just regular customary behavior expected from everyone. I find your account of the stolen car market in Paraguay really interesting; from what you say, it appears that since the legal enforcement of property in cars is completely broken, they have been replaced with a peculiar customary system where cars just change hands liberally and randomly. In such a situation, I'm not sure if I would classify buying a stolen car as crime.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 26 March 2011 09:01:07PM *  1 point [-]

One thing I'd emphasize is that absolute beginners are often intimidated by the tools themselves. Faced with the incomprehensibly obscure console commands or IDEs with myriads of mysterious-looking buttons and dialog boxes, it can be hard to figure out how to even start writing simple beginner-level programs, especially if the language itself requires that even the simplest programs must include some obscure-looking code for initialization, declarations, imports, etc. Thankfully, these days you can probably find good tutorials on the web that should make these initial steps less scary.

As for the beginning language, that strongly depends on what your goals are. To become a good generalist, I would recommend learning C and assembly (for whatever architecture; x86 is probably not a good choice for beginners compared to e.g. MIPS), and also studying the inner workings of compilers (i.e. how parsers, optimizers, and code generators work, and also how various high-level language constructs map onto the concrete memory layout and machine code patterns). When faced with a novel language, this should allow you to immediately figure out what's the rationale behind its various features that would otherwise look arbitrary and strange. Also, in my experience, moving from C to almost any imperative language, including object-oriented languages, is a fairly easy transition. (I have very little experience with functional languages, but these also have to run on top of virtual machines written in imperative ones.)

Of course, if you have more specific goals in mind, like focusing on web programming or numerical calculations, a different and less generalist approach is probably advisable.

Comment author: [deleted] 26 March 2011 07:33:35PM *  2 points [-]

I propose restructuring the causal relationships implicit in the description. If there is a society in which crime pays well, then as a consequence of this people will become rich from crime, and therefore there will be unjustified inequality. But at the same time, since crime pays well, then it will be rational to commit crime. Both of these are effects of the same cause, which is that crime pays well. Because people are rational and keen observers of their immediate environment (but not such keen observers of society in general), I expect these causal relationships to greatly outweigh the supposed causal relationship between observing that there is unjustified inequality and, as a consequence, deciding to commit crime. People respond well to their immediate environment, to the incentives that they are faced with. If crime pays, it pays locally (i.e. if an individual person commits a crime then that pays that individual person), and people will respond well to these (local) incentives. This response has nothing in particular to do with the larger picture (which is that inequality is unjustified).

If you merely make the society-wide observation that inequality appears unjustified, this does not by itself give you any program for profiting from crime yourself. It does not give you a recipe for profiting from breaking the rules. Whereas if you see an opportunity that you can act on, by for example observing that people are profiting from activities which you could participate in (such as burglary, mugging, or what have you), then this gives you an incentive to participate.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Crime and punishment
Comment author: Vladimir_M 26 March 2011 08:07:49PM *  7 points [-]

I think you're wrong to focus on the financial incentives for crime. In reality, the only criminals who earn a lot of money are high-ranking bosses of organized crime and white-collar criminals in the business world, with a few very rare exceptions (like e.g. spectacular heists or super-high-skilled cat burglars). Ordinary criminals don't earn significantly more money than their legally employed peers coming from a similar social class, not even without adjustment for the associated risks -- and taking up crime expecting to become a big mafioso is about as realistic as taking up computer programming expecting to become the next Bill Gates (i.e. not impossible, but vanishingly unlikely for a typical entrant into the profession).

The key issue here, in my opinion, is the status one gains by engaging in crime versus legal work. For concrete people, this is primarily an artifact of the status relations in their own social group, rather than the society at large. In this regard, you are correct to observe that if crime pays, it pays locally -- but rather than the financial gain, the key issue is whether crime pays locally in terms of status gain in the potential criminal's community and social network.

Comment author: Morendil 26 March 2011 06:47:47PM 1 point [-]

The causal connection, however, is at best controversial.

Agreed: it cannot be established from correlation only.

do you actually believe that inequality proportioned to merit is likely to be less severe than otherwise

That would be overreaching. No, I just point out that extreme inequalities that do not appear to have any sound justification make a fertile breeding ground for crime. Extreme inequality of this kind constitutes "grounds for thinking that others are not complying with the rules", and if you think that others are not complying with the rules you may reason that it is rational not to comply with them yourself, since complying with the rules hurts you and does not benefit society as a whole (because the benefits of complying only accrue to a society where by and large everyone complies).

Comment author: Vladimir_M 26 March 2011 07:19:13PM *  2 points [-]

Extreme inequality of this kind constitutes "grounds for thinking that others are not complying with the rules", and if you think that others are not complying with the rules you may reason that it is rational not to comply with them yourself, since complying with the rules hurts you and does not benefit society as a whole (because the benefits of complying only accrue to a society where by and large everyone complies).

I agree with this -- in fact, it's actually a pretty good description of some places I've lived in. However, it should be noted that what exactly is perceived as "complying with the rules" is highly culture-specific. (Of course, what counts as "merit" is also highly debatable.)

All that said, when searching for the causes of crime, rather than focusing on the overall level of social inequality, I think a more fruitful approach is to ask whether there exist significant numbers of people for whom turning to crime offers a better chance of raising their status than any legitimate occupation, and if yes, why exactly it is so. Of course, the answers to these questions won't be completely independent of the overall social inequality, but this approach, in my opinion, makes it possible to analyze the situation with much more detail and accuracy than the crude idea that crime rates can be pushed up or down just by changing some measure of income inequality used by economists.

Comment author: Morendil 26 March 2011 08:55:34AM 2 points [-]

Does someone have links to literature on whether inequality causes crime?

There are links all over the place to the effect that the correlation between inequality and violent crime is well attested. There is a lot of quibbling about what kind of inequality correlates with what kind of crime, but the basic link seems sound.

On average, are more dollars stolen by rich criminals, or by poor criminals?

Rich, but does that matter? I'm not arguing that poverty causes crime, rather that inequality does. Whoever is a beneficiary of the inequality tries to maintain it, while whoever is a victim of it tries to correct it. If the inequality is modest and proportioned to merit, we can expect that both will remain within the law in their efforts; if the inequality is disproportionate, both will have an incentive to resort to extraordinary (and possibly illicit) measures.

I'm not denying the existence of middle class crime, but it's clear that inequality provides lots and lots of opportunity for crime; the greater the inequality, the more the opportunity.

In Mexico today, the body count in the drug wars

Yup, drugs supplied by poor countries to rich countries: inequality in law enforcement (which comes down to economic inequality) amplifying existing economic inequality.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 26 March 2011 05:13:10PM *  4 points [-]

There are links all over the place to the effect that the correlation between inequality and violent crime is well attested. There is a lot of quibbling about what kind of inequality correlates with what kind of crime, but the basic link seems sound.

The causal connection, however, is at best controversial. (Though of course it's fashionable and high-status to assert things along the lines of "inequality causes crime," because it sounds enlightened and caring.) For one, there are historical examples of societies with extreme inequalities and nevertheless extremely low crime rates -- late Victorian Britain, to take a notable example, and most of the 19th century Western Europe in general. And certainly there are numerous ways how the correlation between crime rates and various measures of inequality could emerge without any causal connection.

If the inequality is modest and proportioned to merit, we can expect that both will remain within the law in their efforts; if the inequality is disproportionate, both will have an incentive to resort to extraordinary (and possibly illicit) measures.

Am I misreading you, or do you actually believe that inequality proportioned to merit is likely to be less severe than otherwise? What do you base this conclusion on?

Comment author: Dreaded_Anomaly 25 March 2011 10:05:57PM 0 points [-]

I agree that the present-day U.S. prisons are absolutely horrible. On the other hand, their awfulness is an important element of deterrence, so it's not entirely clear what the net consequences of making them less awful would be.

With such high recidivism rates, though, deterrence doesn't seem to be working too well.

As I think about this further, it occurs to me that maybe the deterrent effect partially results from people's fear of the unknown. Once a person has been in prison, even with its awfulness, it might not seem as bad. (There's also the problem that many repeat offenders come from environments so unstable that prison hardly seems bad by comparison, no matter what.)

It is also unclear what would be the cost of keeping such a large prison population in much better conditions.

One problem is the unreasonable size of the population itself, due in large part to the absurdity of U.S. drug laws and penalties. The large size of the prison population serves to point out that we should be trying to improve the system in a variety of ways. Also, just to clarify, when I made the Rawlsian argument about prisons, I was referring more to the incarceration vs. rehabilitation debate than the awfulness of conditions in general.

On the whole, it seems to me that what evidence exists suggests that the harsh approach emphasizing deterrence and incapacitation has so far been vindicated much better in practice than the attempts to make rehabilitation feasible on a mass scale.

Yes, I agree, but we should note that deterrence and incapacitation are much easier to implement effectively than rehabilitation. Locking people up is something we've known how to do for millennia; we're not quite as practiced at understanding human psychology and neurology.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 25 March 2011 11:02:37PM *  5 points [-]

With such high recidivism rates, though, deterrence doesn't seem to be working too well.

Not necessarily. Even very effective deterrence that drastically cuts crime may coexist with high recidivism rates, since those who ever get imprisoned in the first place are those for whom deterrence is less effective. A high percentage of repeat offenders among former prisoners doesn't mean that there isn't a huge population of potential offenders that are successfully deterred altogether. (Whether this is true is of course arguable.)

One problem is the unreasonable size of the population itself, due in large part to the absurdity of U.S. drug laws and penalties.

I don't think "absurdity" is the right word. Drug laws are among those selectively enforced sweeping provisions that give the authorities a broad enough latitude to use them as pretext for enforcement of unwritten de facto norms which would be nowadays found unconstitutional or at least perceived as scandalous if spelled out explicitly, even though all respectable people hypocritically expect them to be enforced for their own benefit. Here I especially have in mind those norms that used to be enforced more openly through anti-vagrancy, anti-loitering, and similar laws. These are no longer considered constitutional, but respectable people still want the authorities to keep the underclass away from them.

In a sense, drug laws are for the underclass what the insider trading, arcane tax violations, conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and similar vague and sweeping laws are for the rich.

As I think about this further, it occurs to me that maybe the deterrent effect partially results from people's fear of the unknown. Once a person has been in prison, even with its awfulness, it might not seem as bad.

Also, a significant element of any criminal punishment is the subsequent stigma of having been subjected to it, both informal and official (as reflected in background checks). This factor is clearly less relevant for repeated imprisonment.

Comment author: Dreaded_Anomaly 25 March 2011 03:46:47AM 3 points [-]

Yes, of course that behind the veil of ignorance you wouldn't like to be among the 1% who are in prisons, but significantly reducing that number may well be feasible only at the cost of making the lives of the remaining 99% much worse on average. Now, maybe you believe that this is not the case, but that requires a separate argument, and it certainly can't be asserted as self-evident.

I meant that you wouldn't like to be among the 1% in current prisons, rather than any number of better-structured alternatives. Given the various studies of and statistics on the current system, it doesn't seem likely that this is the best we can do.

Also, high rates of recidivism can be an argument in favor of longer prison terms (especially for repeat offenders), if deterrence and incapacitation are recognized as the primary motives for imprisonment, rather than rehabilitation.

It can be, but I think that ignores the effects, psychological and otherwise, that current prisons seem to have on inmates. It seems like the system tends to encourage recidivism. Longer terms in an otherwise-unchanged system would be unlikely to accomplish professed goals better than larger reforms could.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 25 March 2011 09:49:36PM *  4 points [-]

I agree that the present-day U.S. prisons are absolutely horrible. On the other hand, their awfulness is an important element of deterrence, so it's not entirely clear what the net consequences of making them less awful would be. It is also unclear what would be the cost of keeping such a large prison population in much better conditions.

Also, I'm far from convinced by the literature claiming that prisons encourage recidivism significantly on the net. There are certainly plausible scenarios of how this could happen, but I don't know how statistically significant they really are in practice. On the whole, it seems to me that what evidence exists suggests that the harsh approach emphasizing deterrence and incapacitation has so far been vindicated much better in practice than the attempts to make rehabilitation feasible on a mass scale.

That said, I believe that the present system is heavily distorted by some biases that seem rather weird from a historical perspective, like for example the irrational revulsion against corporal punishment. One of my pet theories is that the present bias against torture ends up making prisons more torturous on the net, since it robs the authorities of effective means for enforcing prison discipline. (I elaborated on this theory in an OB comment a while ago.)

Comment author: handoflixue 25 March 2011 08:38:14PM 2 points [-]

A sufficiently long term (i.e. life sentence) does guarantee a ~0% recidivism rate. There are obviously other factors to consider, but if the primary goal is simply to reduce recidivism, longer sentences do have the benefit of simply reducing opportunities to commit a second (or third, or fourth...) crime.

I personally feel that this would be a terrible solution, especially given the financial costs involved. I'd argue that the goal is to make society safe at the lowest cost, since the saved costs can then (presumably) be spent on something that further helps society.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 25 March 2011 08:59:49PM *  1 point [-]

I'd argue that the goal is to make society safe at the lowest cost, since the saved costs can then (presumably) be spent on something that further helps society.

This suggests wide application of death penalty as an attractive option. Historically, English law took this approach, prescribing death penalty even for petty theft and similar offenses that would nowadays be seen as not too serious. (This changed with a series of reforms in the first half of the 19th century.)

Of course, the problem with death penalty is the irreversibility of the punishment in case of wrong conviction, and also that it gives criminals the incentive to murder at will once they've already done something that draws the death penalty (and to fight like cornered rats when being captured). However, my impression is that the old English system worked pretty well.

(Also, the problem with the death penalty as practiced in modern-day U.S. is that the amount of time and effort involved in the bureaucratic work that is necessary to execute someone is so vast that it ends up being more expensive than life imprisonment in practice. But this could of course be easily changed given the political will to do so.)

In response to Crime and punishment
Comment author: Dreaded_Anomaly 25 March 2011 03:11:02AM *  14 points [-]

My understanding of prison is that, despite much talk about rehabilitation, it essentially serves the function of exile. When a person breaks the rules of the society, society forces em to leave. These days, just about all land belongs to one society or its neighbors, and it's bad form for one society to send its criminals to a neighboring society. Instead of exile, then, societies lock people up to keep them away from everything. People form a society and set up rules, so a person who violates those rules gives up eir position in the society and the right to participate freely in it, i.e. the right not to be imprisoned.

Putting all the (convicted) criminals together in one place, given the understanding that most of them will rejoin society at some point, is a pretty bad method of actually reducing crime. The typical prison environment is one which delays or even reverses an inmate's apparent moral development (see e.g. this study by Peter Scharf, a student of Lawrence Kohlberg), so likely it will actually make things worse. This has been demonstrated in studies (like this one), which showed recidivism at over 60% and rising in the U.S.

I do think that people are trying to be fair in a Rawlsian sense, in that they're acting to enforce the social contract and punish violations, i.e. crimes. Unfortunately, the typical prison environment is structured based on a very naive and shallow sense of justice and fairness. A person generally doesn't decide to commit a crime spontaneously; there are a large variety of external factors, as well as the uncontrollable internal factors you describe. It's fairly straightforward to apply Rawls' veil of ignorance and realize that "you" (i.e. the arbitrary individual you could be) would not want to be an inmate in our current prison system, and the likelihood of that as things are today is fairly high (one of every 100 U.S. adults is in prison). Couple that with negative empirical results as described above, and it becomes apparent that the failure is not one of Rawlsian justice in principle, but one of its implementation by those who aren't thoroughly considering the issue. (They might simply be following convention, or they might be more concerned with appearances.)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 25 March 2011 03:36:38AM *  3 points [-]

I agree with the "prison as exile" view. (Transportation was an interesting historical institution somewhere between the two.) However, I don't see the logic behind the Rawlsian argument. Yes, of course that behind the veil of ignorance you wouldn't like to be among the 1% who are in prisons, but significantly reducing that number may well be feasible only at the cost of making the lives of the remaining 99% much worse on average. Now, maybe you believe that this is not the case, but that requires a separate argument, and it certainly can't be asserted as self-evident.

Also, high rates of recidivism can be an argument in favor of longer prison terms (especially for repeat offenders), if deterrence and incapacitation are recognized as the primary motives for imprisonment, rather than rehabilitation.

Comment author: PhilGoetz 25 March 2011 01:48:04AM 0 points [-]

I'm not sure what exactly you mean by "attached in a normative way" here.

The opposite of whatever you meant when you said "detached from reality".

Comment author: Vladimir_M 25 March 2011 02:54:37AM *  0 points [-]

This might be a misunderstanding then. What I meant by "detached from reality" is that attempts to do explicit utilitarian calculations for practical problems almost invariably end up working with unrealistic models and thus producing worthless and misguided conclusions, even if we agree that theoretical premises of utilitarianism are sound (not that I do). In contrast, the regular folk virtue ethics does produce workable guidelines in practice, and in this regard it is attached to reality. But what does the qualifier "attached [to reality] in a normative way" add to that observation?

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 25 March 2011 12:36:42AM 11 points [-]

I think this is what people are complaining about when they complain that "status" is being used isomorphically to "magic".

Comment author: Vladimir_M 25 March 2011 12:46:39AM *  10 points [-]

While Eugine's comment could benefit from some clarification and refinement, I think you're wrong to dismiss it as worthless. The status (or whatever similar term you want to use) assigned to enjoyment of sex versus enjoyment of punishment is definitely a culture-specific thing. (I can easily imagine a culture that, unlike ours, extols sexual asceticism along with righteous cruelty, and some historical examples aren't too far off.) This certainly influences the choice of values that people would like to see perpetuated.

Comment author: PhilGoetz 24 March 2011 11:38:52PM *  1 point [-]

I would say, rather: Approaches like virtue ethics are collections of heuristics that can be used to verify a utilitarian ethics. A utilitarian approach that does not match up with these collections, does not conform to any common human ethical system.

That doesn't make virtue ethics superior. It's more observational (empirical), while a utilitarian approach can be more theoretical. A utilitarian approach has more coverage. Anyone trying to deal with the future will find utilitarian approaches more valuable than will people studying the past.

(The human ethical system is attached to reality - but is it attached in a normative way?)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 25 March 2011 12:22:38AM 0 points [-]

I would say, rather: Approaches like virtue ethics are collections of heuristics that can be used to verify a utilitarian ethics. A utilitarian approach that does not match up with these collections, does not conform to any common human ethical system.

There is another important point: a utilitarian may conclude that given imperfect information and limited ability to predict the consequences of acts reliably, it's usually impossible to do meaningful explicit utility calculations, so that the best way to guide one's action are heuristics such as virtue ethics (which corresponds closely with the intuitive folk ethics that everyone uses in real life anyway). I had this in mind when I wrote about utilitarianism "reducing" (probably not a good choice of word) to other ethical systems.

(The human ethical system is attached to reality - but is it attached in a normative way?)

I'm not sure what exactly you mean by "attached in a normative way" here.

In response to Crime and punishment
Comment author: Vladimir_M 24 March 2011 10:52:04PM *  4 points [-]

The most-favorable interpretation I can come up with is that Snead believes that justice should always be fair. Everyone should get the same chances; everyone should get the same punishment for the same crime.

There is certainly a powerful slippery slope argument here. The norm that ties well-defined punishments to specific deeds is a strong focal point. In such a situation, it's impossible to move away from this point in carefully measured steps in order to maximize some abstract metric. Once the system has moved away from it, there will be strong pressures to move it even further, motivated by all kinds of strong interests, so it's likely to end up in another (possibly quite awful) focal point, not where that abstract metric says it should be.

(Snead, of course, is assuming much more in the long list from the quoted paragraph.)

In response to Crime and punishment
Comment author: Marius 24 March 2011 10:17:10PM 2 points [-]

SilasBarta has half the answer, which is that public punishment of criminal A is excellent for deterring law-abiding citizen B from committing crimes.

The second half of the answer is that most people believe in justice. Justice makes little sense from a Utililitarian perspective (except that public justice deters others), but it is a commonly held belief that bad deeds actually do deserve punishment regardless of the utilitarian function involved. The belief exists not only in most societies, but also among most intelligent animals (particularly primates). Now, a utilitarian may want to discard this evolutionary baggage, but to do so will be very politically difficult.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 24 March 2011 10:36:11PM *  3 points [-]

Justice makes little sense from a Utililitarian perspective (except that public justice deters others), but it is a commonly held belief that bad deeds actually do deserve punishment regardless of the utilitarian function involved.

It doesn't make sense from the utilitarian perspective of an omnipotent God centrally planning everything. However, in a situation where individual actors have some degree of autonomy so that higher-order game-theoretic effects are relevant, and where nobody has perfect information and foresight, it makes plenty of sense even for a strict utilitarian.

(This is one of the main reasons why I see no value in utilitarianism, since attempts to apply it that don't reduce to other approaches like virtue ethics almost inevitably end up detached from reality.)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 24 March 2011 06:52:03PM *  20 points [-]

David Friedman said that you should be immediately suspicious of any anecdote good enough to survive on its literary merits. It's a very good heuristic, since real-life events are rarely structured in a way that makes for a fun plot. Even if the core of the story is true, people retelling it usually have an irresistible urge to improve its literary qualities at the expense of accuracy.

That said, I'm surprised that Tyler Cowen would fall for this one. It really raises all the red flags.

Comment author: [deleted] 24 March 2011 02:57:24AM 0 points [-]

A lot of the "nay philosophy" end up doing philosophy, even while they continue to say "nay philosophy". So I have a hard time taking the opinion at face value.

Moreover it's not like there is one kind of thinking, philosophy, and another kind of thinking, non-philosophy. Any kind of evidence or argument could in principle be employed by someone calling himself a philosopher - or, inversely, by someone calling himself a non-philosopher. If you suddenly have a bright idea and start developing it into an essay, I submit that you don't necessarily know whether, once the idea has fully bloomed, it will be considered philosophy or non-philosophy.

I don't know whether it's true that science used to be considered a subtopic of philosophy ("natural philosophy"), but it seems entirely plausible that it was all philosophy but that at some point there was a terminological exodus, when physicists stopped calling themselves philosophers. In that older, more inclusive sense, then anyone who says "nay philosophy" is also saying "nay science". Keeping that in mind, what we now call "philosophy" might instead be called, "what's left of philosophy after the great terminological exodus".

Of course "what's left" is also called "the dregs". In light of that, what we all "philosophy" might instead be called "the dregs of philosophy".

Comment author: Vladimir_M 24 March 2011 03:25:51AM *  0 points [-]

I don't know whether it's true that science used to be considered a subtopic of philosophy ("natural philosophy"), but it seems entirely plausible that it was all philosophy but that at some point there was a terminological exodus, when physicists stopped calling themselves philosophers.

That is exactly true. The old term for what we nowadays call "natural science" was "natural philosophy." There are still relics of this old terminology, most notably that in English the title "doctor of philosophy" (or the Latin version thereof) is still used by physicists and other natural scientists. The "terminological exodus" you refer to happened only in the 19th century.

Comment author: Cyan 24 March 2011 01:32:22AM 3 points [-]

I'd be interested in a LW or Discussion post by you on this topic.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 24 March 2011 01:49:18AM *  1 point [-]

I've actually had this idea for a while, but I can rarely bring myself to find enough time for a proper article rather than just writing short comments. Thanks for expressing your interest - it has certainly given me additional motivation.

In the meantime, if you haven't seen them already, you can find discussions where I question some established wisdom in economics here and here.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 24 March 2011 12:25:38AM *  4 points [-]

Another area where in recent years I've gained some respect for folk theories is economics. Now of course, folk economics is even more full of falsities and fallacies than folk physics, and a basic education in economics will rectify a lot of these. However, at the same time, "scientific" economics has its own share of awful fallacies that have become a firmly established part of its conventional wisdom, and are happily parroted by legions of economists eager to scoff at anyone who questions them as an ignoramus or crackpot. On some issues where I would myself scoff at folk theories a few years ago, I have come to realize that they may actually be closer to reality than the overconfident assertions of economists.

In particular, if your folk economics intuition tells you that you're getting shafted but learned economists nevertheless keep assuring you that it's all in your own best interest, there's a pretty good chance that your intuition is pointing in the right direction while their assurances are just clever ideological propaganda.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 23 March 2011 04:28:21PM 4 points [-]

Funny, just a few weeks ago I made a very similar point in a comment here, although I've never seen that paper until now.

Comment author: PhilSandifer 23 March 2011 03:04:24AM 1 point [-]

Well, I'm not entirely convinced the phrase "order academic fields by rigor and exactness" is a completely meaningful one. It implies a level of direct comparability that I'm not confident exists. I certainly agree that humanities makes for very bad science, but then, so does basket weaving. The flip side is that science has not developed a particularly useful vocabulary for dealing with nuance, ambiguity, or irony.

I'm also not sure a philosopher/cultural critic without significant scientific training is bound to write nonsense, so long as they actually stick to their field of expertise. Now, it may well be true that humanities sorts are more prone to straying from their actual areas of expertise - certainly a study demonstrating that would not surprise me. But I think that one can write for a very, very long time about sexual politics in Victorian literature without ever running into a situation where lack of knowledge of science beyond a high school level is going to be a problem. It's certainly difficult to imagine it resulting in nonsense production that goes beyond a stray sentence here or there.

And yes, the Sokal Affair clearly reflects badly on the editors of Social Text. But that's why I compared it to getting nonsense published in a newspaper - which has been proven possible from the local level up to major international papers. I also would not describe Social Text as "eager" to publish Sokal's essay. They rejected it initially, and only dusted it off because it was directly relevant to a special issue they were publishing and, probably more importantly for a paper journal, it was very short. But more to the point, Social Text is not a scholarly journal. I wasn't in the field at the time of the Sokal Affair, so any sense I have of its reputation is second hand, but if an un-peer reviewed journal was being treated as equivalent to PMLA or Critical Inquiry or something, that, much more than the Sokal Affair, is damning evidence against the humanities.

I should note that I am also more hostile towards Sokal for his completely and irredeemably awful book Fashionable Nonsense than I am for the Sokal Affair. He, at least, does not overstate the significance of his own hoax. Whereas Fashionable Nonsense is a sufficiently wretched book that I would generally advise people that their time would be better spent reading up on the intricacies of crystal energy healing.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 23 March 2011 03:25:21AM *  9 points [-]

But I think that one can write for a very, very long time about sexual politics in Victorian literature without ever running into a situation where lack of knowledge of science beyond a high school level is going to be a problem. It's certainly difficult to imagine it resulting in nonsense production that goes beyond a stray sentence here or there.

I strongly disagree here. To write meaningfully about sexual politics, you must have a model of sexual and other related aspects of human thought and behavior, and modern science has a whole lot to say about that. (Of course, the relevant science is still very incomplete and far from settled, but that makes it even more important to be knowledgeable about it, in order to separate solid insight from speculation.) If you lack that knowledge, your model is likely to be wrong in at least some ways that could be corrected by familiarizing yourself with the relevant science, and this is likely to show in your writing. Moreover, there is a whole lot of spurious pseudo-insight in this area (Freudianism and its offshoots being the most notorious example), and if you're not familiar with science beyond a high school level, you may well end up swallowing a lot of such nonsense believing it to be solid insight and incorporating it into your work.

Comment author: PhilSandifer 23 March 2011 12:06:24AM 7 points [-]

I'd delight in telling you you're wrong, but you're mostly not.

I would say that I don't think that postmodernism is lacking in rigor. Certainly, having been on both ends of peer review in the humanities, it does not seem to me that the process lets through a lot of flamingly inaccurate crap, beyond the sort of expected problems you get in the margins of well-studied ground. Frankly, in my own research, I'd have an easier time sailing a howler about the history of video games past peer review than I would a howler about the applications of Derrida.

I'm also not sure it does as badly as you say on Vladimir M's heuristics. Looking quickly, for my own field, there's still a ton of low-hanging fruit. Yeah, the major canonical works of literature assigned to undergraduates are pretty well-covered in the literature, but if you're working in popular culture of any era, you have basically no excuse for running out of things to say. The ideology test is a little trickier, since there are areas of literary criticism - feminist, queer, and racial studies, most obviously - that are explicitly ideological. But, of course, we have to be careful with ideology as a warning sign, because arguably at this point climate science and biology are ideologically poisoned. Ideology takes place heavily outside of the academy, and I'm loathe to say that just because something has become a political hot potato the academics of it are prima facia problematic.

But I think that postmodernism, broadly speaking, also hedges well against ideological bias. The thing that it is most easy to completely miss about postmodernism is that it is, by and large, a study of epistemologies. Yes, postmodernist literary criticism makes massive use of Freudian psychoanalysis despite the complete discrediting of Freudianism as an empirical practice. But we don't psychoanalyze real people. We psychoanalyze fictional people. The question is not "does there exist a real person with an Oedipus complex," it's "is the Oedipus complex a sufficiently well-known concept that it would be either included in a work of fiction by an author or read into a work of fiction by a reader?" In other words, since we're generally dealing with man-made structures, the question is less "Is foo true" and more "Is foo part of what is talked about and thought about regarding this subject?"

This helps a lot with the ideological bias issue, because it means that postmodernism can actually be ideologically neutral on the political issues it seemingly invests in. This is something I tell my students whenever one of them gets fussy about the fact that I assign literature with gay people in it. You don't actually have to accept the premise "homosexuality is not a valid basis for discrimination" in order to understand how gay writers articulate their own experience in literature.

Now, in practice, of course, literary scholars are generally liberals who are supportive of gay rights, feminism, and further work towards racial and economic equality. But then again, the ideological bias in the academy extends far beyond humanities departments - it's increasingly hard for an American climate scientist to be a Republican too. At the end of the day, this is somewhat irreducible - after all, reality probably does, in the long run, lend more support to some political viewpoints than others.

In any case, I tend to think that postmodernism is something that just about everybody should be broadly familiar with. I think there are some serious problems with how we teach it, and some serious problems with how it's attacked (Alan Sokal should never, ever be referenced by anyone who is trying to make a serious point about humanities scholarship. His "research" on postmodernism makes his hoax article look like sound scholarship by comparison), but the basic elevator summary of postmodernism is "It's the process of learning to account for epistemological differences when dealing with communications." Which is something that is probably useful if, you know, you ever intend to talk to someone you disagree with in your life.

Also, can I just say that the Stanford Encyclopedia entry you linked to is absolutely terribly written? Clue for writers explaining concepts that use algebraic or pseudo-algebraic notation - it's really nice if you bother to define what S and T mean before you start throwing them around.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 23 March 2011 03:05:13AM *  7 points [-]

But I think that postmodernism, broadly speaking, also hedges well against ideological bias.

Actually, one of my major objections to the modern intellectual currents that are commonly called "postmodernist" is their bias -- part ideological, part fashion-induced -- in choosing which authors to consider as classics and standard sources of citations and inspiration. We keep seeing an endless stream of discussions using concepts from Marx, Freud, and others whose work has long been shown to be largely bunk (even if later authors have salvaged some of these concepts by reinterpretation), while on the other hand, there are many authors who have made important points about issues that postmodernists are directly concerned with, but I can hardly imagine them getting cited and discussed.

To take an example I find very interesting, one topic that has long fascinated me is political and ideological language and its meanings that reach beyond what's being plainly said, and even beyond any conscious deceit and manipulation. (The link with the Overcoming Bias signaling leitmotifs is pretty clear here, and obviously the topic is of direct concern for all sorts of social and critical theorists -- it's falls squarely under the concept of "epistemological differences when dealing with communications.") Yet when it comest to the best writings on the subject I've seen, they're completely off the radar for postmodern academics, either because of ideological differences or otherwise because dropping their names won't earn any prestige points.

Comment author: PhilSandifer 23 March 2011 01:07:23AM 5 points [-]

To be perfectly honest, I know far more people in hard sciences who look down on postmodernist scholars as wooly nonsense-peddlers than I do postmodernists who reject the sciences or rationalism. This is, admittedly, anecdotal evidence, but I can honestly say that I have never seen a piece of anti-science writing out of the humanities half as perniciously irresponsible as Alan Sokal's "work." Certainly nothing that is as reflexively cited in discussions. To be honest, I find an exasperating tendency among math/science people to simply stop their reading on postmodernism with the Sokal Affair and decide they've got the matter nailed, despite the fact that almost nobody bothers to mention that Social Text isn't a peer-reviewed journal, and thus Sokal accomplished something about as hard as publishing a fraudulent piece in a local paper for a semi-major city.

So I'm inclined to be skeptical about which side of that debate is more prone to being infected with bad thinking. The biggest problem postmodernists usually have with math, science, and other more rational fields is that those are not their field, and they're not experts in them. Sit one of them down with some Feynman lectures, though, and they'll generally be fine, because they're generally speaking really smart people who just aren't specialized in that stuff. But the thing is, most of them know that they don't understand what goes on past freshman year in any math or science courses. Puzzlingly, science people seem to freely assume they understand graduate humanities work with alarming regularity. Of course, this failing on their part in no way invalidates their field - any more than the fact that someone who majored in English hasn't taken many math courses invalidates their work. :)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 23 March 2011 02:30:42AM 7 points [-]

Oh, I certainly don't think that the average hard scientist's view and knowledge of humanities are much better. However, when you order academic fields by rigor and exactness, with pure mathematics on one end and humanities on the other, then as a very general rule, in order to avoid writing nonsense in your own field, you must not have misconceptions about fields that are more exact than yours, whereas knowledge of less exact fields is normally not important for scholarly work.

Thus, for example, a physicist can be completely ignorant about philosophy and humanities and nevertheless consistently produce top-quality physics, whereas a philosopher or a cultural critic who is completely ignorant of natural sciences will inevitably end up writing nonsense at least occasionally. So while both of them may have an equally distorted and ignorant view of each other's field, the latter's work will likely suffer far more as a consequence.

Regarding the Sokal affair, I agree that it's usually overblown far beyond its real significance (and physicists should also be more humble in light of the more recent Bogdanoff affair). However, I think your minimization of it is also exaggerated. Regardless of whether a journal is peer-reviewed, editors should be held responsible for what they decide to publish. I don't think the editors of Social Text would have been so eager to publish Sokal's essay if it hadn't pandered so consistently to their ideology.

Comment author: David_Gerard 22 March 2011 04:16:08PM *  14 points [-]

Your phrasing (twice in the essay and now in that comment) is pretty much indistinguishable from proud declaration of ignorance as social signaling. Invoking straw postmodernists is neither big nor clever.

Contrary to many rationalists' views, postmodernism is not composed entirely of bullshit - it is a useful critical method to keep on hand when talking about mushy social and artistic things, like almost all of what humans do that might be called "culture". Humans are incredibly full of shit, and postmodernism and critical theory can be somewhat useful in cutting through it and calling them on it.

However, as the product of humans, it is itself horribly susceptible to bullshit in turn, particularly when overapplied to actual reality. It's also really, really badly lacking in rigor, and pretty much crashes and burns on Vladimir M's tests. So that's a reason not to bother with it unless you're interested in it for its own sake, as I am. I suspect you need to have worked out a usable amount of it yourself to get use out of it.

Nevertheless, it is about something and useful. I'd say that any effective writer of fiction needs a working knowledge of postmodernist techniques, whether they call it that or not.

Starting point for the curious: it works pretty heavily on Bayes structure - Bayesian epistemology being the way to resolve the dilemma of things that are both subjective and objective: how to say communicable things about things that are a matter of opinion, like art and feelings. Very few postmodernists can count above twenty without using their fingers, so a few people have noticed it in passing but the rigorous work pretty much hasn't been done; but if you know what postmodernism is for and you know how Bayesian epistemology works, the Bayes structure is pretty obvious. (This is my cue to try to infect my postmodernist academic friends with Bayes.)

I find postmodernism useful in my years-long interest in record collecting and popular music. Useful (to the reader) popular music criticism requires understanding the horrendous forces of bullshit involved in its production. If you want to see what postmodernism would look like as the basis for engineering, '80s pop music in the UK would be a good example, culminating in "The Manual" by the KLF: a step by step procedure on how to have a number-one record.

I wouldn't say people should go out of their way to learn it, but I wouldn't mark it something to avoid. My problem is I've spent far too long as a music critic, so the stuff is actually interesting and useful to me. This is, arguably, a fate to avoid.

I need to write up something on the subject. One day.

Edit: I've pointed friends at this comment to rip it to shreds and belabour me about the head with wherever I'm being not even wrong, which I probably am in a few places - I come to it as an autodidact because I found it useful, not as someone who trained up in it properly.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 23 March 2011 12:04:44AM *  7 points [-]

In my opinion, the main danger of reading things like postmodernism is that one might get infected by the smug attitude of superiority that looks upon rigorous, precise, down-to-earth rational thinking as blinkered and nerdy, without having anything better to offer instead.

Now of course, there are subjects that nobody yet knows how to approach with rigorous and precise thinking, and all attempts to do so regularly end up in blinkered and nerdy discussions without much connection to reality. In these subjects, a more fuzzy approach is indeed the only viable alternative. The trouble is, those humanists who, as you say, can barely count without using their fingers tend to greatly overestimate the extent of these subjects, and their self-satisfied and smug attitude can be very infections for a lot of people.

Comment author: [deleted] 22 March 2011 02:04:20PM 5 points [-]

What evidence is there that some fields of study make their followers dumber?

That section of the post sounds a bit like a mind-killer shout-out.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Costs and Benefits of Scholarship
Comment author: Vladimir_M 22 March 2011 11:41:33PM *  10 points [-]

If the respectable academic consensus in some field is remote from reality, the prominent authors in it will normally still be strongly selected for intelligence and skills in writing and arguing. As prominent academic authors, they will also be very high-status individuals. It follows that by studying some such field, you are exposing yourself to well-written and masterfully crafted arguments for delusional views espoused by intelligent high-status people. Unless you approach the subject with a hostile stance, it can be very hard to avoid falling for them.

This is especially problematic in fields whose subject matter is ideologically charged. Studying those often means submitting oneself to highly effective ideological propaganda, which can be very hard to resist.

Comment author: anonym 22 March 2011 05:20:37AM 10 points [-]

Why do you say there doesn't seem to be much interest? Your post has 48 karma and 244 comments. That doesn't seem like "not much interest" to me.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 22 March 2011 10:55:26PM 3 points [-]

I wasn't referring specifically to my article, but noting that the topic generally doesn't get the attention that, in my opinion, it deserves. (And even when it comes to the article itself, most of the comments were in subthreads that quickly drifted off the main topic or went into meta-discussions of whether the choice of issues discussed in the article is improper, though of course there were a few very good on-topic comments, as usual.)

Comment author: lukeprog 22 March 2011 04:24:31AM 1 point [-]

Well, it's important to me, anyway. Do you have further thoughts on the problem? Other discussion or front-page posts you could write on the topic?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 22 March 2011 04:55:38AM 2 points [-]

I have some other ideas that I hope to write up when I find some time. I was considering maybe even opening some of these topics in this thread, but unfortunately I'm too busy for any significant discussion tonight.

Comment author: lukeprog 22 March 2011 04:12:32AM *  0 points [-]

Oh yes, I liked that post.

Linked.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 22 March 2011 04:22:45AM 2 points [-]

Thanks for linking, but just to make sure I don't give a wrong impression, I didn't mean to complain specifically about you not linking to it -- I wanted to express the opinion that the topic is neglected on LW in general, considering its importance.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 22 March 2011 04:04:26AM *  12 points [-]

Now, what did I miss?

Clearly, as you hinted by noting that studying certain subjects can actually make you dumber, the key problem is how to evaluate the soundness and reliability of the existing literature in a given area as an non-expert. I raised this topic many times on LW, including in a recent top-level article, but there doesn't seem to be much interest in it here -- even though the issue is, in my opinion, of crucial importance, not least because all the arguments about the value and importance of scholarship that you list also hinge on it.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 20 March 2011 11:30:37PM *  4 points [-]

The key insight here is the applicability of the weak efficient markets hypothesis: if some useful information is publicly known, you can be pretty sure that other people are already using it to their advantage. If you have found some insight that will enable you to get ahead in practice, it's always a good idea to ask yourself what exactly makes you special to be privy to this information. It may be that you are smarter than others, or that you are lucky to have privileged access to this information, but it may also be that others are already familiar with it and using it, only that you've been oblivious about it so far -- or that the insight is in fact less useful than you think.

This is why the laboratory insight about biases from psychology, behavioral economics, etc. is typically not useful in practice. If this insight really is applicable to what people do even when they have strong incentives to avoid bias, then one would expect that there already is a huge industry targeted at making profits from these biases, and avoiding falling prey to it is already a part of well-known good common sense. (This is indeed the case with e.g. gambling.) Otherwise, it may be that the bias is reproducible in the lab but disappears with enough incentive, just like lots of people would flunk a test of basic arithmetic, but it doesn't mean you could get away with shortchanging them with real money.

In contrast, when it comes to issues that don't have instrumental implications in terms of money, status, etc., it's not that hard to learn about biases and make one's beliefs more accurate than average. Trouble is, it's easy precisely because people normally don't bother correcting their beliefs in such matters, lacking the incentive to do so. (Or even having contrary incentives if the biased beliefs have beneficial signaling and other implications.)

Comment author: Perplexed 20 March 2011 10:52:47PM 0 points [-]

I assume you are familiar with this guy:

My personal motto is "Read Stirner, Read Nietzsche, Read Rand." Of course, my motto references the great individualist writers Max Stirner, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Ayn Rand.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 20 March 2011 11:03:16PM 2 points [-]

I assume you are familiar with this guy:

No, I've never heard of him, but thanks for the link. (For what that's worth, I'm not a fan of Rand, and I've never read much from her. I am probably biased against her because of the behavior of her followers, but nevertheless, what little I've read from her writings seems rather incoherent.)

Comment author: TheOtherDave 20 March 2011 10:36:26PM 1 point [-]

Well, of course a lot depends on how much energy and resources are being expended on maintaining the status differential in the first place, and how much opportunity cost is reflected in it, and how many players the world contains.

That is, if we work for the same company and I'm your manager, and I am spending half my time trying to keep you down and you spend half your time trying to sabotage me, a status-altering social change that rendered us peers might turn out to raise both of our statuses relative to other groups, as well as make both of our lives easier and more enjoyable.

But, yes, I agree with you that many people who resist status-altering social changes are thinking in fixed-sum terms.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 20 March 2011 10:51:38PM *  2 points [-]

There are actually two issues there: the distribution of the status itself, and the cost in other goods and resources expended in pursuing and maintaining it. An arms race in pursuing status (e.g. by expensive signaling, or by costly efforts to keep others down) is indeed a problem of collective action that leads to awful negative-sum games, and a social change that prevents this arms race may be beneficial for everyone if it leads to a similar status distribution, only without the cost. But in contrast, it's unclear whether a Pareto-improvement in status itself is possible.

In the boss-employee example, the change may benefit both parties by eliminating the negative-sum game in which they're stuck. It may also benefit everyone else by a tiny amount by making the economy slightly more productive. But if both the boss and the worker raise their status in the society at large as a result, that will come at the expense of others' status -- even if it means an infinitesimal reduction of status for each person in a great mass of people who are now below each of them in the status hierarchy, rather than a large reduction for some clearly identifiable party. (It's roughly analogous to how successfully passing a small amount of perfectly forged money represents an infinitesimal taking from everyone else by making their money slightly less valuable.)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 20 March 2011 10:38:14PM 12 points [-]

Many mainstream philosophers have been defending Less Wrong-ian positions for decades before Overcoming Bias or Less Wrong existed.

When I read posts on Overcoming Bias (and sometimes also LW) discussing various human frailties and biases, especially those related to status and signaling, what often pops into my mind are observations by Friedrich Nietzsche. I've found that many of them represent typical OB insights, though expressed in a more poetic, caustic, and disorganized way. Now of course, there's a whole lot of nonsense in Nietzsche, and a frightful amount of nonsense in the subsequent philosophy inspired by him, but his insight about these matters is often first-class.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 20 March 2011 10:24:16PM *  2 points [-]

One philosopher whose work it would be extremely interesting to see analyzed from a LW-style perspective is Max Stirner. Stirner has, in my opinion, been unfairly neglected in academic philosophy, and to the extent that his philosophy has been given attention, it was mostly in various nonsensical postmodernist and wannabe-avantgardist contexts. However, a straightforward reading of his original work is a very rewarding intellectual exercise, and I'd really like to see a serious no-nonsense discussion of his philosophy.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 20 March 2011 03:14:47PM 4 points [-]

Perhaps.

And perhaps the same goes for any explainer... that is, if it turns out that the "this is what it feels like to be a status-management algorithm" explanation for offense wasn't original with LW, perhaps it wouldn't matter, because it's equally dismissive to assume that anyone solved it.

But surely there has to be a limit to that, doesn't there? Problems, including millenia-old problems, do eventually get solved.

So I guess my question is: why is it clear that this one isn't solved via an understanding of social status and the mechanisms for attacking and defending it? What's left over?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 20 March 2011 08:57:31PM *  8 points [-]

In my opinion, one reason why many people tend to dislike status-based explanations is that these explanations have unpleasant implications because of the fixed-sum nature of status. Status may not be precisely a fixed-sum good, but that does seem to be a very good approximation. Therefore, if the status of a certain individual or group is raised, that usually means that someone else's status has been lowered as result, and the change that produced this rise in status must have come at someone else's expense.

It follows that the advocates of some status-altering social change cannot accurately present it as an unalloyed good and a win-win situation for everyone; it is always analogous to redistribution of wealth, rather than everyone becoming richer. Of course, the former is a tougher sell, and makes for a much less convincing case.

Comment author: Cyan 20 March 2011 03:46:29PM *  4 points [-]

There's a tension in your original statement between value-laden phrases such as "ideological" and "successfully propagandized" and the very general remark about the approach not leading to "an unbiased understanding of any subject" (emphasis added). What I'm driving at is that your objection was really to the recommended content; you didn't quite address this head-on in the original statement but rather made an incorrect fairly general counterargument to reading widely on a given subject (or "simmering", as Alicorn put it). (The italicized phrase is my reply to your request for clarification.)

Your reply to my question about the sequences did address this head-on. At this point I'm just trying to clarify my rhetoric.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 20 March 2011 07:28:27PM 2 points [-]

Thanks for the clarification. In retrospect, I agree that my original comment was poorly worded.

Comment author: Cyan 20 March 2011 03:42:56AM *  8 points [-]

Yup, that was what I was getting at: contrary to your original statement, your true objection isn't to the approach per se but to the content.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 20 March 2011 04:27:47AM 3 points [-]

Honestly, I don't see what exactly I wrote that is contrary to my original statement. The content is relevant insofar as the recommended reading represents the output of one side in an ideological struggle, and my original comment is consistent with that.

Could you clarify what precisely you mean by " approach per se" here?

Comment author: Nisan 20 March 2011 02:29:16AM 2 points [-]

Skewed which way?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 20 March 2011 03:09:51AM 8 points [-]

It's skewed in several ways, each of which would be a complex topic in its own right. In this particular context, I have the impression that nazgulnarsil's idea of what the middle of the distribution looks like would correspond more exactly to somewhat higher percentiles.

Comment author: Cyan 20 March 2011 01:03:52AM 12 points [-]

How do you feel about the practice of advising LW newbies to read the sequences?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 20 March 2011 01:58:26AM *  4 points [-]

Cyan:

How do you feel about the practice of advising LW newbies to read the sequences?

The analogy would be if someone didn't understand some well-defined and useful concept that is discussed in the sequences, and you directed him to read the relevant sequence material, which presumably contains an accurate explanation. The assumption is that the concept is useful and well-defined, rather than an incoherent ideological buzzword, and that the sequences contain a correct explanation of it. (And to the extent that these assumptions don't hold, the advice would be bad.)

However, as a different example, suppose someone is confused about some incoherent ideological concept, like, say, the Marxist notion of "dialectic." Now if you direct this person to read Marxist authors persistently until the idea starts to make sense, you're effectively instructing him to submit to ideological propaganda until he is successfully propagandized. (Especially if this person is already familiar with a significant body of Marxist literature and asks a cogent question that seems to expose some flaws in the concept.)

Now, the question is whether the notion of "objectification" and the feminist authors of the linked blogs are more similar to the first or the second example. Clearly, I believe that the latter is a closer analogy, which I don't find surprising, considering that this is an area of intense ideological warfare and the authors in question in fact represent a more radical wing of one side in this conflict.

Comment author: Alicorn 20 March 2011 12:15:54AM 8 points [-]

"thousands of much-needed feminist advances" seems to link to the "sex differences in humans" article.

I agree with you about it being silly to have a word for advocating the moral equality of the sexes (although I use this as a reason not to label myself "a feminist", in much the same way that I would consider it vaguely silly to identify with a word labeling the advocacy of the moral equality of left- and right-handed people).

I don't really like being summoned to do this consciousness-raising job on the basis of "Sayeth The Girl". For one thing, I wrote that long enough ago that I now find it (like virtually everything else I wrote long enough ago) embarrassingly badly crafted, and I leave it up only as part of a policy that I shouldn't delete stuff I publish just because it's gotten embarrassing. For another, I have never wanted the job of Feminism Police on Less Wrong, and have largely stepped back as more people have been willing to do the needed work.

If you are willing to do your consciousness-raising by reading stuff, you could read some blogs and follow links like crazy (feminist bloggers are pretty good about linkage) and keep going until everything you run into looks familiar. This is the sort of topic you need to simmer in more than study like there will be a test later.

If for some reason you think talking to me in particular would be helpful (and you're reasonably caught up on what I've already written onsite on the subject so I don't need to repeat myself) I'm up for it but would prefer to do so offsite, via IM (or e-mail if IM is impractical).

Comment author: Vladimir_M 20 March 2011 12:40:07AM *  10 points [-]

If you are willing to do your consciousness-raising by reading stuff, you could read some blogs and follow links like crazy (feminist bloggers are pretty good about linkage) and keep going until everything you run into looks familiar. This is the sort of topic you need to simmer in more than study like there will be a test later.

This sounds like saying that you should keep reading authors who share a given ideological standpoint until you're successfully propagandized by them. I don't see how this approach could lead to an unbiased understanding of any subject. [Edit: I mean any subject that is an issue of strong ideological controversy, as this one clearly is.]

Comment author: Vladimir_M 19 March 2011 11:13:07PM *  9 points [-]

paulfchristiano:

Desire for accurate beliefs. Many people don't feel that improving the quality of their beliefs is worthwhile. This is a combination of a failure to recognize exactly how wrong many of their beliefs are and a general perception that it doesn't matter anyway.

This is a tremendously important issue, to which I think the post doesn't give the necessary attention. (It's also generally neglected on LW whenever topics like these are discussed.)

Here on LW, there is often a tacit assumption that changing one's beliefs towards greater accuracy is always a good and rational thing to do. However, this neglects two crucial factors. First, re-evaluating and changing one's beliefs has a cost in time and effort, which must be offset by some benefits to make it rational (in the economic sense at least). Second, when it comes to beliefs whose relevance is primarily of signaling (rather than instrumental) character, one may well be better off having an incorrect belief with superior signaling properties.

Therefore, when people feel that improving the quality of their beliefs is not worthwhile, there is at least a possibility that they might be right about it, and it's completely unjustified to dismiss this attitude as false or misguided out of hand.

This is related to the perception that there is no free lunch: as humans we resist the suggestion that we can get anything for free, and acting intelligently seems to be considered too easy.

But this is a very accurate heuristic. It's basically a correct application of the weak efficient markets hypothesis. When it comes to beliefs that have no instrumental implications, it's relatively easy to learn about biases from sources such as LW sequences and then use this knowledge to find and correct a bunch of incorrect beliefs. However, when it comes to beliefs that are relevant for practical action, figuring out how to improve those is extremely difficult. There is no straightforward way at all to apply LW sequence-style general intellectual skills profitably.

Comment author: nazgulnarsil 18 March 2011 01:53:35AM 17 points [-]

PUA stuff targets the middle of the bell curve. Of course it looks silly to intelligent people.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 19 March 2011 10:21:03PM 12 points [-]

How much do you actually communicate with people who are around the middle of the bell curve? In places like LW, people often have a very skewed perspective about the bottom three quartiles.

Comment author: [deleted] 18 March 2011 01:20:04PM 27 points [-]

A relationship between two rationalists can be much happier and freer of drama. If Eliezer's example isn't clear enough, here's another one.

"I'm worried about X."

Non-rationalist: "I've told you a million times, that's not gonna happen! Why can't you trust me?"

Rationalist: "Ok, let's go to Wikipedia, get some stats, and do the expected value calculation. Let me show you how unlikely this is."

Which conversation ends in a fight? Which conversation ends in both people actually feeling more at ease?

There are female memes to the effect "Men are endearing fools," and male memes to the effect "Women are beautiful fools." But a fool eventually gets frustrating. It is an incredible relief to meet someone who isn't foolish. "Whoa... you mean you can embrace an idea without being an uncritical fanatic? You mean you can actually make allowances for overconfidence bias, instead of taking reckless gambles? You can listen to the content of what I'm saying instead of the applause lights?" Having a rationalist partner means never having to say "Oh, you wouldn't understand."

Also, on cultishness: I saw an ad the other day for a new book on how to start a green activist organization. How to attract members, get speaking engagements, raise money, build momentum, etc. My first reaction was "Oh, that's nice; I'm sure that book would be handy for environmentalists." Then I thought "If we did half the stuff that tree-hugging college kids do, we'd call it Dark Arts and we'd be terrified of turning into a cult."

Comment author: Vladimir_M 19 March 2011 12:35:49AM *  5 points [-]

If Eliezer's example isn't clear enough, here's another one.

"I'm worried about X."

Non-rationalist: "I've told you a million times, that's not gonna happen! Why can't you trust me?"

Rationalist: "Ok, let's go to Wikipedia, get some stats, and do the expected value calculation. Let me show you how unlikely this is."

Just curious: what would be a concrete example of an X that would provide for a realistic exchange that fits this pattern?

Comment author: David_Gerard 18 March 2011 12:18:08AM *  -1 points [-]

Your post is short of suggested alternate courses of action.

You have also taken a specific situation and generalised it in ways that were not in fact being described in the post you are responding to.

To get back to specifics:

You see one of the many recent news stories about decades-long coverups of paedophile priests on the part of the Vatican. You are outraged. Do you (a) post a link to it (b) post it with an opinion (c) don't post it? Why?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 18 March 2011 04:17:46AM *  10 points [-]

David_Gerard:

You have also taken a specific situation and generalised it in ways that were not in fact being described in the post you are responding to.

I did say that my points don't necessarily apply in your case, since I'm not familiar with all the details of it, and that I've taken it as motivation to make a more general point relevant to the topic at hand.

Now, regarding the specifics, one should always be suspicious of outrage, both of other people and one's own. It signals with very high probability that some sort of bias has been triggered. (I'm now talking about outrage about matters of public discourse, not things where one is personally involved.)

If anything, there's a whole lot going on in the world that you could reasonably be outraged over, but you can show active concern only about a very small subset of these events. In the overwhelming majority of cases -- and, given the lack of information, I am not judging now whether that was the case in your specific example -- people's choice of what they get outraged over is determined by their preexisting hostility towards particular individuals, groups, and institutions. Therefore, in regular human interaction, interpreting outrage towards one's favored institution as a signal of hostility -- and conversely, interpreting shared outrage as a signal of ideological agreement and common cause -- is a statistically accurate heuristic.

Even if someone gets actively outraged over what could be reasonably considered the very worst phenomenon currently being reported and discussed in the media, that still means that one might be relaying the biases of the media to which one is exposed. (This isn't relevant if you believe that your favored media outlets are unbiased in what stories of outrage they choose to report with the highest prominence, and that they never bias their coverage towards greater or lesser outrage depending on the topic. But this seems to me clearly false; even the facts are usually reported selectively, let alone the commentary and the more subtly expressed attitudes.)

Finally, you say that in your discussion you made judgments regarding the assignment of blame, including the way the blame for the misdeeds of individual members of an institution should be assigned to the institution itself, as well as the blame that should be assigned indirectly to other members by affiliation. Now again, I can't judge your concrete argument because I haven't seen it, but this is another common case where strong biases are present in the overwhelming majority of instances. Just like with selective outrage, people tend to make the widest possible assignments of blame when it comes to the institutions they dislike in the first place, but at the same time they use entirely inconsistent criteria that minimize and individualize the extent of blame towards their favored institutions (if they even register that there might be something wrong going on in them).

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 18 March 2011 01:03:21AM *  3 points [-]

Now, I do believe that there are plenty of topics where even the most rational individuals are in serious danger of having their most basic epistemological skills distorted by biases, and therefore, it's never a good idea to draw any "sanity waterlines."

You clearly don't understand the concept in the way it was intended, and instead criticize a different idea.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 18 March 2011 02:45:10AM 1 point [-]

You clearly don't understand the concept in the way it was intended, and instead criticize a different idea.

I allow for that possibility, but I don't see where my understanding goes wrong (given the correction I made after JGWeissman's criticism that I conceded). So without further clarification on your part, I have to rest my case at this point.

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 17 March 2011 11:07:33PM 6 points [-]

Of course, the crucial assumption here is that it is possible for humans to acquire a set of reasoning skills so thoroughly and reliably that they will actually apply them to all issues, no matter what. I don't think this is possible, and with this in mind, I still don't think the "waterline" concept is useful.

Fallacy of gray. Even if there are no actual magical superrationalists, clearly some people are better skilled than others, and a group of people would behave differently depending on this level.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 18 March 2011 01:00:47AM *  3 points [-]

Fallacy of gray. Even if there are no actual magical superrationalists, clearly some people are better skilled than others, and a group of people would behave differently depending on this level.

The question is whether it is possible in practice for individuals or groups to exist who really apply some set of skills with enough consistency that "sanity waterline" becomes a good enough approximation of reality for them. If individuals and groups differ greatly, as they obviously do, it may still be that nobody is good enough that their basic skills would be highly (even if imperfectly) reliable when it comes to the most seductive biases. Even if this assumption is not true, it does not represent the fallacy of grey, no more than, say, claiming that nobody can run 100m in less than 9.5s means equating athletes with couch potatoes. (The latter claim may be falsified if someone actually manages to run that fast, but even if false, it's not a fallacy of grey, since it merely asserts an upper bound for achievement, not that there aren't people far closer to it than others.)

Now, I do believe that there are plenty of topics where even the most rational individuals are in serious danger of having their most basic epistemological skills distorted by biases, and therefore, it's never a good idea to draw any "sanity waterlines." You may disagree with this view, but not on the grounds that it constitutes fallacy of grey.

Comment author: David_Gerard 17 March 2011 07:24:47PM *  4 points [-]

I've had some Catholics getting seriously upset and calling me a bigot for posting a link to a news story about long-running Vatican coverups of paedophile priests to my Facebook. There's a pseudo-logical chain of argument attached to this assertion, which as far as I can make out is that the Catholics in question - this was multiple Catholics who didn't know each other - are helpless in the face of their immortal souls' access to Heaven basically being controlled by these people; so I am therefore causing them gratuitous pain when they are pained enough already.

I find it difficult to deal with the claim that posting a link to a horrible news story - the factuality of which is entirely accepted by the offended parties - constitutes unacceptable bigotry.

Obviously, this is them blaming me for pointing out serious conflicts that are already present in their own thoughts and feelings. It still strikes me as offensively stupid to an extent I have no intention of putting up with if in any way avoidable.

(I suppose it didn't help when I pointed out that their continued donations of money, and even their continued attendance, grants these people power, and that I do consider that choosing to continue to do so makes them avoidably morally culpable. OTOH, by that stage I didn't care.)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 17 March 2011 10:27:59PM *  10 points [-]

David_Gerard:

I find it difficult to deal with the claim that posting a link to a horrible news story - the factuality of which is entirely accepted - constitutes unacceptable bigotry.

Obviously, this is them blaming me for pointing out serious conflicts that are already present in their own thoughts and feelings. It still strikes me as offensively stupid to an extent I have no intention of putting up with if in any way avoidable.

I haven't seen the concrete details of the debate you describe and I'm not claiming that what I'm about to write applies to this case, but generally speaking, conclusions like those of your Facebook correspondents are not always unjustified. (I mean the feeling of hostility they perceived, not the rationalization you ascribe to them.) When someone points out the faults of some particular party and expresses outrage, even if all the stated facts are true, there are still two additional important issues.

First, placing a strong focus on someone's faults is likely to be interpreted as an expression of deeper hostility, and statistically speaking, this interpretation is often correct. To take an extreme example, imagine if someone wrote a book titled The Crimes of the Elbonians, in which he documented every bad deed committed by any Elbonian individual or institution throughout known history. Even if every claim in the book is factually true, an Elbonian would reasonably infer hostility, possibly threatening hostility, on part of the writer (as well as his target readership). Of course, such reactions are often biased in that they overestimate the level of intended hostility, or even detect it where there really is none. (On the other hand, I don't think any individual is entirely free of such biases when it comes to all aspects of one's identity.)

Second, and more important, when discussing the faults of some institution, it is practically impossible to do it without making additional assumptions and implications about the difficult questions of the assignment of blame, both individual and institutional. Again, I don't think anyone is entirely free of biases in this regard, in the sense that everyone will apply somewhat inconsistent standards to the faults of his favored and disfavored institutions. (One will also likely bias one's judgments by using a distorted model of how a given institution actually works.)

With this in mind, even if the reactions of these people were severely biased, I think one should be very careful before one places them into the "offensively stupid" category. Of course, what I wrote also has more general implications for the main topic of the original post.

Comment author: JGWeissman 17 March 2011 06:49:52PM 7 points [-]

Regarding the "sanity waterline," I don't believe this concept presents a useful and accurate model of people's beliefs, not even as a rough first approximation. In my opinion, any action based on such a model must be fundamentally misguided one way or another.

You have argued against a misunderstanding of the sanity waterline concept. The idea is sound that people who have and systematically apply a set of skills will not make make mistakes of a certain class. The sanity waterline concept is not simply an ordering of the irrationality of wrong beliefs, but an association of skills with the mistakes they prevent. It does not claim that not making a mistake places someone higher on the waterline so they will not make more irrational mistakes, rather it explicitly calls out the distinction between getting something right because your rationality skills force you to get it right, and other means such as joining the social group that happens to be right.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 17 March 2011 07:32:44PM *  3 points [-]

You are right. My thinking was indeed imprecise here. If we assume that there exists a set of skills such that each skill, if practiced consistently, prevents one from having a specific set of irrational beliefs, then we can impose a partial order on sets of beliefs by observing which set of skills is implied to be absent by each set of beliefs. This partial order can be seen as a ranking of irrationality of different sets of beliefs, and the set of skills shared by a group of people places a lower bound with respect to the partial order, which can then be metaphorically called a "waterline."

Of course, the crucial assumption here is that it is possible for humans to acquire a set of reasoning skills so thoroughly and reliably that they will actually apply them to all issues, no matter what. I don't think this is possible, and with this in mind, I still don't think the "waterline" concept is useful. If anything, it's dangerous because people may fall into the trap of thinking that they are above a certain waterline, whereas in reality, there are issues where due to all kinds of biases even the very basic skills are failing them.

Comment author: [deleted] 17 March 2011 05:15:19PM *  7 points [-]

The broad goal, I believe, is raising the sanity waterline in the general public.

The narrow goal, as far as I can tell, is developing a solid local community of strong rationalists, and then to do things with our strengths. (Potentially: invent and test systematic methods for making people and the world more awesome, which may include science, starting businesses, making art, and generally creating things that demonstrate the effectiveness of rationality.)

For the narrow goal, we want to appeal to people who will be unusually good assets. (But not necessarily the usual suspects.) For the broad goal, it would be nice to have pitches for rationality that might nudge anyone, regardless of background, in the right direction.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Rationality Outreach: A Parable
Comment author: Vladimir_M 17 March 2011 06:20:42PM 4 points [-]

Then the question from your post should be asked in the context of the goals you outline.

Regarding the "sanity waterline," I don't believe this concept presents a useful and accurate model of people's beliefs, not even as a rough first approximation. In my opinion, any action based on such a model must be fundamentally misguided one way or another.

Regarding the goal of developing a local community, you've listed a whole bunch of goals, and to answer your initial question, we must begin by asking two other questions. First, is there actually a common body of insight, presumably close to what is called "rationality" on LW, that would be of practical help in all of these endeavors, and what would it consist of? Second, if such a body of insight exists and a group of people is trying to reach, share, and apply it, how much of a hindrance is it if they must avoid criticizing religion in the process?

Unless we have clear and well-argued answers to these questions, I don't think any productive discussion of the original issue is possible. Looking at people's comments in this thread, it seems to me that their views on the first of the two preliminary questions are muddled by wishful thinking, in the sense that they are too quick to assume that such a body of insight exists and that they have a good idea of what it is.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 17 March 2011 04:46:29PM *  12 points [-]

Frankly, I think you're skirting around the real issue: what precisely is the "rationality outreach" supposed to accomplish?

If the goal is to have a community where all false and biased beliefs will be criticized without any exception at all, including those that are held sacred by the present respectable opinion, then it's inevitable that you'll cause lots of outrage and end up with opinions on some issues that will sound crackpot or extremist to the respectable mainstream, and will also cause dissension in any realistic group of people. On the other hand, if the choice of issues for criticism will be limited by some cost-benefit calculation, then this calculation depends on the exact goals of the group. Specifically, you should attack those false beliefs that interfere with your goals in practice, and only them. For example, a team of physicists cannot tolerate a member who has crazy ideas about physics, but they shouldn't have a problem with a member who has crazy ideas about economics (like Albert Einsten, for example).

So, the question is: what exactly is supposed to be the benefit of making your group explicitly atheist, and does it justify the cost of turning off people who will find this doctrine unpleasant or offensive? To answer this question, you must have a precise idea of what exactly the goals of your group are and how they are supposed to be accomplished. It's basically the same problem that's seen on LW whenever the issue of suitability of various controversial topics comes up.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 16 March 2011 11:59:28PM *  3 points [-]

One crucial observation is that without conscious self-discipline, most people will end up consuming far more calories than their bodies actually spend; the surplus energy will likely be the equivalent of gaining several pounds a month. (The only exceptions are people with unusually low appetite and those who are extremely fit and athletic.) However, in most cases, not nearly all of these extra calories will be turned into extra weight. It's as if your body has a certain threshold weight, so that if you are below that, any extra calorie will be stored as fat, but if your weight is above that, it will remain stable or creep upward only very slowly.

The trouble is, it's still a total mystery what exactly determines this threshold, and what, if anything, one could do to push it downwards. I ate and drank liberally until my late twenties and nevertheless remained around my ideal weight, even though my total superfluous energy intake through the years was probably enough to double my weight if stored at full efficiency. But then at one point I suddenly realized that every extra calorie is starting to stick with frightening efficiency. (I have no desire to find out what my new threshold is, but based on the experiences from the time I realized it, it went up by at least ~15 pounds.) I wonder if this is an irreversible and unavoidable symptom of aging.

Comment author: lessdazed 16 March 2011 03:58:52PM 9 points [-]

Here is what works for me, it's a set of behaviors and strict and loose rules. Hopefully this helps somebody, and perhaps someone can use this as a data point or extrapolate this into useful patterns.

Strict Rules:

1) Never be hungry. If I am hungry, I may overeat or find it hard to resist unhealthful food. Therefore, I snack constantly. 2) Eat some protein many times a day. This maintains muscles, which burn calories 24/7.

Loose rules:

1) Avoid corn syrup as much as possible. 2) Don't drink calories. No soda, no coffee, only straight green tea, no milk, no sugar. There are two exceptions: 1% fat milk and low sodium vegetable (not fruit!) juice. I drink a ton of it. I cheat by drinking beer, which is why it is "loose". 3) Severely restrict simple carbohydrate and grain intake, especially processed. This is a loose rule because it is impossible to abstain from simple sugar and probably not desirable. My snack bars have only somewhat more sugar than protein, as does milk. 4) Drink water, tea or milk before eating. Sometimes thirst feels like hunger. I am not strict enough about this. 5) Restrict unfermented soy to moderation; soy is the quickest and easiest way to get cheap protein but it resembles estrogen to your body.

Behaviors:

1) Be self confident. Other people gorge at mealtimes. If you spend all day snacking, you have "ruined you dinner" as my mother would put it. I don't eat just because everyone else is. On the other hand, if it's impolite to eat where you are, pull out a healthy snack bar and eat anyway. 2) Buy distinguished portions as self control. When I got a 32 oz. jug of real maple syrup, it lasted a couple days, likewise when I bought 5 pounds of honey. However, usually, for me, one package=one meal if it is a delicious food. One chocolate bar of any size=one serving. That's how I am. 3) Buy food easy to eat. If I buy whole carrots, I will not peel it. That's just reality. I spring for the more expensive "baby" carrots. If I buy regular spinach, I will probably eat it without washing it thoroughly enough, so I get pre-washed.

Recipes:

1) Microwaved yams. Me and my dog share one or more of these a day. 3-5 min. depending on size. I eat the skin, these are a good portable snack. $1/pound. No butter, etc. 2) Microwaved liver. I would eat this every day, but it has too much cholesterol and vitamin A. Don't get the store-prepared stuff, which has sugar in it. Covered, it cooks in its own juices in a few minutes. Share with dog. $2-3/pound. 3) Microwaved and raw tomatoes. Who decided that apples can be eaten whole as a snack, but not tomatoes? $1-3/pound depending on season and if from farmer's market. Tomatoes are bad for dogs-too acidic. 4) Sprouted whole multi grain bread, Much denser and cheaper than other bread. $3 for 1.5 pounds in NYC, $1 less than a one pound loaf of other bread. Put ground almonds on it, $6-7/pound. Add honey, $4/pound. Share with dog, but dog gets $2/pound mass produced peanut butter instead and no honey. 5) Tofu and tempeh. $2-3/pound. Share with dog. 6) Microwaved spinach can be easily compacted into a small space. Even if you don't like it, a pound well-cooked isn't many bites. $3/pound. Share with dog, but not too much. 7) These food bars, which make one really thirsty for milk and are cost effective for a soy free protein bar. Milk is cheap. Everyone knows chocolate is bad for dogs, right?

Lifestyle:

1) Get a dog, then you have to take him/her out. Once you are out, a major obstacle to running around the block is removed, and your dog will want to go. Also, dogs are wonderful. 2) Be self confident. Do pull-ups on the subway and on construction scaffolding during a lunch break. It does not matter what other people think. 3) Sprint up real stairs for exercise. This 1) builds muscle better than other running programs, and so will give you flesh that will eat calories 24/7, 2) burns calories faster than other running, 3) will not be subject to the weather, 4) works your arms. Rest from taking steps two at a time by taking them one at a time or using your arms more.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 16 March 2011 11:38:33PM 0 points [-]

lessdazed:

I cheat by drinking beer,

For those who are looking for a low-calorie alternative to beer, white wine spritzers can be a very satisfying substitute.

Comment author: Swimmer963 15 March 2011 07:58:45PM 3 points [-]

Interesting. Both my brother and sister have the same phenomenon: they love candy and desserts, but dinner foods that have any element of sweetness (like beets, sweet potatoes, or even sweet-and-sour sauces) gross them out.

You can sweeten most of those teas a little...of course, that means adding calories to something that's essentially calorie-free.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 16 March 2011 12:13:52AM *  8 points [-]

You can sweeten most of those teas a little...of course, that means adding calories to something that's essentially calorie-free.

Even if you put a teaspoon or a pack of sugar in your tea or coffee, it's still 6-7 times less sugar than in a can of soda (and most fruit juices are not much better). The amount of sugar in juices and sodas is insane.

Comment author: cousin_it 15 March 2011 07:28:23PM *  4 points [-]

Unreliable hardware is a problem that applies equally to all AIs. You could just as well say that any AI can become unfriendly due to coding errors. True, but...

Comment author: Vladimir_M 15 March 2011 07:40:24PM *  5 points [-]

an AI with a prior of zero for the existence of the outside world will never believe in it, no matter what evidence it sees.

Would such a constraint be possible to formulate? An AI would presumably formulate theories about its visible universe that would involve all kinds of variables that aren't directly observable, much like our physical theories. How could one prevent it from formulating theories that involve something resembling the outside world, even if the AI denies that they have existence and considers them as mere mathematical convenience? (Clearly, in the latter case it might still be drawn towards actions that in practice interact with the outside world.)

Comment author: NihilCredo 15 March 2011 04:56:27PM 6 points [-]

Would take overt or covert dictatorial control of humanity and reshape their culture so that (a) breeding to the brink of starving is a mass moral imperative and (b) asking very simple questions to the Oracle five times a day is a deeply ingrained quasi-religious practice.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 15 March 2011 07:27:36PM 2 points [-]

Would take overt or covert dictatorial control of humanity and reshape their culture so that (a) breeding to the brink of starving is a mass moral imperative

Out of curiosity, how many people here are total utilitarians who would welcome this development?

Comment author: Dreaded_Anomaly 13 March 2011 04:53:25PM 1 point [-]

There is a difference between those situations. "You" is the only modern second person singular pronoun, whereas the third person singular has "he" and "she" in addition to the oft-used "they," the latter obviously being the one which doesn't fit.

Personally, I do feel it would be better to have some separation among the singular and plural second person pronouns, to avoid awkward constructions like "you all" and similar things. However, "thou" doesn't seem to be a very viable option, given its current formal, Biblical connotations.

Also, the English language is missing a possessive form of the pronoun "which" (compare "who" and "whose"), if anyone wants to work on that problem.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 15 March 2011 12:46:32AM 2 points [-]

One really clumsy thing in English is that there is no interrogative pronoun to which the answer would be an ordinal number (i.e. N-th in some sequential order). There isn't even a convenient way to ask that question.

Comment author: rwallace 14 March 2011 02:34:21AM 6 points [-]

The kind of specialized investment required to maintain and develop technology at our current level requires market sizes not much smaller than the current ones (e.g. check out what a modern microchip factory costs.) If we didn't mind going back to town-blacksmith tech levels, sure, population could get a lot smaller - but that would, among other problems, kill off the idea of meeting everyone's basic needs.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 14 March 2011 11:42:56PM 2 points [-]

rwallace:

The kind of specialized investment required to maintain and develop technology at our current level requires market sizes not much smaller than the current ones (e.g. check out what a modern microchip factory costs.)

I've read this claim many times, but I've never seen a convincing argument for what exactly would count as "much smaller." My impression is that three orders of magnitude smaller would almost certainly be too small, two orders of magnitude possibly also, but I'm not at all sure about one order of magnitude.

In response to comment by Yvain on Being a teacher
Comment author: SilasBarta 14 March 2011 09:52:02PM 3 points [-]

That's not really a grammatical error though. If you were giving off a description as you got it, you wouldn't be expected to restart -- you could say, "I saw a brown ... big ... spider" rather than "I saw a brown ... no, big brown spider."

It's not the same level of error as if he said "I seed a big brown spider" or "I saw a big brown spiders." True, you may not know why we have a preference for placing certain adjectives first, but then, it's not as important to learn, either.

Now, if you had to explain why French only conjugates verbs in written rather than spoken form ...

In response to comment by SilasBarta on Being a teacher
Comment author: Vladimir_M 14 March 2011 11:30:02PM *  10 points [-]

Now, if you had to explain why French only conjugates verbs in written rather than spoken form ...

For the same reason English spells write, right, Wright, and rite differently. They used to be pronounced differently, but aren't any more, and the spelling hasn't been updated to reflect that.

Comment author: wedrifid 14 March 2011 03:16:22AM *  3 points [-]

I don't feel a need to associate my identity with it, but I think it'd be a better world if preference for unicorns didn't signal gender or sexuality at all.

You'd better not move to Germany. Chairs have a masculine sexual identity.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 14 March 2011 04:38:59AM *  3 points [-]

Slavic languages also assign a grammatical gender to every noun, and there's nothing sexual about it. (I certainly find nothing sexual about stars, books, rivers, or mathematics being feminine.) Even for nouns that denote humans and other living creatures with biological sex, the correlation between grammatical gender and biological sex is high but still not perfect.

The gender defaults are mostly masculine (though with some exceptions), and it would be impossible to change that without rewriting the grammar of the language altogether, which is why the entire business over gender-neutral language in English has always seemed absurd to me. On the upside, it's almost impossible to speak without revealing whether you're male or female, since you have to refer to your attributes and actions using adjectives and even verbs inflected for gender, so confusions of this sort are almost impossible (however this can make it impossible to translate literature where a character's sex is supposed to be hidden).

Comment author: [deleted] 13 March 2011 11:44:05PM *  2 points [-]

Do you think Alicorn's style doesn't have the characteristics I described, or that such writing isn't statistically likely to come from men?

Well, she thinks explicitly and abstractly, like most people here, and I suppose that could be more common in men, but I don't think I've noticed anything especially male or female in her prose. I didn't notice an unusual lack or predominance of pronouns. (Actually I think Alicorn, more than most LessWrongers, tends to illustrate ideas with anecdotes about individual people, whether real or hypothetical. So that would mean more pronouns -- but then again, Eliezer has the same habit, and I don't know if that means you'd consider his writing feminine.)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 14 March 2011 01:35:19AM 1 point [-]

I didn't base my conclusion on pronouns at all. Maybe you missed my commend a few turns further up in the thread where I describe it in more detail.

Comment author: [deleted] 14 March 2011 12:15:34AM *  4 points [-]

Two writing samples, one male and one female, from humanities journals: First:

Machiavelli's advocacy of force and fraud in the conduct of politics is the key teaching that has secured his reputation as "Machiavellian" and that has led to the conception of "The Prince" as the first document in the Western tradition to lay bare the dark, demonic underside of civic humanism. But this interpretation overlooks the degree to which a politics of intense competition and personal rivalry inhabits the humanist vision from antiquity, producing an ethics of expediency and a rhetoric of imposture that seeks to mask its alertness to advantage behind the guise of integrity and service. This vision is nowhere more apparent than in Cicero's "De Oratore," which exerted a powerful influence on the Italian humanists of the quattrocentro in whose direct descent Machiavelli stands. Deception, to put it simply, is an acknowledged and vital element in civic humanism long before "The Prince." The difference is that Cicero typically couches it in a sacrificial rhetoric that is euphemistically inflected while Machiavelli opts for a hard-edged rhetoric of administrative efficiency to make his case. But the stylistic differences, important as they are, should not mask the essential affinity between the Machiavellian doctrine of princely fraud and the Ciceronian ethics of gentlemanly dissimulation.

Second:

This article analyzes the intellectual content of civic humanism in the specific context of Medici power, asking the question: what ideological role did civic humanism play in Medicean Florence? It argues that there is no contradiction between the ideals of civic humanism and support for the Medici regime. On the contrary, civic humanism could be used to justify and legitimate Medici power. The article analyzes the writings of principal humanists such as Leonardo Bruni, Poggio Bracciolini, and Francesco Filelfo, showing that Hans Baron's republican "civic humanism" was compatible with different constitutional forms and different distributions of power.

Two excerpts from New York Times articles, one male and one female:

First:

Under newly fortified Republican control, many state governments started the year pledging forceful action to crack down on illegal immigration, saying they would fill a void left by the stalemate in Washington over the issue. Gov. Susana Martinez of New Mexico backed a repeal to a law granting driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants. Now, with some legislatures winding down their sessions, the lack of consensus that has immobilized Congress has shown up in the legislatures as well, and has slowed — but not stopped — the advance of bills to penalize illegal immigrants. No state has passed a law that replicates the one adopted last April in Arizona, which greatly expanded the powers of police officers to question the immigration status of people they stop. Still, immigrant advocates in many states say the debate has clearly shifted in favor of tougher enforcement. They say they have had to fight just to hold the line on immigration issues that they thought were long settled.

Second:

With the referendum over the constitutional amendments that will shape Egypt’s immediate political future just days away, the country’s nascent political forces were squaring off on Sunday, scrambling to influence a choice that leaves many confused. The Muslim Brotherhood and rump elements of the disbanded governing National Democratic Party, which both stand to gain the most from a rapid rebirth of electoral politics, support the amendments. Arrayed against them is much, but not all, of the remaining political spectrum, centered on the young organizers behind the Tahrir Square demonstrations who fear a yes vote would ultimately rob them of their revolution. Yet everyone agrees on two things. The referendum, which is scheduled for Saturday, will be a milestone and the first one not rigged outright in about 60 years. “Whether we accept the amendments or we reject them, either situation means a page in our history will turn,” said Amr Shubaki, a political analyst at the state-financed Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies.

Two excerpts from short stories, one male and one female.

First:

An old man with radiation scars surrounding the chromed half of his face limped down a salt-grass covered dune. Metal armatures creaked under his clothing as he thumped heavily across dry sand to wet, scuffing through the black and white line of the high-tide boundary, where the sharp glitter of cast-up teeth tangled in film-shiny ribbons of kelp. About his feet, small combers glittered in the light of a gibbous moon. Above, the sky was deepest indigo: the stars were breathtakingly bright. The old man, whose name was Aethelred, fetched up against a large piece of seawrack, perhaps the wooden keel of some long-ago ship, and made a little ceremony of seating himself. He relied heavily on his staff until his bad leg was settled, and then he sighed in relief and leaned back, stretching and spreading his robes out around him.

Second:

Kalak rounded a rocky stone ridge and stumbled to a stop before the body of a dying thunderclast. The enormous stone beast lay on its side, riblike protrusions from its chest broken and cracked. The monstrosity was vaguely skeletal in shape, with unnaturally long limbs that sprouted from granite shoulders. The eyes were deep red spots on the arrowhead face, as if created by a fire burning deep within the stone. They faded. Even after all these centuries, seeing a thunderclast up close made Kalak shiver. The beast’s hand was as long as a man was tall. He’d been killed by hands like those before, and it hadn’t been pleasant. Of course, dying rarely was.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 14 March 2011 01:23:18AM *  1 point [-]

The humanities articles both use the same formal dry academic style, from which it's hard to say anything. The first one is much worse in terms of long-winded verbiage, but that doesn't say much. If I had to guess, I would toss a coin.

The Times articles are similarly written in a routine journalistic style (it reads like a telegram with some cliche phrases cut and pasted between the words), so again it's hard to say anything. (Also, from what I know, news articles are heavily edited and it's questionable how much individual style they preserve.) If I really had to guess, I would say the first is more likely to be female by an epsilon. Google confirms this is correct, but I admit I wouldn't bet any money on it. (On the other hand, I wouldn't be surprised if an experienced newspaper editor could guess much better.)

As for the short stories excerpts, well, that's some bad prose. The first one sounds to me a bit more feminine; I'd say it's something like a 60-40 guess. Googling these paragraphs, I see that I guessed right; admittedly, I wouldn't have bet very much money on this one either.

Comment author: [deleted] 13 March 2011 11:28:58PM 0 points [-]

Your position seems to be, then, that Orwell's advice is sound, and it was his failure to follow his own advice which was unsound. I had taken you to mean approximately the opposite - that Orwell, a good writer, failed to take his own advice, and thereby illustrated the unsoundness of his advice. Or did you have something else entirely in mind?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 14 March 2011 12:08:06AM 1 point [-]

Actually, both, to some extent. There is good and bad writing in terms of aesthetic style, and also in terms of logical soundness and factual accuracy. Any given piece of writing can be good or bad along these dimensions almost independently. Clearly, texts that combine great style with bad logic and inaccurate facts are especially misleading and difficult to assess correctly, and a lot of Orwell's writing is in this category.

Now, in this essay, the great stylist Orwell breaks his own advice all over the place and thereby demonstrates that it's complete rubbish when it comes to achieving good writing style. Good style in fact requires breaking these rules so often that it's meaningless to espouse them as general guidelines. What's significant is that Orwell is such a good stylist that his style dazzles you into not realizing this even as the contradictions are dancing in front of your nose. At the same time, the rules do have some limited applicability when it comes to logic and facts: some particular sorts of passives, bad metaphors, etc. are commonly used as weasely rhetorical tricks -- and Orwell's weasely essay does in fact employ them, hidden in plain sight by his great style.

So, to sum it up, Orwell has taken some observations about writing of non-zero but limited usefulness and applicability and written an unsound essay espousing them as supposedly general (if not absolute) rules. In the process he has contradicted himself by demonstrating that to achieve good style one must break these rules liberally, and also by breaking them in those situations where they do have some applicability (such as the awful "it is generally assumed that...").

Comment author: [deleted] 13 March 2011 09:43:32PM 3 points [-]

It's been my experience that writing style isn't especially gendered. I used to think I could tell, but I can't actually guess accurately based on writing style alone. (Topic choice, sure.) And, of course, women have successfully written under male pseudonyms many times. Lots of behaviors are gendered, but there's psychological evidence that people are biased towards seeing gender differences in everything, and I think the "female writing style" is one of those supposed gender differences that doesn't actually exist. If you want, though, we can see if you can guess the gender of the authors of a few writing samples where the choice of topic doesn't give it away.

I initially thought Alicorn was male too, but that's because she has a genderless username and writes on a majority-male site. I've been mistaken for a guy on the internet, when I thought my username was plenty girly, but, you know, I was on the internet so the priors are skewed.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 13 March 2011 11:31:55PM 0 points [-]

I used to think I could tell, but I can't actually guess accurately based on writing style alone. (Topic choice, sure.)

Writing style can't be strictly separated from the choice of topic (or rather sub-topics addressed when writing on a given topic), and some of the most powerful clues come exactly from where these things blend into each other. Moreover, in interactive back-and-forth writing on forums and blogs, typical male and female behaviors and attitudes often quickly become apparent, just like in a live conversation, and are clearly detectable in writing.

Someone has already posted a link to a paper whose authors claim to have found measurable statistical differences between male and female styles, but I'm not sure how much (if at all) the usual human intuition relies on those specific clues.

But in any case, I don't see where exactly you disagree with my above diagnosis, given that it's discussing what I believe to be a fairly extreme and clear-cut case. Do you think Alicorn's style doesn't have the characteristics I described, or that such writing isn't statistically likely to come from men?

If you want, though, we can see if you can guess the gender of the authors of a few writing samples where the choice of topic doesn't give it away.

If you have some samples ready, I'd be curious to give it a try.

Comment author: [deleted] 13 March 2011 10:56:47PM 2 points [-]

This is unfair to Orwell. Orwell's advice is not to never use the passive voice. To begin, Orwell gives examples of bad writing and says:

I list below, with notes and examples, various of the tricks by means of which the work of prose construction is habitually dodged: ... the passive voice is wherever possible used in preference to the active ...

His obvious complaint is that the passive voice is overused and inappropriately used, not that it is used at all. Note the phrase "wherever possible". That suggests that the problem he is identifying is one of excess. In obvious reaction to this, he suggests a rule which exactly flips the above description, specifically:

Never use the passive where you can use the active.

This however does not say "never use the passive, ever". And it should furthermore be obvious that Orwell does not mean, "never use the passive where you can find some convoluted and unreadable way to use the active." I should think that you could always find some convoluted way to use the active. Rather, I think it should be obvious that he means, "never use the passive where you can use the active well." What it amounts to is a reminder to the writer to re-examine his passives to see whether an active would not be better.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 13 March 2011 11:15:03PM *  1 point [-]

Well, yes, he also says, "Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous." But his opening sentence sounds to me precisely like the sort of passive that he's warning against. It conjures the image of vague nameless opponents instead of naming concrete people, or at least concrete sorts of people, where we could examine if he really represents their views fairly. For a careful reader, this should be a warning that he might be setting up a strawman.

Can you even think of a concrete phrase that exemplifies a more shamelessly weasely use of passive than "it is generally assumed that..."?

Comment author: FAWS 13 March 2011 09:45:34PM *  2 points [-]

Language Log apparently thinks there are official rules determined by history.

This could hardly be farther form the truth. Language Log thinks that some completely made up rules that even the authors that propagate them often don't follow in the very books they are doing the propagating in (I'm not sure if this applies in the specific case of Strunk and White and singular they, but it applies in many cases of what's labeled prescriptivist poppycock there) are made even more absurd by history and the usage of high status people praised for their style.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 13 March 2011 09:50:21PM *  4 points [-]

This could hardly be farther form the truth. Language Log thinks that some completely made up rules that even the authors that propagate them often don't follow in the very books they are doing the propagating in

Exactly so. My favorite example is Orwell's "Politics and the English Language," in which he rails against (among other things) the passive voice, but the very opening sentence of the essay contains the phrase "it is generally assumed." Mistakes were made, I guess...

Comment author: Alicorn 13 March 2011 08:38:02PM 3 points [-]

Out of curiosity, what markers do you associate with feminine writing?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 13 March 2011 09:17:25PM *  1 point [-]

Perhaps I should stress that it's not that you write in a typical masculine style. Rather, you write in a style that's altogether unusual, and the minority of people who write like that are predominantly men. So it does constitute some evidence, unless I'm completely mistaken about the facts of the matter (and I pretty confident I'm not).

Regarding the typical male/female style, it's hard to give a simple description. It's an intuitive impression that's not amenable to detailed introspection. Somehow a given text usually sounds more natural in male voice than female or vice versa, unless perhaps it's a completely dry technical discussion, and while far from being 100% reliable, these guesses are also far better than chance. As for those clues that can be analyzed explicitly, I'm not sure if it would be a good idea to get into that topic, since it's mostly about (statistically accurate) sex-stereotypes, which is clearly a hot-button issue.

Comment author: AlephNeil 13 March 2011 07:18:51PM *  10 points [-]

here are hard limits imposed on our expansion by the speed of light, and they are only cubic, not exponential.

Not if space is hyperbolic. The volume of a hyperbolic sphere is exponential in its radius.

Actually, even if space is Euclidean, the effects of special relativity still mean that we can expand exponentially (for as long as we're able to maintain some constant amount of acceleration in any direction we choose, that is). In Minkowski spacetime, the subset of the future light cone consisting of points where a fixed amount of proper time has elapsed is in fact a hyperbolic 3-space.

(But for all practical purposes, you're right about the unsustainability of exponential growth.)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 13 March 2011 09:01:31PM 2 points [-]

Actually, even if space is Euclidean, the effects of special relativity still mean that we can expand exponentially (for as long as we're able to maintain some constant amount of acceleration in any direction we choose, that is).

I'm curious what would be the requirements in terms of energy and mass to maintain this motion under special relativity. In Newtonian physics, constant acceleration of a constant mass requires power increasing linearly with time -- are things substantially different under SR? Also, even if free energy is somehow given, is it possible to maintain constant acceleration without constantly losing mass in the other direction due to momentum conservation (assuming you're not moving along infinite-mass rails of some sort)?

Comment author: Alicorn 12 March 2011 04:35:01PM 4 points [-]

I have never been mistaken for male in person or on the phone, ever. Additionally, people who identify me as male (or choose to express their uncertainty with male pronouns) on the Internet aren't typically doing so because there's positive evidence to that effect; they're guessing based on my location ("the Internet" or the specific site), which amounts to careless, casual stereotyping and rankles horribly. If people tended to only identify me as male after I dropped a casual reference to an ex-girlfriend without mentioning in the same context that I'm bi, that would bother me less, albeit still some, because it would be a reasonable update to make on the basis of information I'd provided beyond simply having wandered into an area that they suppose to be the province of males.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 13 March 2011 08:17:50PM *  2 points [-]

Alicorn:

Additionally, people who identify me as male (or choose to express their uncertainty with male pronouns) on the Internet aren't typically doing so because there's positive evidence to that effect...

Have you considered that your writing style might be unusual for a woman? Even based on a small sample of writing that has no obvious clues, it's usually possible to guess the author's sex much better than chance. You write in a very technical matter-of-fact style, with long, complex, and yet very precisely constructed sentences, and take unusual care to avoid ambiguities and unstated implications. (You'd probably be a great textbook writer.) Whatever the reason for this state of affairs might be, people who write like that are overwhelmingly men.

Also, why not simply use a female name if you're bothered by this?

Comment author: Raemon 13 March 2011 07:37:48PM *  0 points [-]

The impression was given more from random one-off comments that were clearly optimized for poetry rather than factual/moral accuracy. So it's very possible I got the wrong impression. But I've heard a lot of noise about eliminating death, and basically zero noise about fixing overpopulation.

There's nothing wrong with trying to do both, but we should be working at least as hard at solving overpopulation as we are on increasing lifespan. I realize that most people here are probably not actually going to contribute to either of those fields, but a disproportion fixation on anti-aging seems dangerous to me. Are the cryonics proponents here making an effort to use minimal resources and take up minimal real estate?

Have you read Robin Hanson's writings on the economics of uploads?

I haven't. Can you provide a link?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 13 March 2011 07:53:49PM *  3 points [-]

Hanson's IEEE Spectrum article is a good start. See also this discussion on Overcoming Bias and its followup. There are also numerous other posts in OB archives discussing these issues; some of them are under the tag "ems."

The economist Nick Rowe recently wrote another good analysis along similar lines.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 13 March 2011 07:25:23PM 5 points [-]

Raemon:

If death is solved via uploads running at high speed, I'm not too concerned. (Still a little concerned, since computers still take up space, but the issue is close enough to negligible that I'm fine ignoring it).

Have you read Robin Hanson's writings on the economics of uploads? He argues very convincingly that uploads will inevitably lead to a Malthusian equilibrium, in fact much more rapidly than a biological immortality scenario.

The sense of I've gotten around here is that "exponential growth is okay, because Space is Big".

It can't possibly be okay, since sustained exponential growth must eventually catch up with the expansion of our light cone, which is (barring faster than light travel) the fundamental physical limit on how much space can be available. Exponential growth always dominates polynomial growth given enough time, and I'm sure most people here are well aware of that, so you probably got a wrong impression.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 13 March 2011 02:21:15PM 0 points [-]

Yup, you're right. I have absolutely no idea what my brain thought it was doing there. <hides face in shame>

Entirely incidentally: requiring that the subject and object match in number would admittedly be a strange sort of grammatical requirement to have, as it would preclude expressing all manner of useful thoughts (e.g., "Give me two slices of pizza"), and I'd be incredulous if an actual language claimed to have such a requirement, but I'm not sure it's logically impossible.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 13 March 2011 07:06:03PM *  0 points [-]

You're right, of course. In fact, one could conceive of a language where the grammatical number of the object would have to agree with the subject, and it would therefore not give any information about the actual number of things denoted by the object, which would have to be stated explicitly if it's necessary to avoid ambiguity, like in languages that lack grammatical number altogether. For all I know, there might even be an actual human language somewhere that features something like this.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 13 March 2011 05:34:48AM 2 points [-]

You're not the only person I know to make this claim, but I will admit to never having understood it.

That is, I can understand objecting to "If my neighbor visits I'll give them a cookie" because it violates the English grammatical convention that the subject and object must match in quantity -- singular "neighbor" doesn't go with plural "them." I don't have a problem with that, myself, but I accept that some people do.

And I can understand endorsing "If my neighbor visits I'll give em a cookie" despite it violating the English grammatical convention that "em" isn't a pronoun. I don't have a problem with that either.

But doing both at once seems unmotivated. If I'm willing to ignore English grammatical conventions enough to make up new pronouns altogether, I don't see on what grounds I can object to someone else ignoring subject/object matching rules.

Mostly, when people say this sort of thing I understand it to be an aesthetic judgment, on a par with not liking the color blue. Which is fine, as long as they aren't too obnoxious about trying to impose their aesthetic judgments on me.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 13 March 2011 09:34:46AM 3 points [-]

That is, I can understand objecting to "If my neighbor visits I'll give them a cookie" because it violates the English grammatical convention that the subject and object must match in quantity

Presumably you mean pronoun and antecedent. Clearly, subject and object need not agree in number (what you call "quantity"); such a requirement would in fact be logically impossible.

Comment author: cousin_it 11 March 2011 09:17:12PM *  2 points [-]

what's true in it isn't new, and what's new isn't true

The logical redundancy in this phrase has long bothered me.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 13 March 2011 04:09:47AM 2 points [-]

If I remember correctly, you're Russian? Those Slavic double negatives must be giving you constant distress, if you're so bothered by (seeming) deficiencies of logic in natural language.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 12 March 2011 06:57:45PM *  9 points [-]

Alicorn:

In fact, bunnies are edible.

Babies are edible too. Cannibalistic infanticide is a fairly common phenomenon throughout the animal world. It is widely practiced by chimpanzees, some of the closest evolutionary relatives of humans. (It's mostly done by male chimpanzees, but sometimes also females; see the linked paper for more details and references.)

Unless some group-selection mechanism is in operation (and such explanations are always controversial), there is no straightforward reason why one should care about unrelated babies. Killing them may well be adaptive behavior. Infanticide is thus unsurprisingly a widespread phenomenon in nature -- and once you kill a baby, you might as well eat it too; hence cannibalistic infanticide. Even when it comes to one's own kids and relatives, there are situations where killing them may be cost-effective in selfish gene terms, and parental and kin infanticide is also far from nonexistent among animals. All these behaviors are a regular subject of study in evolutionary biology, including evolutionary psychology.

Therefore, noting that babies can look less cute than other things whose only relevant characteristics are nutritional is hardly an argument against state-of-the-art evolutionary psychology. It is certainly a good argument against dilettantish dabbling in it, which is indeed all too common, even by otherwise formidable intellectual figures such as Dennett. Of course, the real academic evolutionary psychology has its own problems with sorting out well-substantiated theories from just-so stories, but they are at wholly different levels.

Comment author: lukeprog 11 March 2011 06:20:56AM 1 point [-]

Yeah, don't get me started on continental philosophy.

BTW, one of my favorite takedowns of postmodernism is this one.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 11 March 2011 06:51:17AM *  0 points [-]

lukeprog:

BTW, one of my favorite takedowns of postmodernism is this one.

Thanks for the link. I skimmed the article and it seems well written and quite informative; I'll read it in full later.

In my opinion, there are some good insights in postmodernism, but as someone (Eysenck?) said about Freud, what's true in it isn't new, and what's new isn't true. In a sense, postmodernism itself provides perhaps the most fruitful target for a postmodernist analysis (of sorts). What these people say is of little real interest when taken at face value, but some fascinating insight can be obtained by analyzing the social role of them and their intellectual output, their interactions and conflicts with other sorts of intellectuals, and the implicit (conscious or not) meanings of their claims.

Comment author: Desrtopa 11 March 2011 04:16:33AM *  1 point [-]

The post doesn't draw on any existing knowledge in the area of influencing public opinion. For example, to me it seems pretty evident that public opinion normally flows only in one direction, namely down the social hierarchy of status, and any attempt to change it will be successful only insofar as it changes the influential higher-status levels.

Not invariably. I've certainly had a substantial impact on some of my professors' views on rationality.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 11 March 2011 05:54:23AM *  2 points [-]

Indeed, but that's exactly the point: influencing opinion higher up the status hierarchy is more difficult and more effective. If you really care about influencing opinion, and you don't already have an influential platform, the really difficult problem is how to come up with strategies that are both feasible and effective.

Comment author: lukeprog 11 March 2011 01:07:42AM *  16 points [-]

Do you think Nick Bostrom's journal-published work on very similar subjects needs to be rewritten in different language to be understood? I don't, anyway. I personally find the style of mainstream philosophy and science much easier to understand than, say, your CEV paper. But that might be because mainstream philosophy and science is what I spend most of my time reading.

Frankly, I think your arguments can be made more clear and persuasive to a greater number of intelligent people if phrased in the common language.

Just because most philosophy is bad doesn't mean that when you write mainstream philosophy, you have to write badly.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 11 March 2011 05:46:40AM *  10 points [-]

lukeprog:

I personally find the style of mainstream philosophy and science much easier to understand than, say, your CEV paper. But that might be because mainstream philosophy and science is what I spend most of my time reading.

Seconded. I haven't read that many academic philosophy papers, but what I have seen has almost always been remarkably clear and understandable. I'm baffled that Eliezer would make such an extreme statement and actually mean it seriously (and get upvoted for it?!), considering how often he's cited academic philosophers like e.g. Chalmers, Bostrom, Dennett, or Parfit.

(Here of course I have in mind the Anglospheric analytic philosophy; continental philosophy is a horrible mess in comparison.)

Comment author: DavidAgain 08 March 2011 06:29:17PM 0 points [-]

As in somebody gets AIDS from their first partner (who gets it from whatever, depending on how far back we count as 'parties involved': perhaps a cheating grandparent or if that still counts then transfusion etc.)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 11 March 2011 04:25:58AM 0 points [-]

Yes, you're right, that would be another possibility.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 11 March 2011 03:15:05AM *  20 points [-]

I mostly agree with the previous commenter who called this post "applause lights." Reading it, many objections come to mind (some of which have already been voiced in other comments):

  1. "Planting seeds" suggests starting a self-perpetuating chain reaction, but the post presents no evidence that any of the proposed methods are effective in this regard.

  2. The post doesn't draw on any existing knowledge in the area of influencing public opinion. For example, to me it seems pretty evident that public opinion normally flows only in one direction, namely down the social hierarchy of status, and any attempt to change it will be successful only insofar as it changes the influential higher-status levels. Otherwise, any success will be temporary and soon drowned. Whether or not you agree with this, any practical proposal for influencing public opinion must assume some such model, and it's crucial not to assume a wrong one.

  3. Similarly, there is no discussion of how to avoid making a negative contribution. For people with less than spectacular communication skills, following some of the advice in the post may result in low-status behaviors that will lower people's opinion of the cause associated with them. (I'm not saying your advice necessarily leads to this, just that it's easy to end up applying it that way.)

  4. What is the exact goal of the desired change? Presumably it is to lead people to form more accurate beliefs across the board. But even assuming this can be done, is it really desirable? I don't think this question can be answered affirmatively either at the individual or at the social level. It seems evident to me that in some significant cases one is better off not adjusting one's beliefs towards greater accuracy, and moreover, in every human society there are widespread beliefs that wouldn't survive rational scrutiny but nevertheless play crucial signaling and coordination roles, and it's not at all clear whether organized society is possible without them. So what are the exact goals of "spread[ing] rationality on a mass scale," and what argument exists that the results would be positive (by whatever measure)?

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 11 March 2011 12:06:44AM 0 points [-]

You appealed to inadequacy of "today's software tools and methodologies". Now you make a different argument. I didn't say it's probable that solution will be found (given the various difficulties), I said that you can't be sure that it's Neolithic tools in particular that are inadequate.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 11 March 2011 02:47:27AM *  2 points [-]

It's hard to find a perfect analogy here, but both analogies I mentioned lend support to my original claim in a similar way.

It may be that with the present state of math, one could cite a few established results and use them to construct a simple proof of P != NP, only nobody's figured it out yet. Analogously, it may be that there is a feasible way to take present-day software tools and use them to implement a working AGI. In both cases, we lack the understanding that would be necessary either to achieve the goal or to prove it impossible. However, what insight and practical experience we have strongly suggests that neither thing is doable, leading to conclusion that the present-day software tools likely are inadequate.

In addition to this argument, we can also observe that even if such a solution exists, finding it would be a task of enormous difficulty, possibly beyond anyone's practical abilities.

This reasoning doesn't lead to the same certainty that we have in problems involving well-understood physics, such as building airplanes, but I do think it's sufficient (when spelled out in full detail) to establish a very high level of certainty nevertheless.

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 10 March 2011 11:49:58AM *  3 points [-]

And I'd say that even if someone had a correct general idea how to build an AGI (an assumption that by itself beggars belief given the current state of the relevant science), developing an actual working implementation with today's software tools and methodologies would be sort of like trying to build a working airplane with Neolithic tools.

This is the sort of sentiment that has people predict that AGI will be built in 300 years, because "300 years" is how difficult the problem feels like. There is a lot of uncertainty about what it takes to build an AGI, and it would be wrong to be confident one way or the other just how difficult that's going to be, or what tools are necessary.

We understand both airplanes and Neolithic tools, but we don't understand AGI design. Difficulty in basic understanding doesn't straightforwardly translate into the difficulty of solution.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 10 March 2011 10:19:42PM 2 points [-]

We understand both airplanes and Neolithic tools, but we don't understand AGI design. Difficulty in basic understanding doesn't straightforwardly translate into the difficulty of solution.

That is true, but a project like OpenCog can succeed only if: (1) there exists an AGI program simple enough (in terms of both size and messiness) to be doable with today's software technology, and (2) people running the project have the right idea how to build it. I find both these assumptions improbable, especially the latter, and their conjunction vanishingly unlikely.

Perhaps a better analogy would be if someone embarked on a project to find an elementary proof of P != NP or some such problem. We don't know for sure that it's impossible, but given both the apparent difficulty of the problem and the history of the attempts to solve it, such an announcement would be rightfully met with skepticism.

Comment author: ferrouswheel 10 March 2011 06:35:40AM 2 points [-]

Well, if you bothered looking at our/OpenCog's roadmap you'll see it doesn't expect AGI in a "few years".

What magical software engineering tools are you after that can't be built with the current tools we have?

If nobody attempts to build these then nothing will ever improve - people will just go "oh, that can't be done right now, let's just wait a while until the tools appear that make AGI like snapping lego together". Which is fine if you want to leave the R&D to other people... like us.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 10 March 2011 07:06:34AM 2 points [-]

ferrouswheel:

Well, if you bothered looking at our/OpenCog's roadmap you'll see it doesn't expect AGI in a "few years".

The roadmap on opencog.org has among its milestones: "2019-2021: Full-On Human Level AGI."

What magical software engineering tools are you after that can't be built with the current tools we have?

Well, if I knew, I'd be cashing in on the idea, not discussing it here. In any case, surely you must agree that claiming the ability to develop an AGI within a decade is a very extraordinary claim.

Comment author: lukeprog 09 March 2011 07:39:39PM 2 points [-]

Too bad we can't judge Friendly AI charity effectiveness as "easily" as we can judge the effectiveness of some other charities, like those which distribute malaria nets and vaccines.

If one assumes that giving toward solving the Friendly AI problem offers the highest marginal return on investment, which project do you give to? Yudkowsky / SIAI? OpenCog / Goertzel? Gert-Jan Lokhorst? Stan Franklin / Wendell Wallach / Colin Allen?

My money is on SIAI, but I can't justify that with anything quick and easy.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 10 March 2011 12:12:31AM *  2 points [-]

I don't know much about AI specifically, but I do know something about software in general. And I'd say that even if someone had a correct general idea how to build an AGI (an assumption that by itself beggars belief given the current state of the relevant science), developing an actual working implementation with today's software tools and methodologies would be sort of like trying to build a working airplane with Neolithic tools. The way software is currently done is simply too brittle and unscalable to allow for a project of such size and complexity, and nobody really knows when and how (if at all) this state of affairs will be improved.

With this in mind, I simply can't take seriously people who propose a few years long roadmap for building an AGI.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 08 March 2011 06:45:11PM 3 points [-]

3 A cyber-replica is not you. If one were made and stood next to you, you would still not consent to be shot. 4 Ditto a meat replica 5 If you believe the many worlds model of quantum physics is true (Eliezer does), then there already are a vitually infinite number of replicas of you already, so why bother making another one?

Point 5 contradicts 3 and 4, which suggests to me that your father is just arguing, or possibly that he isn't enthusiastic about continuing to live, and is looking for excuses.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 08 March 2011 09:25:04PM 1 point [-]

Point 5 contradicts 3 and 4,

I wouldn't say so. The natural way to read it is as proposing two separate reasons not to care about making replicas of oneself, which are relevant under different assumptions.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 08 February 2011 11:39:10PM 13 points [-]

At this point, my Expectancy for positive results from single changes like "just use a trainer at the gym" has hit essentially zero - I've tried all sorts of stuff, nothing ever fucking works - so I'm not willing to spend the incremental money. If I have a lot of money to spend, I'll try throwing a higher level of money at all aspects of the problem - get a trainer on weights, try the latest fad of "short interval bursts" for aerobic exercise, get LASIK and a big TV and a separate room of the apartment to make exercising less unpleasant (no, dears, I don't get any endorphins whatsoever), buy a wide variety of grass-fed organic meats and take one last shot at the paleo diet again, and... actually I think that's most of what I'd do. That way I'd be able to scrape up enough hope to make it worth a shot. Trying one item from that list doesn't seem worth the bother.

I did try Shangri-La again when Seth Roberts contacted me personally and asked me to take another shot. It was just wearing tight, uncomfortable noseplugs while eating all my food and clearing out time at night to make sure I took oil 1 hour away from eating any other food or brushing my teeth, a trivial inconvenience when I'd walk over broken glass to lose weight. I lost 20 pounds and then despite trying out around 10 different things Seth Roberts said to do, my weight slowly started creeping up again, and when after a while I gave up and stopped taking the oil to see what would happen, there was no change in the behavior of my weight - the same slow creep. It's clear that Shangri-La worked initially but then, contrary to all theory, it just mysteriously stopped working. So far I've gained 10 of those 20 pounds back, in accordance with the one truly reliable law of dietary science: 95% of the people who manage to lose weight put it back on shortly thereafter. BTW, exercise didn't lead me to lose any weight whatsoever, even when combined with an attempt at the paleo diet (albeit not one that spent lots of money, or involved a personal trainer).

So far as I can tell, all the advice here is from metabolically privileged folks who don't know they're metabolically privileged and don't comprehend the nothing fucking works phenomenon that obtains if you're not metabolically privileged.

If you want to give advice, that's fine. Don't tell me how well it's going to work or how easy it's going to be; that just tells me you're clueless.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 08 March 2011 09:16:05PM *  1 point [-]

It's clear that Shangri-La worked initially but then, contrary to all theory, it just mysteriously stopped working.

Frankly, I'm surprised that this "Shangri-La" approach is taken seriously by you and other people here on LW. I do believe that it has worked for many people, but this looks exactly like the sort of problem where placebo should be very effective on average. On the other hand, Roberts's theories about it don't even sound like a good just-so story.

Comment author: DavidAgain 07 March 2011 10:44:36PM *  0 points [-]

Oh, fair enough: I was reading back to the 'how many people were killed by Christian fundamentalists' question... Sorry!

On your question, am I missing something obvious or would widows/widowers be a real and all-too-likely possibility?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 08 March 2011 09:00:52AM 0 points [-]

What exact scenario with widows/widowers do you have in mind?

Comment author: Alicorn 07 March 2011 05:00:30PM 3 points [-]

People who believe that souls attach to bodies at the moment of conception puzzle me. I'm not sure how, if at all, they deal with the existence of identical twins (who were conceived just the once and then split up later) or chimeras (who were once fraternal twins and then fused together). I doubt they'd say that identical twins have half a soul each or need to share, or that chimeras have two souls.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 07 March 2011 11:40:16PM *  1 point [-]

When it comes to issues of personhood, consciousness, personal identity, etc., there is no view (let alone value system) that wouldn't be vulnerable to such problematic questions. In fact, I'd say that by the usual standards of philosophical cross-examinations, these questions are relatively easy to address from the standpoint of the ensoulment-at-conception theory.

Comment author: Nornagest 07 March 2011 10:11:03PM 1 point [-]

I'm not sure how useful it is to search for sexual transmission scenarios within a reference class populated entirely by the chaste.

(Actually, the Shi'a practice of nikah mut‘ah seems to qualify, but that's rather obscure by the standards of this discussion.)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 07 March 2011 10:34:23PM 0 points [-]

I'm not sure how useful it is to search for sexual transmission scenarios within a reference class populated entirely by the chaste.

Well, originally I suggested one scenario that would seemingly fall under this. I'm genuinely curious if someone can think of any others. Your suggestion of the Shiite temporary marriages is a good one, though based on some casual googling I just did, it appears that condoms are permitted by this particular religion.

Comment author: DavidAgain 07 March 2011 09:58:18PM 0 points [-]

Surely the 'any actions (by any of the parties involved)' isn't relevant for casting blame/responsibility here? Christianity recognises, or rather emphasises, that people do constantly fall short of the values, and encourages repentence and continuing to follow the same rules.

I don't know whether churches would advise a repentent person who had cheated or had sex before marriage to then be celibate within their marriage. But if they tell them to keep having sex without protection then that specific action can be blamed for the results. A system of behaviour that relies on being universalised to make any sense is flawed. One encouraged by a religion that is fully aware that people constantly fall short of its commandments could be regarded as culpable.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 07 March 2011 10:29:05PM 0 points [-]

It wasn't my intention to make or imply any value judgments and blame assignments in this context. I just asked if someone can think of a scenario that meets these conditions, as a mere question of fact and logic.

Comment author: taryneast 07 March 2011 05:36:37PM *  -1 points [-]

Can you think of any such scenario that doesn't involve other actions forbidden by the same religion?

Yes:

1) a totally innocent married woman who has kept herself "pure" with only her husband... and contracts HIV because he is unfaithful

2) a woman who is raped by an HIV positive person (religious or otherwise)

3) a man who kept himself "pure" for marriage, only to discover that his now-wife hadn't "kept herself for her husband" and contracted HIV during her own pre-marital sex

4) a person who converted to the religion later in life... and had unprotected sex before they converted

5) some poor young thing who contracts it during unprotected oral sex because they're told that "it's not really sex" and therefore not considered "impure" by their religion's standards

6) a person who shares needles with somebody else... no prohibition against opiates in the bible mate

...I'm sure I could go on.

Argument from personal incredulity is generally not a strong stance to take.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 07 March 2011 09:43:53PM 2 points [-]

It seems like you misunderstood my question. I asked about examples of HIV transmission scenarios that: (1) would be prevented by the use of condoms, and (2) don't involve any actions (by any of the parties involved) that are also prohibited by all the major religions that prohibit condom use. I don't see a single item on your list that meets both conditions.

Comment author: Desrtopa 07 March 2011 05:31:26PM 4 points [-]

People will get abortions whether they are legal or not. If they are illegal, they will be much more dangerous; that means more deaths from "back-alley" abortions. More people will be criminals and that means higher law enforcement costs, jail costs, and/or crime rates, which makes your (city, state, not so much in the case of a nation) less desirable and hurts economic activity.

As of a few years ago, when we covered this in one of my classes, the average age of an abortion providing doctor in the United States was over sixty, because any doctor in training is allowed to opt out of learning the procedure, performing it is emotionally taxing and a threat to one's livelihood, and most of those motivated to perform it are those who were adults before Roe v. Wade and remember what it was like before it was legal.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 07 March 2011 09:32:24PM 4 points [-]

Do you have any references for that claim? I'd be very interested in seeing the concrete statistics (and how exactly they were arrived at).

Comment author: Risto_Saarelma 07 March 2011 09:47:34AM 2 points [-]

This is more of a vague intuition than something built up to withstand prolonged prodding, but individuals have very complex and idiosyncratic complexes of beliefs in their heads, while the beliefs that operate on the level of society get simplified into something that can be transmitted through language. The sets of professed beliefs in a culture need to be put into language, and are then much easier to subject to analysis than whichever thorny messes people are carrying in their heads.

As an example, saying that the sanity waterline is higher in health care in contemporary France than it was in health care in 15th century France seems to me to be saying something meaningful and probably true, but it's a lot less obvious exactly how you'd go talking about the sanity waterlines of individual French physicians.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 07 March 2011 05:22:27PM 2 points [-]

Risto_Saarelma:

The sets of professed beliefs in a culture need to be put into language, and are then much easier to subject to analysis than whichever thorny messes people are carrying in their heads.

I don't think that's the case. It seems to me that a very significant part of what people learn from the surrounding culture is not communicated explicitly. To take an important example, some of the essential skills for navigating through the reigning social norms are taboo to discuss explicitly, and you are expected to figure them out by tuning into subtle and implicit aspects of what you see and hear. I'm sure lots of society-wide beliefs are formed by such processes that don't involve any explicit verbal formulation.

As an example, saying that the sanity waterline is higher in health care in contemporary France than it was in health care in 15th century France seems to me to be saying something meaningful and probably true,

I agree it can make sense when it comes to particular areas of knowledge, especially those that are technical or hard-scientific. But one would be hard pressed to find many examples when an all-encompassing comparison would make sense.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 07 March 2011 08:23:37AM *  2 points [-]

However, there are people who've contracted HIV because condoms were forbidden, and personally didn't do anything contravening the religion's rules.

Catholics are not generally considered fundamentalists. ETA: now that I've read more of the thread, it seems that you're using "fundamentalist" to mean people who don't care about the effects of their beliefs. Is there a difference between that and being a consistent deontologist?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 07 March 2011 08:35:53AM 1 point [-]

NancyLebovitz:

However, there are people who've contracted HIV because condoms were forbidden, and personally didn't do anything contravening the religion's rules.

What concrete scenarios do you have in mind?

Comment author: CronoDAS 07 March 2011 07:51:07AM 5 points [-]

Would you count people who contracted HIV because their religion forbid condom use?

In response to comment by CronoDAS on Positive Thinking
Comment author: Vladimir_M 07 March 2011 08:18:39AM *  2 points [-]

CronoDAS:

Would you count people who contracted HIV because their religion forbid condom use?

Can you think of any such scenario that doesn't involve other actions forbidden by the same religion?

(The only thing I can think of would be spouses of patients who contracted HIV via transfusion and who would have used condoms if it hadn't been for the religious prohibition. But how many of those have there been?)

Comment author: Risto_Saarelma 07 March 2011 06:46:29AM 2 points [-]

Try applying the metaphor on the level of cultures rather than individuals. Cultures can vary on how many irrational ideas they tolerate or promote, how much they expect their members to be able to reflect and justify their beliefs, and exactly what kind of beliefs are useful to signal within them. This doesn't require a precise ranking of the degrees of insanity of beliefs.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 07 March 2011 08:07:24AM 2 points [-]

I'm not sure I understand your comment. How exactly would you apply the "waterline" metaphor to comparison between cultures? If anything, it seems to me even less applicable, since there are even more degrees of freedom involved.

In response to Positive Thinking
Comment author: Vladimir_M 07 March 2011 03:36:42AM *  12 points [-]

Swimmer963:

I wouldn’t describe many of them [my non-believer friends] as rationalists, particularly, but it seems that according to lesswrong doctrine, they are above the sanity waterline while my first friend group is below.

Am I the only one who thinks that this "sanity waterline" model is wildly inaccurate? The model assumes that false beliefs can be somehow ordered by the level of insanity, so that people who have achieved a given level of sanity are immunized against everything below that. This, however, seems to me completely remote from reality. Even if we can agree on some standardized "insanity ranking" for false beliefs -- already an unrealistic assumption -- there's no way people's actual sets of beliefs will conform to the "waterline" rule according to this ranking, not even as the roughest first approximation.

One essential reason for this is the signaling role of beliefs. When it comes to issues that don't have significant instrumental implications, people are drawn to beliefs with the highest signaling value rather than accuracy. High-status beliefs can be anywhere from completely correct to downright crazy, and outside of strictly technical topics, there is typically nothing that would systematically push them towards the former. And indeed, in practice we usually see people with an eclectic mix of correct and ridiculously false beliefs (and everything in-between), with nothing resembling a systematic "sanity waterline."

Comment author: SilasBarta 07 March 2011 02:53:42AM 0 points [-]

I'm saying that there's a lot less significance to EFF deeming something "not clearly illegal" than you were implying.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 07 March 2011 03:11:34AM *  3 points [-]

There's actually a whole lot of significance in being endorsed by a respectable institution. As several other people have remarked in this thread, if the feds decide to throw the book at you, you're screwed no matter what. The only way to immunize yourself against this threat is to have backing by high-status people who are able to sway the public opinion and the legal establishment in your favor (so the feds will get bad press instead of accolades if they attack you, and you have a good chance to persuade a court to order the feds to leave you alone). EFF is far from being a decisively powerful player in this regard, but getting its endorsement is definitely a large step in the direction favorable for the Bitcoin people.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 07 March 2011 12:56:05AM *  6 points [-]

Eliezer Yudkowsky:

Yesterday, someone said that my writing reminded them of George Orwell's Politics and the English Language. I was honored.

To continue with the thread necromancy, it's a dubious honor. I've seen several well argued scathing critiques of that essay by linguists. See for example the Language Log posts by David Beaver and Geoffrey Pullum discussing Orwell's nonsensical claims about the passive voice, the use of metaphors, etc.

Orwell was the outraged opponent of totalitarianism and the muddy thinking in which evil cloaks itself

There's plenty of "thinking" in Orwell's books that it would be charitable to call muddy. Orwell was one hell of a good writer, but intellectually he's way overrated. Even when it comes to his best work, 1984, every now and then I'm struck when I read some older book and realize that significant parts of the plot and philosophy of 1984 were borrowed from it. (If you think I'm exaggerating, just read Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon and James Burnham's wartime books.)

Comment author: Yvain 05 March 2011 08:03:34PM *  46 points [-]

Seeing this makes me happy because I had a similar revelation a few years ago and it always makes me mad to see people use the glaringly bad justification for being pro-choice which you've overcome. On the other hand, after thinking about the matter quite a bit I still am pro-choice. You say:

On the other hand, as little as it is, it still represents a human life

I think the key word is "represents".

A lot of bad reasoning seems to come from proving a controversial idea can be fit into a category of things that are mostly bad, and then concluding that the controversial idea, too, must be mostly bad.

For example, some people are opposed to a project to genetically engineer diseases like cystic fibrosis out of the human genome, because that's a form of "eugenics". I think this is supposed to cash out as saying that the CF project shares some surface features with what the Nazis did and what those American Southerners who tried to force-sterilize black people did, and those two things are definitely bad, so the CF project must also be bad.

The counterargument is that the features it shares with the Nazi project and the Southern project are not the features that made those two programs bad. Those two programs were bad because they involved hurting people, either through death or through force-sterilization, without their consent. The CF elimination project hopefully would be voluntary and would not damage the people involved. Therefore, although it shares some similarities with the Nazi project and the Southern project (it's about genetics, it's intended to improve the species, etc), those aren't relevant to this moral question and the argument "But it's eugenics" is flawed.

(If you haven't read the 37 Ways Words Can Be Wrong sequence, I suggest that now. Think of a person taking a blue egg that contains vanadium, pointing to a bin full of blue eggs that contain palladium, and saying "But this is a blegg, and we all know bleggs contain palladium!" Well, no.)

The "human life" issue strikes me as very similar. "Taking a human life" is a large category mostly full of bad things. It contains things like stabbing a teenager with a knife, poisoning a senator, strangling an old person in a nursing home, starving a toddler, et cetera. All of these are really bad. They're really bad for various reasons including that they cause the person pain, that they disrupt society, that they violate the person's preference not to be killed, et cetera.

Abortion possibly does fit into the category of "taking a human life." But although it shares the surface features of that category, it isn't clear whether or not it shares the interesting moral feature which is exactly what the whole argument is about. Killing you or me is bad because we understand death and have preferences against it and don't want to die. Whether or not killing a fetus is bad depends on whether or not the fetus also satisfies those conditions - not on whether from a certain angle the problem looks like other cases that satisfy those conditions.

The question isn't whether or not we want to stick the fetus into an artificial category called "human", it's whether it has the specific features that make that category relevant to this particular problem in the first place.

See Leaky Generalizations and Replace The Symbol With The Substance

Comment author: Vladimir_M 07 March 2011 12:38:26AM *  4 points [-]

The trouble with this reasoning is that universally accepted norms cannot be based on lines drawn at arbitrary points. There must be a strong focal (Schelling) point where the lines are drawn, or otherwise they will soon be pushed in one direction or another. Or to put it differently, slippery slope arguments usually have at least some validity.

With this in mind, arguments against things based on placing them into common categories with bad things can be perfectly valid in a very important sense. Yes, they usually produce powerful propagandistic rhetoric as a side-effect, and sometimes that is their primary purpose. However, often there are no convenient focal points where you would ideally like to draw the lines, and the best available focal points are around some much broader category, so if you won't draw the lines around the broader category, there is a very real possibility that some pressure will push them all the way to things you'd definitely want to prevent.

So, for example, people who want to draw the line so as to condemn all eugenics (under some coherent and widely accepted definition of the term) have a workable focal point to defend. In contrast, if you'd like to draw the lines around some forms of eugenics and not others according to some sophisticated ethical analysis, chances are such norms would be unstable and the lines would soon be moved in one direction or another.

Comment author: Costanza 06 March 2011 11:16:46PM *  5 points [-]

Law students are certainly sometimes called to argue both sides of an ambiguous question, and litigators have to argue on behalf of their clients. Furthermore, the big, famous cases in America are almost always Supreme Court cases. But any case that makes it to the Supreme Court has survived intense selection pressure. The overwhelming number of cases that are actually litigated are resolved in the lower courts. A greater number of potential cases are settled or resolved before trial. The law is mostly confusing only at at the very distant margins.

I don't know that U.S. law in general is more contradictory than any other legal system intended to govern human behavior -- it is made by humans, expressed in human language, and is finite in length -- all the law libraries in the world are too short to anticipate the full range of possible human activity. That leaves a huge area of ambiguity under any system of law.

The author of that law review article cited above confused me. On the one hand, he started out by evoking the "nightmare vision" of Orwell's 1984. But the stated goal of his essay is "to establish three points: 1) there is no such thing as a government of law and not people, 2) the belief that there is serves to maintain public support for society's power structure, and 3) the establishment of a truly free society requires the abandonment of the myth of the rule of law."

This sure wasn't Orwell's goal. In 1984 there was no law. Also, as Orwell explained in Why I Write:

Here one comes upon an all-important English trait: the respect for constituitionalism and legality, the belief in 'the law' as something above the state and above the individual, something which is cruel and stupid, of course, but at any rate incorruptible. It is not that anyone imagines the law to be just. Everyone knows that there is one law for the rich and another for the poor. But no one accepts the implications of this, everyone takes for granted that the law, such as it is, will be respected, and feels a sense of outrage when it is not. Remarks like 'They can't run me in; I haven't done anything wrong', or 'They can't do that; it's against the law', are part of the atmosphere of England...Everyone believes in his heart that the law can be, ought to be, and, on the whole, will be impartially administered. The totalitarian idea that there is no such thing as law, there is only power, has never taken root.

There's a short classic book, originally from 1948, called An Introduction to Legal Reasoning. On the first page, the author explains:

It is important that the mechanism of legal reasoning should not be concealed by its pretense. The pretense is that the law is a system of known rules applied by a judge; the pretense has long been under attack. In an important sense, legal rules are never clear, and if a rule had to be clear before it could be imposed, society would be impossible. The mechanism accepts the differences of view and ambiguities of words. It provides for the participation of the community in resolving the ambiguity by providing a forum for the discussion of policy in the gap of ambiguity. On serious controversial questions, it makes it possible to take the first step on the direction of what otherwise would be forbidden ends. The mechanism is indispensable to peace in a community.

This is a long spiel, mostly about things that have been rattling around in my own head for a while -- sorry to drone on. The law certainly does need a jab once in a while.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 07 March 2011 12:16:29AM 0 points [-]

Costanza:

Also, as Orwell explained in Why I Write:

To be precise, that quote is from "England Your England," not "Why I Write."

Comment author: nerzhin 04 March 2011 04:31:19PM 4 points [-]

Impostor syndrome is pretty common among men too, in my experience. It may still be more common in women, but I'm not sure.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 04 March 2011 05:51:48PM 2 points [-]

Yes, this should definitely be taken into account. In fact, given the present state of many fields, I'm sure that for many people in academia the "impostor syndrome" is just a true realization that their work is worthless.

Comment author: komponisto 04 March 2011 04:21:57PM 4 points [-]

In Fran Allen's day, programming at IBM was considered work for women

That's an extremely interesting reminder of how culture-dependent these occupational gender patterns are.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 04 March 2011 05:34:36PM *  4 points [-]

However, these were the days before compilers. Programming back then was a very different affair from nowadays, involving a lot of office work, as well as other kinds of semi-skilled work that were back then (and would likely still be to some extent) perceived as typical women's work. I'd be wary of any generalizations to today's situation in computing without studying the issue in much more detail.

In response to Testing Intelligence
Comment author: Vladimir_M 03 March 2011 03:44:43AM *  5 points [-]

paulfchristiano:

I would appreciate pointers to reliable scholarship surrounding this question, but a brief search turned up mostly very muddled thinking and a general lack of people doing good experiments.

That was my impression too when I tried making some sense of this area. Nevertheless, based on the literature I've seen, I think one can reliably say the following about your five items:

  1. Raven's and similar tests are definitely not the gold standard for pure g measurement that they were once thought to be. The Flynn effect has had the largest magnitude exactly on this sort of tests, and people can be trained to improve their scores on them significantly. (Though proponents if IQ would of course claim that this ruins their predictive validity.)

  2. My impression is that this would be a very g-intensive task, possibly the most g-intensive sort of task at all. A really interesting evaluation of the Flynn effect would be to see how much it has affected people's performance on tasks of this sort, but I'm not familiar with any literature addressing this question.

  3. This sort of task may involve a bunch of other abilities largely unrelated to intelligence, depending on the nature of the problem. To take the most important example, if the problem requires figuring out the thoughts and motivations of other people, someone with an extremely high general intelligence but slightly autistic will likely perform worse than average. If the problem is completely formalized and symbolic, I'd say it's little different from (2).

  4. This is tricky. People of mediocre or even low intelligence but with great charisma and self-presentation skills can be surprisingly capable of fooling others into thinking they're much smarter than they really are. Even if the interaction is purely about some formal and logically rigorous issue, your subjective impression may end up being much more favorable than if you applied a predefined set of formal criteria for evaluation.

  5. This is about intelligence as well as conscientiousness. I don't know what's the correlation between these in the general population (and I doubt anyone knows precisely), but it's certainly above zero. On the other hand, there are definitely people with one much better than the other. Which is more important depends on how novel and tough the problems are, how tiresome and tedious the tasks are, and how much time there is for preparation. For example, someone of mediocre intelligence can ace a math exam by working through a whole thick problem book beforehand, but this would not work for a math olympiad.

Take all this with the disclaimer that I'm just an amateur in this area, though I have read a fair bit of research literature in it at one point.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 01 March 2011 09:00:51PM *  5 points [-]

I think you're forgetting the problem of incentives. Whatever standard procedures for evaluating/predicting usefulness you come up with, if they're actually used to allocate resources and status in practice, people will have the incentive to hack them by designing and presenting their own work to come off as better than it really is. And since people who do research are usually very smart, you'll be faced with a host of extremely smart people trying to outsmart and cheat your metrics, in which many will surely be successful. Goodhart's law, and all that.

This, of course, is not even considering whether the influential people whom you'd have to win over to establish such practices have the incentive to submit their past and present work to such evaluation. Unfortunately, although the problems you point out are very real, there is no straightforward solution for them; almost any attempt at fixing institution is likely to run into difficult and unpredictable problems with perverse incentives.

Comment author: MichaelVassar 27 February 2011 04:46:12PM 1 point [-]

I think I account for varied personalities well, but treat supposed personality differences which are basically the fear of doing things not in accordance with an established identity as bad motivations and see those as accounting for a significant fraction of supposed personality differences though not for the majority.

I'm confused about "In my opinion, you're also underestimating some downsides of being a senior member of the modern-day academic nomenklatura ". What makes you say that?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 01 March 2011 05:01:46AM *  4 points [-]

MichaelVassar:

I'm confused about "In my opinion, you're also underestimating some downsides of being a senior member of the modern-day academic nomenklatura ". What makes you say that?

Basically, I have in mind the required level of conformity with the respectable opinion. This is admittedly somewhat speculative on my part since I have neither personal experience nor close friends in such positions, but it seems to me that the standards of conformity expected from a public intellectual with prestigious academic and media affiliations have nowadays reached a level where it's doubtful whether a genuinely curious and open mind can satisfy them without a great deal of self-censorship and possibly also dishonesty about one's true beliefs. This seems to me like a significant barrier to true self-actualization by any reasonable definition of the term. Clearly, assuming the problem exists, it will be worse the further one's interests are from strictly technical and non-ideological topics.

Perhaps it will be clearer if I illustrate it with a more extreme example. Imaging you were an elite member of some intellectual profession in the former U.S.S.R. -- would you rather be a mathematician or an economist? As a mathematician, you could do all the mathematics you liked, with only some rare and minimal lip-service to the system; as an economist, on the other hand, you would have to constantly mold your views according to a reigning ideology clearly remote from reality. Now of course, the modern-day Western world is far from even late-period U.S.S.R., but the difference is in my opinion one of degree, not essence. The position of a high-status intellectual still comes with very severe restrictions on your intellectual freedom.

Comment author: Andy_McKenzie 26 February 2011 07:28:48PM 4 points [-]

I respond to Hanson's response here.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 26 February 2011 11:44:18PM *  1 point [-]

Andy,

I think it's not entirely clear what exactly you mean by "specialization." In my post, I'm not addressing the question of when (if ever) it is advisable to stick your nose into topics outside of your own area of expertise, which is a fascinating topic in its own right. Rather, I am assuming that you have decided to do so and that your goal is to form a maximally accurate opinion about some such question.

So overall, I think my post is orthogonal to the issue of how much you should push yourself towards specialization, except insofar as it stops being relevant if you decide to pursue the most extreme and absolute specialization possible.

Comment author: JGWeissman 25 February 2011 06:02:21PM 3 points [-]

If it were possible to learn to how to get rich by studying people who had done so, this does not imply that it would be easy to get rich, or that people we can observe getting rich have obviously learned to do so in this way.

  • Figuring out how to synthesize the data is work.
  • Actually synthesizing the data, having figured out how do so, is work.
  • Implementing what you have learned to actually get rich is likely to be long-term, hard work.

Generally, the effecient market hypothesis does not imply that it is impossible to find opportunities to do work to create value. It implies that you are not likely to find opportunities to get much better than a typical return of value for work.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 25 February 2011 06:44:06PM 3 points [-]

JGWeissman:

Generally, the effecient market hypothesis does not imply that it is impossible to find opportunities to do work to create value. It implies that you are not likely to find opportunities to get much better than a typical return of value for work.

I agree. In fact, the principle can be refined even further: you're not likely to find opportunities much better than a typical career path accomplished by people whose abilities and qualities are comparable to yours. So if you think you've found a great opportunity, it's not at all impossible that you're correct, but it does mean that you're either very lucky or exceptionally capable.

These points may seem trivial, but in reality, I'm baffled with how many people don't seem to understand them. The most obvious example are all those people who keep insisting that they can beat the stock market, but I've seen many others too.

Comment author: AlephNeil 24 February 2011 09:59:56PM 2 points [-]

Let's regard Omega's prior as being given by M(x) as shown here. Now let's divide our monotone UTM's programs into the following classes.

  1. Ones that just say "Print the following: ... "
  2. Every other program.

You can imagine Omega as a Bayesian reasoner trying to decide between the two hypotheses "the data was generated by a program in class 1" and "the data was generated by a program in class 2". Omega's prior will give each of these two hypotheses a non-zero probability.

To "cut to the chase", what happens is that the "extra damage" to the score caused by "class 2" falls off quickly enough, relative to the current posterior probability of "class 2", that the extra loss of score has to be finite.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 25 February 2011 01:10:19AM 0 points [-]

I see! That's a very good intuitive explanation, thanks for writing it down.

Comment author: gwern 24 February 2011 10:30:16PM *  1 point [-]

Is this a correct model, though?

I'm sure it isn't! But that's the fun of Fermi problems: reaching not-wildly-incorrect solutions by way of absurdly simplified & wrong models.

For example, I feel sure that if my 20 foot answer is too little, the lethal radius would still be less than 1 larger order of magnitude (200 feet), and if it's too much, that the lethal radius is still bigger than 1 smaller order (2 feet).

Comment author: Vladimir_M 25 February 2011 12:48:06AM *  1 point [-]

Oh, I like your Fermi model! (And also my above comment was horribly incorrect -- see the subsequent discussion with Constant.)

What I was wondering however is whether it might be off too much even by Fermi problem standards, i.e. by multiple orders of magnitude. The trouble is that if the target creatures are vastly better or poorer conductors than the surrounding medium, this greatly influences how the flow of energy through and around them is distributed, possibly making the model based on uniform energy flow across all angles too inaccurate even for a Fermi calculation. (To give an extreme example, a metal wire connecting the poles of a battery draws nearly all energy flow in the circuit through itself, despite being a negligible part of the spatial cross-section.)

Or to put it more precisely, the way a human distorts the flow of electrical energy when surrounded by ground and air may well be extremely different, and possibly go in a totally different direction, from the way a fish distorts it when surrounded by seawater, so your generalization from humans to fish might be problematic.

My initial idea was to attempt another Fermi approach based on guesstimating V(r) and its derivative, but the poor conductivity of fish relative to seawater seems to complicate that one too.

Comment author: [deleted] 24 February 2011 10:54:49PM 5 points [-]

Vladimir, I'm not sure about the orientation bit. Imagine constructing a sphere of fish around the lightning strike, so that the fish tile the sphere and are flat against the sphere (actually, hemisphere). Necessarily, all the electricity flows through the fish, because they completely tile the hemisphere. Now re-orient the fish without otherwise changing their location. Now, because the fish are thin, they no longer cover the sphere, and between them is a lot of seawater. So only a small fraction, now, of the electricity flows through the fish, and the rest passes by them in the seawater.

Meanwhile, of course, that small fraction of electricity is staying in the fish for much longer, because each unit of power is flowing the entire length of the fish, from head to tail, whereas when the fish are placed sideways relative to the flow of electricity, each unit of power is only flowing from one side to the other.

At first glance, it seems to cancel out.

Imagine the following: each fish is made out ten unit cubes placed next to each other. They can either be placed perpendicular to the flow of energy, so that each cube gets the energy that flows through one unit square. Or, they can be placed parallel to the flow of energy, so that they all share the energy from a single unit square, which flows through all of them one after the other.

It seems to come to the same thing.

But here's one further complication: if the fish is a better conductor than the seawater, then the energy will tend to re-direct to seek out the fish (more electricity will flow through the better conductor, cet.par.), so that placing the fish parallel to the flow of energy rather than perpendicular to it will not entirely protect it from the neighboring energy. In short, if the fish is a better conductor than the seawater, then it is better for the fish to be oriented perpendicular to the flow of energy.

But, without going into details, I hastily extrapolate that if the fish is a poorer conductor than the seawater, then it is better for the fish to be oriented parallel to the flow of energy (i.e. facing the lighting strike point, or facing away).

In response to comment by [deleted] on Procedural Knowledge Gaps
Comment author: Vladimir_M 25 February 2011 12:25:54AM *  2 points [-]

Constant:

But, without going into details, I hastily extrapolate that if the fish is a poorer conductor than the seawater, then it is better for the fish to be oriented parallel to the flow of energy (i.e. facing the lighting strike point, or facing away).

You are correct! I hastily analogized from the human step potential, ignoring the fact that fish, unlike humans, may well be much poorer conductors than the surrounding (or, in the human case, underlying) medium. Sadly, it seems the electrical engineering courses I took long ago haven't left many surviving correct intuitions.

After a bit of googling about this question, I'm intrigued to find out that the problem of electrocuting fish has attracted considerable research attention. A prominent reference appears to be a paper titled Electrical stunning of fish: the relationship between the electrical field strength and water conductivity by two gentlemen named J. Lines and S. Kestin (available ungated here, and with a gruesome experimental section). Alas, the paper says, "No publications appear to be available which identify conductivity measurements of fish tissue at the frequencies being used." It does however say that we might expect something in the hundreds or low thousands of uS/cm, whereas Wikipedia informs us that the conductivity of seawater is around 4.8 S/m, i.e. as much as 48,000 uS/cm.

So, yes, this was definitely a blunder on my part.

Comment author: gwern 24 February 2011 08:02:21PM *  6 points [-]

I'm not a physics major, but this is how I would reason: a regular human usually survives a lightning strike, IIRC. Why would fish be any different? It might hurt them but they have simpler nervous systems to boot. So my initial guess is that no fish at all is hurt, no more than they are fried by the sun unleashing gigawatts onto the ocean.

But that's a cheap answer, perhaps. Let's try another route. A human isn't that big compared to a tuna fish, but is pretty big compared to things like trout or salmon. Let's say we weigh 100x as much as those small fish.

Lightning is a one-shot packet of energy - like quickly blinking a flashlight. As the light spreads away from the flashlight, it begins to fade out. (Why isn't the entire earth illuminated?) Well, there's a fixed number of photons released, and the sphere/area they are spread over keeps getting bigger as they go - it increases as the square of how far away they are. It's like gravity: you get an inverse square law. Squares increase pretty fast - 2^2 = 4, 3^2 = 9, 4^2 = 16 etc.

So if we humans are 2 feet around from the 'epicenter', how many units of 2 feet do we have to go to cut the strength by 1/100 and give the little fish a little fish-sized dose? Well, the square root of 100 is 10, so 10 2-feets is 20 feet.

In other words, by this reasoning, I'd expect even little fish to survive a lightning strike around 20 feet away. 20 feet is much smaller than an ocean.

This is all high-school physics at best; all you really have to do is think about why gravity follows an inverse square law, analogize a space-filling gravity to light, and guess some numbers in the best spirit of Fermi calculations.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 24 February 2011 09:58:21PM *  0 points [-]

Is this a correct model, though? My understanding is that the relevant figure is the potential difference between various points the creature's body touches during the lightning strike. (Just like if a high voltage power transmission cable snaps and falls to the ground close to where you stand, you're in much worse danger of electrocution if you stand so that one of your feet is closer than the other to a point where the cable touches the ground.)

Considering that the fish are usually elongated and the potential is (presumably?) distributed in a radially symmetrical way, they will be struck much worse if they happen to be swimming directly towards or away from the lightning strike point. [Edit: This is incorrect - please see the further discussion with Constant below.] Ignoring this and assuming spherical fish, the danger seems to be proportional to D*dV(r)/dr, where V(r) is the potential as a function of distance on the radial between the strike point and the current position of the fish, and D is the diameter of the fish. Now does anyone know what V(r) is supposed to look like?

Comment author: cousin_it 24 February 2011 09:23:04AM *  2 points [-]

Yes, it's a provable property of Solomonoff induction. It was a surprise to me too when I worked it out some days ago (using Shane Legg's paper linked from the post), but users AlephNeil and paulfchristiano didn't seem surprised, and Eliezer always considered it obvious I guess.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 24 February 2011 08:58:30PM *  0 points [-]

But then it seems to me that Game 3 is unfair, in that it artificially amplifies infinitesimal errors. Faced with a hostile input, a Solomonoff predictor will correctly converge to saying "I don't know," i.e. producing p(0) ~ p(1) ~ 1/2. However, a game that forces it to nevertheless make binary predictions in this situation will force an answer based on the infinitesimal differences between the calculated probabilities and 1/2, and moreover, the correct answers are contrived so that these infinitesimal differences always point in the wrong direction.

If you instead let the Solomonoff predictor just honestly say "I don't know," as in the first two games, the problem disappears.

Comment author: cousin_it 24 February 2011 06:10:06AM *  1 point [-]

The drop in Omega's score on each step will approach |log(1/2)| fast enough that the two sums won't differ by more than a constant.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 24 February 2011 06:40:06AM *  2 points [-]

That seems to be equivalent to saying that Omega's probability estimates will approach fifty-fifty fast enough. So if I understand correctly, it's a provable property of Solomonoff induction that faced with a "maximally hostile" bit-string, its probability estimates will converge to fifty-fifty fast enough that it can't blunder worse than a random guesser by more than a constant term in the log(P) game? If true, I find that quite fascinating.

Comment author: Daniel_Burfoot 24 February 2011 12:26:42AM 3 points [-]

First let's set the input sequence to be very malevolent toward Omega: it will always say the reverse of what Omega is projected to say based on the previous bits.

I'm not sure I buy this, but let me make sure I understand correctly. There is some super-super-intelligence generating bits, which is smarter than Omega and also antagonistic to it. That intelligence basically simulates Omega, figures out what Omega will guess, and sends the opposite value.

First, can't Omega just figure out that it's being simulated, and then find a source of pure randomness, and just guess according to that?

Second, can't Omega at least make sure it remains level with the pitiful human, by figuring out what the human will guess and copying that?

Third, how do you know there even exists a stream of bits that will make Omega lose constantly? It's not at all obvious to me that such strings exist. It seems like you're asserting the existence of N-bit strings that have Kolmogorov complexity substantially larger than N.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 24 February 2011 05:21:18AM *  0 points [-]

From what I understand, Omega is defined simply as a function F : L -> {0,1}, where L is the set of all strings over {0,1}, and F((b_1,...,b_n)) is interpreted as its prediction of what the bit b_{n+1} will be given the initial bits b_1,...,b_n. Then you can always define the "malevolent" bit sequence simply as b_{n+1} = ~F((b_1,...,b_n)). F can be wildly uncomputable, of course, so it makes no sense to ask about the Kolmogorov complexity of these bit sequences.

The generalization where Omega also assigns probabilities rather than just making binary guesses seems obvious.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 24 February 2011 05:05:22AM *  1 point [-]

Game 1: on each round you and Omega state your probabilities that the next bit will be 1. The logarithm of the probability you assigned to the actual outcome gets added to your score.
[...]
As it turns out, in game 1 you cannot beat Omega by more than an additive constant, even if the input sequence is uncomputable and you know its definition.

I don't get this. A trivial algorithm always assigning p(0) = p(1) = 1/2 will have its score dropping by |log(1/2)| for each bit. At the same time, with the bit sequence maximally hostile to Omega, where b_{n+1} = ~OmegaPrediction((b_1...b_n)), Omega's score will always drop by at least |log(1/2)| and typically more, sometimes far more (whenever it hyper-computes any probabilities very far from 1/2).

Unless I'm missing something (as I probably am), how can the difference between the score of the trivial algorithm and Omega remain limited to "an additive constant" in any sense of the term?

Comment author: David_Gerard 23 February 2011 03:07:40PM *  4 points [-]

Conservapedia is so gibberingly insane it inspired the creation of RationalWiki. (Which has its bouts of reversed stupidity.)

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Conservapedia:Conservapedian_relativity came to some prominence last year when Prof Brian Cox discovered the Conservapedia article, then getting some blogosphere interest.

It is important to note here that Andrew Schlafly, founder of Conservapedia and author of most of these articles, has a degree in electrical engineering and worked as an engineer for several years before becoming a lawyer. He would not only be capable of understanding the mathematics, he would have used concepts from the theory in his professional work. At least most engineer cranks aren't this bad.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 24 February 2011 04:34:27AM *  13 points [-]

David_Gerard:

It is important to note here that Andrew Schlafly, founder of Conservapedia and author of most of these articles, has a degree in electrical engineering and worked as an engineer for several years before becoming a lawyer. He would not only be capable of understanding the mathematics, he would have used concepts from the theory in his professional work.

In fairness to relativity crackpots, unless things have changed since my freshman days, the way special relativity is commonly taught in introductory physics courses is practically an invitation for the students to form crackpot ideas. Instead of immediately explaining the idea of the Minkowski spacetime, which reduces the whole theory almost trivially to some basic analytic geometry and calculus and makes all those so-called "paradoxes" disappear easily in a flash of insight, physics courses often take the godawful approach of grafting a mishmash of weird "effects" (like "length contraction" and "time dilatation") onto a Newtonian intuition and then discussing the resulting "paradoxes" one by one. This approach is clearly great for pop-science writers trying to dazzle and amaze their lay audiences, but I'm at a loss to understand why it's foisted onto students who are supposed to learn real physics.

Comment author: MichaelVassar 20 February 2011 04:19:34PM 0 points [-]

I just doubt that you are correct, about the Times column or anything else above.

Academia, and especially math, seems to me to exist to not be part of society, to be literally descended from monastic orders, etc. It indoctrinates people to claim what you are saying, and even believe it, but people's values are pretty objective and not so measurable by such claims.

How impactful was his involvement in the USQ affair?

Terry may have more fun than Tyler, since he's smarter and can access more fun, but I think it's VERY unlikely that after spending a year like Tyler does he'd go back to his life.

Financial/political success isn't 'instrumental rationality'. Maslow's 'self-actualization' is. Tyler and Terry both do pretty well in that respect, but in my assessment, not comparably well.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 24 February 2011 02:17:49AM 1 point [-]

MichaelVassar:

Financial/political success isn't 'instrumental rationality'. Maslow's 'self-actualization' is.

Undoubtedly so, but based on your comments, I'd say you might be suffering from a too narrow and perhaps also somewhat biased view of the different modes of self-actualization. By this I mean that you're not taking into account the full scope of the potential modes, and you're also underestimating the differences in the optimal modes for people of different personalities.

In my opinion, you're also underestimating some downsides of being a senior member of the modern-day academic nomenklatura (and especially one who is not at its top tier), particularly those that are more pronounced the further a field is from the exactness and meritocracy that is least imperfectly embodied by math. Though you've probably met more concrete people from this social class than me, so your judgment may in fact be more accurate than mine.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 23 February 2011 09:23:24AM *  6 points [-]

In my opinion, Dawkins wins this debate hands down. Though I find it amusing to think what the Bayesians here will say about the part where a commenter asks him, "If you had to bet, what would you say is the proportion of alleles that evolve neutrally?", and Dawkins replies, "How I would bet should be of no interest to you."

Humor aside, as for Lewontin, I actually had the attitude of humble and judicious open-mindedness towards these controversies until a few years ago, when I read that magnum opus by him, Rose, and Kamin titled Not in Our Genes. Even disregarding the parts that read like a complete parody -- for example, when they advise us, apparently in full seriousness, to read Chairman Mao for enlightenment -- most of the book is such a blatant ideological hack-job that I was left wondering how anyone could take these people seriously. (To make the it even more absurd, I stumbled across that book in a university library while looking for Pinker's The Blank Slate, of which I found one single crisp-looking specimen sharing a shelf with seven or eight well worn out copies of Not in Our Genes.)

Comment author: Wei_Dai 22 February 2011 08:41:13PM 0 points [-]

I'd like to see a post on this, especially if you have any insights or knowledge on how we can make those black-box circuits work better, or how to best combine formal probability calculations with those black-box circuits.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 23 February 2011 08:47:33AM *  0 points [-]

Well, that would be a very ambitious idea for an article! One angle I think might be worth exploring would be a classification of problems with regards to how the outputs of the black-box circuits (i.e. our intuitions) perform compared to the formal models we have. Clearly, among the problems we face in practice, we can point out great extremes in all four directions: problems can be trivial for both intuition and formal models, or altogether intractable, or easily solvable with formal models but awfully counterintuitive (e.g. the Monty Hall problem), or easily handled by intuition but outside of the reach of our present formal models (e.g. many AI-complete problems). I think a systematic classification along these lines might open the way for some general insight about how to best reconcile, and perhaps even combine productively, our intuitions with the best available formal calculations. But this is just a half-baked idea I have, which may or may not evolve into more systematic thoughts worth posting.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 23 February 2011 03:17:50AM 4 points [-]

(nods) Sure, if I really can't expect employees to treat email as the kind of thing that it actually is, just because it is that kind of thing, then the next best alternative is to force them to treat email as something else.

Though if I were really going to go down that road, perhaps I'd do better to require that all employees jog around the building every time they send an email. Same benefit, plus it wastes less paper, and it's healthier.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 23 February 2011 04:34:18AM *  2 points [-]

TheOtherDave:

Though if I were really going to go down that road, perhaps I'd do better to require that all employees jog around the building every time they send an email. Same benefit, plus it wastes less paper, and it's healthier.

I don't know how serious you are about this, but even ignoring the problem of weirdness signaling, I don't think this would be anywhere as effective. People usually have the correct instinct to treat paper documents and correspondence as an inherently serious and solemn matter, and coupling every email with producing a paper document is thus likely to be much more effective than coupling it with some meaningless ritual.

I'd say the casual attitude towards business emails is one of the greatest examples of practical irrationality in today's world. I find it fascinating how many smart people, including lawyers and senior managers, who can't possibly be ignorant of the legal weight of business emails, still can't resist the urge to use them as a medium for casual chit-chat, offhand remarks, and informal discussions, until lawsuits hit them as a result.

In response to Research methods
Comment author: Vladimir_M 23 February 2011 02:29:56AM *  4 points [-]

Swimmer963:

Every email has to be printed and filed in a binder.

This seems to me like it might be a very prudent measure. As far as I know, emails are legally considered as written documents bearing no less official weight than the most formal correspondence on letterhead paper. At the same time, it's very hard for people to keep this in mind and refrain from using email carelessly, with no more caution and forethought than casual workplace talk. Forcing them to duplicate every email in paper involves a large overhead, but this may well turn out to be cost-effective by preventing all sorts of liabilities potentially incurred by careless emails.

Comment author: lukeprog 21 February 2011 04:02:48AM 4 points [-]

I'm not sure how much we disagree. Obviously it all comes back to opaque brain processes in the end, and thus epistemology remains messy. I don't think anything I said in my original post denies this.

As for a black-box module in my brain doing math, yes, that's part of what I call "me." What I'm doing there is responding to a common objection to Bayesianism - that it's all "subjective." Well yes, it requires subjective probability assessments. So does every method of epistemology. But at least with Bayesian methods you can mathematically model your uncertainty. That's all I was trying to say, there, and I find it hard to believe that you disagree with that point. As far as I can tell, you're extrapolating what I said far beyond what I intended to communicate with it.

As for reducing epistemology to Bayesianism, my footnote said it was impractical, and I also said it's incomplete without cognitive science, which addresses the fact that, for example, our belief-forming processes remain mostly opaque to this day.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 23 February 2011 12:40:19AM *  2 points [-]

Fair enough. We don't seem to disagree much then, if at all, when it comes to the correctness of what you wrote.

However, in that case, I would still object to your summary in that given the realistic limitations of our current position, we have to use all sorts of messy and questionable procedures to force our opaque and unreliable brains to yield workable and useful knowledge. With this in mind, saying that epistemology is reducible to cognitive science and Bayesian probability, however true in principle, is definitely not true in any practically useful sense. (The situation is actually much worse than in the analogous example of our practical inability to reduce chemistry to physics, since the insight necessary to perform the complete and correct reduction of epistemology, if it ever comes, will have to be somehow obtained using the tools of our present messy and unreliable epistemology.)

Therefore, what is missing from your summary is the statement of the messy and unreliable parts currently incorporated into your epistemology, which is a supremely relevant question precisely because they are so difficult to analyze and describe accurately, since their imperfections will interfere with the very process of their analysis. Another important consideration is that a bold reductionist position may lead one to dismiss too quickly various ideas that can offer a lot of useful insight in this present imperfect position, despite their metaphysical and other baggage.

Comment author: lukeprog 21 February 2011 12:45:52AM 5 points [-]

I meant to capture some of what you've said here in the footnote included above, but let me see if I can get clear on the rest of what you're saying...

I agree that beliefs are formed by a process that is currently, almost entirely opaque to us. But I'm not sure what you mean when you say that "the numbers produced this way to not pertain to the outputs of your brain's opaque circuits, but only to the output of the formal procedure itself." Well of course, but the point of what I'm saying is that I can try to revise my belief strength to correspond to the outputs of the formal process. Or, less mysteriously, I can make choices on the basis of personal utility estimates and the probabilistic outputs of the formal epistemological process. (That is, I can make some decisions on the basis of a formal decision procedure.)

You write that "Assigning probability numbers produced by explicit formal procedures to beliefs produced by opaque procedures in one's head is a total fallacy..." But again, I'm not trying to say that I take the output of a formal procedure and then "assign" that value to my beliefs. Rather, I try to adjust my beliefs to the output of the formal procedure.

Again, I'm not trying to say that I use Bayes' Theorem when guessing which way Starbucks is on the basis of three people's conflicting testimony. But Bayes' Theorem can be useful in a great many applications where one has time to use it.

But before I continue, let me check... perhaps I've misunderstood you?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 21 February 2011 03:16:33AM *  3 points [-]

It seems like I misunderstood your claim as somewhat stronger than what you actually meant. (Perhaps partly because I missed your footnotes -- you might consider making them more conspicuous.)

Still, even now that I (hopefully) understand your position better, I disagree with it. The overwhelming part of our beliefs is based on opaque processes in our heads, and even in cases where we have workable formal models, the ultimate justification for why the model is a reliably accurate description of reality is typically (and arguably always) based on an opaque intuitive judgment. This is why despite the mathematical elegance of a Bayesian approach epistemology remains messy and difficult in practice.

Now, you say:

Whenever you use words like “likely” and “probable”, you are doing math. So stop pretending you aren’t doing math, and do the math correctly, according to the proven theorem of how probable P given X is – even if we are always burdened by uncertainty.

But in reality, it isn't really "you" who's doing the math -- it's some black-box module in your brain, so that you have access only to the end-product of this procedure. Typically you have no way at all to "do the math correctly," because the best available formal procedure is likely to be altogether inferior to the ill-understood and opaque but effective mechanisms in your head, and its results will buy you absolutely nothing.

To take a mundane but instructive example, your brain constantly produces beliefs based on its modules for physics calculations, whose internals are completely opaque to you, but whose results are nevertheless highly accurate on average, or otherwise you'd soon injure or kill yourself. (Sometimes of course they are inaccurate and people injure or kill themselves.) In the overwhelming majority of cases, trying to supplement the results of these opaque calculations with some formal procedure is useless, since the relevant physics and physiology are far too complex. Most beliefs of any consequence are analogous to these, and even those that involve a significant role of formal models must in turn involve beliefs about the connection between the models and reality, themselves a product of opaque intuitions.

With this situation in mind, I believe that reducing epistemology to Bayesianism in the present situation is at best like reducing chemistry to physics: doable in principle, but altogether impractical.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 20 February 2011 10:06:25PM *  13 points [-]

I think this paragraph reflects a very serious confusion that is seen on LW regularly:

How strongly should I believe P? How should I adjust my probability for P in the face of new evidence X? There is a single, exactly correct answer to each such question, and it is provided by Bayes’ Theorem. We may never know the correct answer, but we can plug estimated numbers into the equation and update our beliefs accordingly.

Most of your beliefs are not produced by some process that you can break into its component parts and analyze mathematically so as to assign a numerical probability. Rather, they are produced by opaque black-box circuits in your brain, about whose internal functioning you know little or nothing. Often these circuits function very well and let you form very reliable judgments, but without the ability to reverse-engineer and analyze them in detail, which you presently don't have, you cannot know what would be the correct probability (by any definition) assigned to their outputs, except for the vague feeling of certainty that they typically produce along with their results.

If instead of relying on your brain's internal specialized black-box circuits you use some formal calculation procedure to produce probability estimates, then yes, these numbers can make sense. However, the important points are that: (1) the numbers produced this way do not pertain to the outputs of your brain's opaque circuits, but only to the output of the formal procedure itself, and (2) these opaque circuits, as little as we know about how they actually work, very often produce much more reliable judgments than any formal models we have. Assigning probability numbers produced by explicit formal procedures to beliefs produced by opaque procedures in one's head is a total fallacy, and discarding the latter in favor of the former makes it impossible to grapple with the real world at all.

Comment author: torekp 20 February 2011 12:46:52PM 1 point [-]

Can you spell this out some more, focusing on this example? I'm looking for criteria which can be applied in advance to predict the degree of success of special interest propaganda.

Does the social and legal status and legitimacy of pharmaceuticals, as against pesticides, simply reflect the greater prestige of doctors over farmers?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 20 February 2011 09:19:55PM *  2 points [-]

torekp:

Does the social and legal status and legitimacy of pharmaceuticals, as against pesticides, simply reflect the greater prestige of doctors over farmers?

In this case, I think that's a correct hypothesis. The medical profession -- and by extension all the related professions in its orbit, to varying extents -- certainly enjoys such a high-status public perception that people will be biased towards interpreting its official claims and acts as coming from benevolent and objective expertise, even when a completely analogous situation in some ordinary industry or profession would be met with suspicion. Thus, it seems eminently plausible that in medical and related research people can let themselves be influenced by much more venal interest than usual, thinly disguised and rationalized as neutral and objective expertise and beneficial cooperation.

In my opinion, however, this is not where the worst problem lies. As long as the beneficiaries of biased research are easy to identify, one at least has a straightforward way to start making sense of the situation. A much worse problem is when the perverse incentives have a more complex and impersonal bureaucratic structure, in which ostensibly there are no private profits and venal interests, merely people working according to strict standards of professional ethics and expertise, but in reality this impeccable bureaucratic facade hides an awful hierarchy of patronage and the output is horrible nonsense with the effective purpose of rationalizing and excusing actions out of touch with reality. In these situations, venal interests effectively blend with ideological ones, and with all their elaborate and impressive bureaucratic facade, they are very difficult to recognize and analyze correctly.

Comment author: Perplexed 20 February 2011 08:26:51PM *  4 points [-]

The Salthouse paper states that the Z-scores there are relative to the entire sample (ages 20 - 60). But I'm pretty sure that the OP's graph uses Z-scores relative to the variation within an age cohort. Otherwise, they would be too steep to be believable - almost mathematically impossible considering that the sample runs out to age 80 and shows a drop of about 2.0 Z units

ETA: The Flynn effect may account for about a third of the apparent drop in cognitive ability - that is, today's old-folks started off less cognitively skilled than today's youngsters, so their decline with age is not as steep as it looks.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 20 February 2011 09:01:51PM *  2 points [-]

Perplexed:

The Salthouse paper states that the Z-scores there are relative to the entire sample (ages 20 - 60). But I'm pretty sure that the OP's graph uses Z-scores relative to the variation within an age cohort.

The poster should definitely clarify that. The current presentation is unclear.

Otherwise, they would be too steep to be believable - almost mathematically impossible considering that the sample runs out to age 80 and shows a drop of about 2.0 Z units

I don't find it that implausible. Anecdotally, I've met people whose cognitive skills appeared horribly diminished already in their seventies. (Don't forget that the median age of death in the developed world is roughly in the mid-seventies for men and late seventies for women.)

Even if cognitive decline can be greatly ameliorated by persistent intellectual effort, most of the population clearly won't benefit from this, which is good to have in mind if one has seen an anecdotal sample of exceptionally intellectual people.

ETA: The Flynn effect may account for about a third of the apparent drop in cognitive ability - that is, today's old-folks started off less cognitively skilled than today's youngsters, so their decline with age is not as steep as it looks.

As in all other things related to measuring cognitive ability, the Flynn effect tends to make a confused mess of the whole situation just when one starts to come up with neat and plausible theories. It's very hard to tell how and to what extent it has bearing on these results.

Comment author: Wei_Dai 20 February 2011 08:30:00AM *  1 point [-]

So, how could one possibly approach this issue while strictly avoiding the mention of anything that's ideologically charged at least by implication?

How about using an example from the past? A controversy that was ideologically charged at some point, but no longer inflames passions in the present? I'm not sure if there are such examples that would suit your purpose, but it seems worth looking into, if you hadn't already.

Overall I don't think we disagree much. We both think whether to bring up political implications is a matter of cost-benefit analysis and we seem to largely agree on what count as costs and what as benefits. I would just caution that we're probably biased to over-estimate the net benefit of bringing up political implications since many of us feel strongly motivated to spread our favorite political ideas. (If you're satisfied that you've already taken into account such biases, then that's good enough for me.)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 20 February 2011 08:47:23PM 1 point [-]

Wei_Dai:

How about using an example from the past? A controversy that was ideologically charged at some point, but no longer inflames passions in the present?

Trouble is, the present system that produces reputable and accredited science and scholarship is a rather novel creation. Things worked very differently as recently as two or three generations ago, and I believe that an accurate general model for assessing its soundness on various issues necessarily has to incorporate judgments about some contemporary polarized and charged topics, which have no historical precedent that would be safely remote from present-day controversies. As Constant wrote in another reply to your above comment, modern science is so deeply intertwined with the modern system of government that it's impossible to accurately analyze one without asking any questions about the other.

And to emphasize this important point again, I believe that coming up with such a model is a matter of supreme importance to anyone who wants to have correct views on almost any topic outside of one's own narrow areas of expertise. Our society is historically unique in that we have these vast institutions whose mission is to produce and publish accurate insight on all imaginable topics, and for anyone intellectually curious, the skill of assessing the quality of their output is as important as recognizing edible from poisonous fruit for a forager.

I would just caution that we're probably biased to over-estimate the net benefit of bringing up political implications since many of us feel strongly motivated to spread our favorite political ideas.

That is surely a valid concern, and I probably display this bias myself at least occasionally. Like most biases, however, it also has its mirror image, i.e. the bias to avoid questions for fear of stirring up controversy, which one should also watch for.

This is not only because excessive caution means avoiding topics that would in fact be worth pursuing, but also because of a more subtle problem. Namely, the set of all questions relevant for a topic may include some safe and innocent ones alongside other more polarizing and charged ones. Deciding to include only the former into one's assessment and ignoring the latter for fear of controversy may in fact fatally bias one's final conclusions. I have seen instances of posts and articles on LW that, in my opinion, suffer from this exact problem.

Comment author: RolfAndreassen 20 February 2011 06:00:14PM 7 points [-]

And you still don't, unless you are well read and know what a difference of 2.4 in Z-score means. Are the Z-scores similar to IQ points, in which case 2.4 is not very much, or are they standard deviations, in which case 2.4 is a devastating and horrifying loss? Or something else entirely?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 20 February 2011 07:49:50PM *  3 points [-]

It seems like the horrifying interpretation is correct. (See my other comment where I cite a paper providing more data.)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 20 February 2011 07:46:54PM *  4 points [-]

One interesting paper about this topic I once skimmed is T.A. Salthouse, "When does age-related cognitive decline begin?" (Ungated link here.) The paper presents some figures similar to the graph in this post, with roughly similar magnitudes. (Maybe it is in fact among the sources of data?)

This is assuming the z-score in the graph is reported relative to the distribution of the scores over the entire (all-ages) sample. Which is pretty scary, when you think about it.

Comment author: Wei_Dai 20 February 2011 05:37:09AM 1 point [-]

Why do you find it beneficial to bring up implications about political and other charged issues, when discussing topics that are on LW's discussion agenda?

I can understand it if you're making some point about improving rationality in general, and the best example to illustrate your point happens to be political, and you judge the benefit of using that example to be worth the cost (e.g., the risk that LW slides down the slippery slope towards politics being prominently debated, and others finding it difficult to respond to your point because they want to avoid contributing to sliding down that slippery slope).

If it's more like "btw, here are some political implications of the idea I was talking about" then I think we should avoid those.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 20 February 2011 07:23:54AM *  4 points [-]

Wei_Dai:

Why do you find it beneficial to bring up implications about political and other charged issues, when discussing topics that are on LW's discussion agenda?

I don't think one should bring up such implications just for the hell of it, when they contribute nothing of substance. I also agree that among otherwise equally useful examples, one should use those that are least distracting and that minimize the danger of dissension. There's a simple cost-benefit case there, which I don't dispute. However, it seems to me that many relevant topics are impossible to discuss without bringing up such implications.

Take for example my original post that started this discussion. For anyone who strives to be less wrong about almost anything, one of the absolutely crucial questions is what confidence should be assigned to what the academic mainstream says, and in this regard, I consider the topic of the post extremely relevant for LW. (If you believe otherwise, I would be curious to see the argument why -- and note that what I'm arguing now is independent of what you might think about the quality of its content.) Now, I think nobody could dispute that on many topics the academic opinion is biased to some extent due to political and ideological influences, so it's important to be able to recognize and evaluate such situations. Moreover, as far as I see, this represents a peculiar class of bias that cannot be adequately illustrated and discussed without bringing up some concrete examples of biases due to ideological or political influences. So, how could one possibly approach this issue while strictly avoiding the mention of anything that's ideologically charged at least by implication?

Yet some people apparently believe that this line of inquiry already goes too far towards dangerous and undesirable topics. If this belief is correct, in the sense that maintaining a high quality of discourse really demands such a severe restriction on permissible topics, then this, in my opinion, decisively defeats the idea of having a forum like LW, under any reasonable interpretation of its mission statement, vague as it is. It effectively implies that people are inherently incapable of rational discourse unless it's stringently disciplined and focused on a narrow range of topics, the way expert technical forums are. Because this is definitely not the only example of how charged issues will inevitably be arrived upon by people discussing the general problems of sorting out truth from bias and nonsense.

There are also other important points here, on which I've already elaborated in my other comments, which all stem from the same fundamental observation, namely that those topics where one needs an extraordinary level of rationality to escape bias and delusion and often exactly those that are commonly a matter of impassioned and polarized opinion. In other words, general skills in rational thinking and overcoming bias are of little use if one will stick to technical topics in which experts already have sophisticated, so to say, application-specific techniques for eliminating bias and nonsense. (Which often work well -- one can easily think of brilliant scientists and technical experts with outright delusional opinions outside of their narrow specialties -- and when they don't, the issue may well be impossible to analyze correctly without getting into charged topics.) But even if you disagree with my view expressed in this last paragraph, I think your question is adequately answered by the points I made before that.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 20 February 2011 02:14:55AM 0 points [-]

If we can distinguish between preference and accuracy claims, that would be quite a large step towards rationality.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 20 February 2011 02:38:55AM *  2 points [-]

Indeed, but the trouble is of course that often the optimal strategy for promoting one's preferences is to convince people that opposing them is somehow objectively wrong and delusional, rather than a matter of a fundamental clash of power and interest. (Which of course typically involves convincing oneself too, since humans tend to be bad at lying and good at sniffing out liars, and they appreciate sincerity a lot.)

That said, one of the main reasons why I find discussions on LW interesting is the unusually high ability of many participants to analyze issues in this regard, i.e. to separate correctly the factual from the normative and preferential. The bad examples where people fail to do so and the discourse breaks down tend to stick out unpleasantly, but overall, I'd say the situation is not at all bad, certainly by any realistic standards for human discourse in general.

Comment author: Wei_Dai 19 February 2011 11:11:19PM 2 points [-]

How long can we afford to have rationalists sit out of politics?

Do you think having LW discuss politics will help save the world? If so, how do you envision it happening?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 19 February 2011 11:40:49PM *  3 points [-]

Just to make sure there is no confusion about who stands where on the issue, I'd like to re-emphasize that I definitely don't support making politics a prominent item on the discussion agenda of LW. What I am concerned about are topics that are on LW's discussion agenda as presently defined, but have some implications about political and other charged issues, and the question of whether these should be avoided. (Though of course this is complicated by the fact that the present discussion agenda is somewhat vague and a matter of some disagreement.)

Comment author: jdinkum 17 February 2011 08:02:12PM 3 points [-]

Really? One of three murders in the U.S. go unsolved.

http://www2.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2009/data/table_25.html

Comment author: Vladimir_M 19 February 2011 07:13:07PM *  3 points [-]

jdinkum:

One of three murders in the U.S. go unsolved.

That's not a good number to base your calculations on. Getting away with any crime nowadays is extremely difficult if the police and prosecutors are willing to invest significant resources in investigating and prosecuting it. How much they'll be willing to invest heavily depends on all sorts of circumstances, even when it comes to the most serious crimes.

In particular, murders and other violent crimes are investigated far more vigorously if committed in a respectable environment, in a way makes high-status people feel unsafe.

Comment author: Wei_Dai 19 February 2011 12:09:02PM 4 points [-]

Certainly, I find it comically absurd that there should be a community of people boasting about their "rationality" who at the same time have to obsessively self-censor to avoid turning their discussions into food fights.

The official motto in the logo is "refining the art of human rationality", which implies that our rationality is still imperfect. I don't see why it's absurd or bad PR to say that we're more rational than most other communities, but still not rational enough to talk about politics.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 19 February 2011 06:39:28PM *  3 points [-]

Merely saying that there are topics too inflammatory even for LW is one thing, but remember that the context of my remark was a discussion of whether topics should be avoided even if they have only indirect implications about something that might inflame passions. The level of caution that some people seem to believe should be exercised would in my opinion, if really necessary, constitute evidence against the supposedly high level of rationality on LW. (And on many people, the contradiction would also have a bad PR effect.)

Please also see my above reply to Vladimir Nesov in which I elaborate on this further.

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 18 February 2011 09:14:07PM 4 points [-]

Certainly, I find it comically absurd that there should be a community of people boasting about their "rationality" who at the same time have to obsessively self-censor to avoid turning their discussions into food fights.

Fallacy of gray. Nobody is perfectly rational, but that doesn't make all people equally rational. Also, you used the inflammatory and imprecise "boasting" characterization.

While not relying on helpful techniques is a good way of signaling ability, it's a bad way of boosting performance. The virtue of humility is in taking every precaution even if all seems fine already, or even if the situation looks hopeless.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 19 February 2011 06:03:22PM *  0 points [-]

Vladimir_Nesov:

Fallacy of gray. Nobody is perfectly rational, but that doesn't make all people equally rational.

It would be such a fallacy if I had claimed that one must either reach absolute perfection in this regard or admit being no better than others. In reality, however, I claimed that people who have to avoid any discussion at all that has even indirect and remote implications about sensitive topics for fear of discourse breaking down have no grounds for claiming to be somehow more "rational" than others (controlling of course for variables like intelligence and real-life accomplishment).

Also, you used the inflammatory and imprecise "boasting" characterization.

In retrospect, yes, I should have expressed myself more diplomatically. Also, I didn't mean to imply that everyone or even a large part of the participants behave like that. However, it is not at all rare to see people on LW making remarks about "rationality" whose self-congratulatory aspect is, if not explicit, not too terribly subtle either. This, in my opinion, is bad PR already because qualifying oneself is low status as a general principle, and a combination of such statements with an admission of inability to maintain the quality of discourse about all but the most innocent topics gives the whole thing a tinge of absurdity. That, at least, is my honest impression of how many people are going to see these things, with clear implications on the PR issues.

On the other hand, if the quality of discourse outside of technical topics really cannot be maintained, then the clear solution is to formulate a strict policy for what's considered on-topic, and enforce it rigorously. That would not only make things function much better, but it would also be excellent from a PR perspective. (Rather than giving off a bad "we can't handle sensitive topics" impression, it would give off a high status "we don't want to be bothered with irrelevancies" impression.)

Comment author: prase 18 February 2011 10:29:11PM 1 point [-]

I don't think we have a real disagreement. I haven't said that more rigorous formalism is always better, quite the contrary. I was writing about objective methods of looking at the results. Physicists can ignore mathematical rigor because they have experimental tests which finally decide whether their theory is worth attention. Computer scientists can finally write down their algorithm and look whether it works. These are objective rules which validate the results.

Whether the rules are sensible or not is decided by common sense. My point is that it is easier to decide that about the rules of the whole field than about individual theories, and that's why objective rules are useful.

Of course, saying "common sense" does in fact mean that we don't know how did we decide, and doesn't specify the judgement too much. One man's common sense may be other man's insanity.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 19 February 2011 04:56:30PM 1 point [-]

Oh yes, I didn't mean to imply that you disagreed with everything I wrote in the above comment. My intent was to give a self-contained summary of my position on the issue, and the specific points I raised were not necessarily in response to your claims.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 18 February 2011 11:12:24PM *  3 points [-]

I think one very important principle you ignore here are the implications of what might be called the generalized weak efficient markets hypothesis. When it appears that DIY research based on publicly available information offers a potential for huge gains, the first thing one should ask oneself is why everyone (or at least a large number of smart and capable people) isn't already doing the same thing with obvious success. Often this is enough to write off the idea as a priori unworthy of consideration. Thus, for example, it can be safely concluded without further consideration that it's an infeasible idea to try getting rich based on studying the publicly available information about billionaires, or to improve one's investment strategy by studying the behavior of the stock market.

There are of course exceptions, but they're very few and far between, so one should embark on a project that contradicts this principle only if there is some very good indication that it might be an exceptional situation. (For example, it might be that the idea really is too clever to have ever occurred to anyone, or there might be some systematic biases limiting its adoption, or it might be that everyone is in fact already doing it, only you've been oblivious about it so far. However, for most people, only the third thing is less than extremely rare.)

The principle is very general, in my opinion useful in a great multitude of cases and with a whole bunch of interesting implications. I'll consider writing an article about it.

Comment author: steven0461 18 February 2011 09:03:51PM *  1 point [-]

I'm not necessarily advocating complete censorship. Special cautionary reminders around political topics and disciplined downvoting might do the trick.

I don't see evidence for bad PR here. I haven't seen anyone cite the politics taboo as a reason to shun LessWrong, and in general it isn't unusual for sites to have rules like this. While it would certainly be embarrassing if the average LessWrong commenter weren't at least a little more rational than the average internet commenter, productive political discussion between internet commenters not pre-selected for agreement is a notoriously hard problem.

If you're worried about bad PR, I suspect there's a better case that bad PR will be caused by LessWrong arriving at conclusions that are true but disreputable.

Are you saying that there are some points relevant to this discussion that you're reluctant to bring up because they are "a bad idea to talk about"?

Sure.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 18 February 2011 09:32:50PM 2 points [-]

steven0461:

If you're worried about bad PR, I suspect there's a better case that bad PR will be caused by LessWrong arriving at conclusions that are true but disreputable.

That is indeed a good point. Still, I do think my original concern is valid too.

In any case, given the opinions exchanged in this discussion (and other similar ones), I do believe that LW is in need of a clearer official policy for what is considered on-topic. I find commenting here a lot of fun, and what I write is usually well received as far as the votes and replies appear to indicate, but occasional comments like yours leave me with an unpleasant impression that a significant number of people might strongly disapprove of my attitudes and choices of topics. I certainly have no desire to do anything that breeds ill will, but lacking clearer rules, it seems to me that this conflict (assuming it's significant) is without an obvious resolution, unless we are to treat any complaint as a liberum veto (which I don't think would be workable as a general principle).

Sure.

Well, you have sure whetted my curiosity with that. I honestly don't see anything in the post and the subsequent comments that warrants such grave observations, but it might be my failure of imagination.

Comment author: JGWeissman 18 February 2011 08:31:22PM -1 points [-]

You seem to be restating your position, without actually addressing my point that a policy that takes into account the likely behaviours of LW members of various levels of skill and experience, including those who have recently joined, does not reflect on the capabilities of the experienced, high level members.

If you can not address this point, you should stop repeating your argument that such rational people should be able to handle political discussion.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 18 February 2011 09:05:39PM 3 points [-]

JGWeissman:

You seem to be restating your position, without actually addressing my point that a policy that takes into account the likely behaviours of LW members of various levels of skill and experience, including those who have recently joined, does not reflect on the capabilities of the experienced, high level members.

I don't see how this objection is specific to sensitive topics. Assuming that regular participants maintain high enough standards, incompetent attempts by newbies to comment on sensitive topics should be effectively discouraged by downvoting, as in all other debates. Even in the most innocent technical discussions, things will go downhill if there is no mechanism in place to discourage unproductive and poorly thought out comments. In either case, if the voting system is ineffective, it means that more stringent moderation is in order.

On the other hand, if even the behavior of regular participants is problematic, then we get back to the problems I was writing about.

Comment author: prase 17 February 2011 09:53:27PM *  1 point [-]

That's right, and I don't disagree. Formal standards are not a panacea, never. But, do you suppose, in cases you describe, things would go better without those formal standards?

I am still not sure if we mean exactly the same thing, when talking about formal rules. Take the example of pure mathematics, which you have already mentioned. Surely, abstruse formalist descriptions of practically uninteresting and maybe trivial problems appear there too, now and then. And revolutionary breakthroughs perhaps more often result from intuitive insights of geniuses than from dilligent rigorous formal work. Much papers, in all fields, can be made more readable, accessible, and effective in dissemination of new results by shedding the lofty jargon of scientific publications. But mathematicians certainly wouldn't do better if they got rid of mathematical proofs.

I do not suggest that all ideas in respectable fields of science should be propagated in form of publications checked against lists of formal requirements: citation index, proofs of all logical statements, p-values below 0.01, certificates of double-blindedness. Not in the slightest. Conjectures, analogies, illustrations, whatever enhances understanding is welcome. I only want a possibility to apply the formal criteria. If a conjecture is published, and it turns out interesting, there should be an ultimate method to test whether it is true. If there is an agreed method to test the results objectively, people aren't free to publish whatever they want and expect to never be proven wrong.

If you compare the results of computer science to postmodern philosophy, you may see my point. In CS most results may be useless and incomprehensible. In postmodern philosophy, which is essentially without formal rules, all results are useless and incomprehensible, and as a bonus, meaningless or false.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 18 February 2011 08:37:15PM *  2 points [-]

I agree about the awful state of fields that don't have any formal rules at all. However, I'm not concerned about these so much because, to put it bluntly, nobody important takes them seriously. What is in my opinion a much greater problem are fields that appear to have all the trappings of valid science and scholarship, but it's in fact hard for an outsider to evaluate whether and to what extent they're actually cargo-cult science. This especially because the results of some such fields (most notably economics) are used as basis for real-world decision-making with far-reaching consequences.

Regarding the role of formalism, mathematics is unique in that the internal correctness of the formalism is enough to establish the validity of the results. Sure, they may be more or less interesting, but if the formalism is valid, then it's valid math, period.

In contrast, in areas that make claims about the real world, the important thing is not just the validity of the formalism, but also how well it corresponds to reality. Work based on a logically impeccable formalism can still be misleading garbage if the formalism is distant enough from reality. This is where the really hard problem is. The requirements about the validity of the formalism are easily enforced, since we know how to reduce those to a basically algorithmic procedure. What is really hard is ensuring that the formalism provides an accurate enough description of reality -- and given an incentive to do so, smart people will inevitably figure out ways to stretch and evade this requirement, unless there is a sound common-sense judgment standing in the way.

Further, more rigorous formalism isn't always better. It's a trade-off. More effort put into greater formal rigor -- including both the author's effort to formulate it, and the reader's effort to understand it -- means less resources for other ways of improving the work. Physicists, for example, normally just assume that the functions are well-behaved enough in a way that would be unacceptable in mathematics, and they're justified in doing so. In more practical technical fields like computer science, what matters is whether the results are useful in practice, and formal rigor is useful if it helps avoid confusion about complicated things, but worse than useless if applied to things where intuitive understanding is good enough to get the job done.

The crucial lesson, like in so many other things, is that whenever one deals with the real world, formalism cannot substitute for common sense. It may be tremendously helpful and enable otherwise impossible breakthroughs, but without an ultimate sanity check based on sheer common sense, any attempt at science is a house built on sand.

Comment author: JGWeissman 18 February 2011 07:36:18PM 3 points [-]

Certainly, I find it comically absurd that there should be a community of people boasting about their "rationality" who at the same time have to obsessively self-censor to avoid turning their discussions into food fights.

When you have made this argument before, I responded:

There are some people here who I would trust to have rational discussions about the policy decisions that politics is supposedly about, and which candidates are likely to implement which policies and which tradeoff is better. My expectation if they tried to have that discussion on this public internet site is that they would draw attention and participation of less skilled members who would drag the discussion down into typical mind killing politics, and probably draw new people to Less Wrong who are not so interested in rationality and getting the right answer as joining in the tribal political argument.

It seems inappropiate to me for you to repeat this argument without addressing my response.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 18 February 2011 08:13:22PM *  4 points [-]

JGWeissman,

Please pardon my lack of response to your argument -- back in that thread the volume of replies to my comments became too large for me to respond to all of them. Better late than never, though, so here is my response.

I certainly don't think constant discussions of everyday politics on LW would be interesting or desirable. Someone who wants to do that has countless other places on the internet, tailored to all possible opinions and tastes, and there is absolutely no need to clutter up LW with it. However, what we're debating is at the other extreme, namely whether there should be a strict censorship (voluntary or not) of all discussions that have even remote implications in politics and other topics that are likely to inflame passions.

I think the answer is no, for several reasons. First, there are interesting questions relevant for issues at the core of LW's mission statement that inevitably touch on sensitive topics. Second, for some potentially sensitive questions I find extremely interesting (and surely not just I), LW really is a venue where it's possible to get a uniquely cool-headed and rational analysis, so avoiding those would mean forsaking some of the forum's greatest potentials. Finally, as I've already mentioned, the idea of a self-congratulatory "rationalist" community that in fact suffers from the same problems as any other place whenever it comes to sensitive topics is comically bad PR for whatever causes LW is associated with.

Of course, it may be that LW is not capable of handling sensitive topics after all. But then, in my opinion, the present way it's constituted doesn't make much sense, and it would benefit from a reorganization that would impose much more precisely defined topic requirements and enforce them rigorously.

Comment author: steven0461 17 February 2011 10:51:29PM *  1 point [-]

Every contribution starts out negative by default because it takes up space in recent comments and elsewhere, occupies the minds of LW commenters, and takes time to read. Beyond that, I admit your post caused no serious negative contributions. Combined with some other recent harmless threads, that counts against the "no politics" guideline. On the other hand, harmless violations of such guidelines can cause harmful violations in future top-level posts, and most of the harm may be in low-probability large-scale arguments, like the ones we had about gender.

I do think we keep avoiding crucial parts of the problem that are a bad idea to talk about, but that are frustrating to avoid talking about once the topic has been brought up (if only because of the sense that what has been said will be taken for a community consensus), and this frustration is probably what's actually causing me to complain.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 18 February 2011 07:23:13PM *  3 points [-]

steven0461:

On the other hand, harmless violations of such guidelines can cause harmful violations in future top-level posts, and most of the harm may be in low-probability large-scale arguments, like the ones we had about gender.

Fair enough. What we're facing here is the same ongoing conflict of visions about what the range of appropriate topics on LW should be. My opinion is that if the forum as presently constituted isn't capable of handling sensitive topics in a rational manner, and if any topic with even the remotest sensitive implications should therefore be avoided, then the whole project should be written off as a failure and the website reconstituted along the standard guidelines for technical forums (i.e. with a list of precise and strict definitions of suitable technical topics, and rigorous moderation to eradicate off-topic comments).

Certainly, I find it comically absurd that there should be a community of people boasting about their "rationality" who at the same time have to obsessively self-censor to avoid turning their discussions into food fights. I'm surely not alone in this assessment, and the bad PR from such a situation should be a sufficient reason for the owners of LW to undertake some radical steps (in one direction or another) to avoid it.

I do think we keep avoiding crucial parts of the problem that are a bad idea to talk about, but that are frustrating to avoid talking about once the topic has been brought up (if only because of the sense that what has been said will be taken for a community consensus), and this frustration is probably what's actually causing me to complain.

I'm not sure I understand what you're saying here. Are you saying that there are some points relevant to this discussion that you're reluctant to bring up because they are "a bad idea to talk about"?

In response to Rationalist Hobbies
Comment author: Vladimir_M 17 February 2011 09:34:55PM *  6 points [-]

Wei_Dai:

Science fiction - Reduces status quo bias and gives interesting insights. Also teaches that the way a society is organized depends a lot on the set of technologies it has access to, so if you don't like how your society works, one lever you have is to change that set.

From what I've seen of it, I disagree. With a very few exceptions, even the highest-ranking SF in terms of popularity and critical acclaim is usually badly written, and instead of exploring truly imaginable and inventive developments, it projects the prejudices and illusions of its own time embodied by the author.

I'd be very curious to hear about some counterexamples from other commenters, though.

Comment author: prase 17 February 2011 07:18:27PM *  0 points [-]

Just to be clear: by strict rules I don't mean anything with significant subjective judgement involved, like peer reviews. I rather mean things like demanding testability, mathematical proofs, logical consistency and such. Also, not much rules governing the social life of the respective community, but rather rules applied to the hypotheses.

Also, I haven't said that rules are sufficient. One can still publish trivial theories which nobody is interested to test, mathematical proofs of obscure unimportant theorems or logically consistent tautologies. But at least the rules remove arbitrariness and make it possible to objectively assess quality and to decide whether a hypothesis is good or bad, according to standards of the discipline.

The discipline's standard of good hypothesis may not universally correspond to a true hypothesis, but I suspect that if the standards of the discipline are strict enough, either the correspondence is there, or it is easily visible that the discipline is based on wrong premises, because it endorses some easily identifiable falsehoods. (It would be too big a coincidence if a formal system regularly produced false statements, but no trivially false statements.)

On the other hand, when the rules aren't enough formal, the discipline still makes complex false claims, but nobody can clearly demonstrate that their methods are unreliable because the methods (if there are any) can be always flexed to avoid producing embarrassingly trivial errors.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 17 February 2011 09:18:15PM *  4 points [-]

prase:

Just to be clear: by strict rules I don't mean anything with significant subjective judgement involved, like peer reviews. I rather mean things like demanding testability, mathematical proofs, logical consistency and such. Also, not much rules governing the social life of the respective community, but rather rules applied to the hypotheses.

Trouble is, there are examples of fields where the standards satisfy all this, but the work is nevertheless misleading and remote from reality.

Take the example of computer science, which I'm most familiar with. In some of its subfields, the state of the art has reached a dead end, in that any obvious path for improving things hits against some sort of exponential-time or uncomputable problem, and the possible heuristics for getting around it have already been explored to death. Breaking a new path in this situation could be done only by an extraordinary stroke of genius, if it's possible at all.

So what people do is to propose yet another complex and sophisticated but ultimately feeble heuristic wrapped into thick layers of abstruse math, and argue that it represents an improvement of some performance measure by a few percentage points. Now, if you look at a typical paper from such an area, you'll see that the formalism is accurate mathematically and logically, the performance evaluation is carefully measured over a set of standard benchmarks according to established guidelines, and the relevant prior work is meticulously researched and cited. You have to satisfy these strict formal standards to publish.

Trouble is, nearly all this work is worthless, and quite obviously so. From a practical engineering perspective, implementing these complex algorithms in a practical system would be a Herculean task for a minuscule gain. The hypertrophied formalism often uses numerous pages of abstruse math to express ideas that could be explained intuitively and informally in a few simple sentences to someone knowledgeable in the field -- and in turn would be immediately and correctly dismissed as impractical. Even the measured performance improvements are rarely evaluated truly ceteris paribus and in ways that reveal all the strengths and weaknesses of the approach. It's simply impossible to devise a formal standard that wold ensure that reliably -- these things are possible to figure out only with additional experimentation or with a practical engineering hunch.

Except perhaps in the purest mathematics, no formal standard can function well in practice if legions of extraordinarily smart people have the incentive to get around it. And if there are no easy paths to quality work, the "publish or perish" principle makes it impossible to compete and survive unless one exerts every effort to game the system.

Comment author: CronoDAS 17 February 2011 07:12:02PM 6 points [-]

My father used to do work for a company that made him change his password every two weeks and wouldn't let him reuse any of the last ten passwords he used. As a result, he resorted to writing down the password and taping it to his laptop so he could remember what the current password was - and made a point of it to the IT department.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 17 February 2011 07:33:39PM *  1 point [-]

One thing I find fascinating is people's occasional ingenuity in getting around password strength requirements. For example, faced with the requirement that the password can't be the same as their name or username, sometimes they'll figure out what is the smallest change that will make it acceptable (like e.g. leaving out the last letter), and use that.

(Come to think of it, the very fact that I know all this also says something by itself.)

Comment author: CronoDAS 13 February 2011 07:44:11AM 6 points [-]

For the record, I heard that, outside of chess, Bobby Fisher was a grade-A nutcase.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 17 February 2011 07:15:35PM *  2 points [-]

You heard it well.

On a related note, Garry Kasparov comes off as a very reasonable man (or at least he did in a few of his TV interviews I saw), but a few years ago, I was shocked to find out that he has some extremely bizarre crackpot ideas about history. Specifically, he appears to have a serious interest in the theories of Anatoly Fomenko, and although he's not a full supporter of Fomenko's "New Chronology," he does believe that the conventional chronology of historical events is completely wrong, and the mainstream historians are naive for believing it. There has even been some direct collaboration between the two: Kasparov wrote a friendly preface to one of Fomenko's books, and Fomenko credits him for "valuable discussion."

For what that's worth, Fomenko himself appears to be an accomplished academic mathematician in his day job.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 17 February 2011 06:22:46PM *  9 points [-]

No, the comments have been made by the project's founder Andrew Schlafly. He's also claimed that the Fields Medal has a liberal bias (disclaimer: that's a link to my own blog.) Andrew also has a page labeled Counterexamples to Relativity written almost exclusively by him that claims among other things that "The theory of relativity is a mathematical system that allows no exceptions. It is heavily promoted by liberals who like its encouragement of relativism and its tendency to mislead people in how they view the world."

I will add to help prevent mind-killing that Conservapedia is not taken seriously by much of the American right-wing, and that this sort of extreme behavior is not limited to any specific end of the political spectrum.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 17 February 2011 07:02:30PM 3 points [-]

Ouch. I've never read more than one or two Conservapedia articles before, and I didn't know it was that bad.

Comment author: Perplexed 17 February 2011 06:15:12PM 2 points [-]

professionals of high rank and/or expertise without a university degree, but this is absolutely unimaginable in law or medicine.

I believe you are wrong about law - at least in many states in the US. Though you certainly won't become a partner at a top firm without college and law degrees.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 17 February 2011 06:45:16PM *  2 points [-]

Perplexed:

I believe you are wrong about law - at least in many states in the US.

I stand corrected, then. (And I'm happy to see another example of historical vestiges that still have some life in them!) I was going by the Canadian regulations, which allow no such thing.

Of course, even in the U.S. it's nowadays a rare thing, and as you say, it's not a realistic path towards high status in the profession. Whereas in the computer industry, both Microsoft and Apple were founded by college dropouts (and the latter is still headed by one).

Comment author: prase 16 February 2011 12:30:11PM 1 point [-]

How about accepting either empirical testability or a requirement that all claims be logically proven?

Even better demand that there be strict rules in the discipline, which the research must obey - be it logical provability, empirical testability or whatever else. It is still possible to make up unreasonable rules, but production of bullshit is a lot easier without rules. Which is the case of deconstructionism and related fields.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 17 February 2011 06:18:25PM *  2 points [-]

prase:

Even better demand that there be strict rules in the discipline, which the research must obey - be it logical provability, empirical testability or whatever else. It is still possible to make up unreasonable rules, but production of bullshit is a lot easier without rules.

Strict formal rules are a two-edged sword. If well designed, they indeed serve as a powerful barrier against nonsense. However, they can also be perverted, with extremely bad results.

In many disciplines that have been affected by the malaises discussed in this thread, what happens is that a perverse formal system develops, which then serves as a template for producing impressive-looking bullshit work. This sometimes leads to the very heights of ass-covering irresponsibility, since everyone involved -- authors, editors, reviewers, grant committees... -- can hide behind the fact that the work satisfies all the highest professional expert standards if questioned about it. At worst, these perverse formal standards can also serve as a barrier against actual quality work that doesn't conform to their template.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 16 February 2011 08:25:09PM 4 points [-]

When dealing with the possibility of ideology influencing results one needs to be careful that one isn't engaging in projection based on one's own ideology influencing results. Otherwise this can turn into a fully general counter-argument. (To use one of the possibly more amusing examples, look at Conservapedia's labeling of the complex numbers and the axiom of choice as products of liberal ideology.)

Also, an incidental note about the issue of climate change: we should expect that most aspects of climate change will be bad. Humans have developed an extremely sensitive system over the last few hundred years. We've settled far more territory (especially on the coasts) and have far more complicated interacting agriculture. Changing the environment in any way is a change from the status quo. Changing the status quo in any large way will be economically disruptive. Note however that there are a handful of positives to an increase in average global temperature that are clearly acknowledged in the literature. Two examples are the creation of a north-west passage, and the opening of cold areas of Russia to more productive agriculture (or in some cases, any agriculture as the permafrost melts).

Comment author: Vladimir_M 17 February 2011 05:55:34PM 3 points [-]

JoshuaZ:

When dealing with the possibility of ideology influencing results one needs to be careful that one isn't engaging in projection based on one's own ideology influencing results. Otherwise this can turn into a fully general counter-argument.

That is true. The easy case is when clear ideological rifts can be seen even in the disputes among credentialed experts, as in economics. The much more difficult case is when there is a mainstream consensus that looks suspiciously ideological.

To use one of the possibly more amusing examples, look at Conservapedia's labeling of the complex numbers and the axiom of choice as products of liberal ideology.

This sounds like it's probably a hoax by hostile editors. It reminds me of the famous joke from Sokal's hoax paper in which he described the feminist implications of the axioms of equality and choice. Come to think of it, it might even be inspired directly by Sokal's joke.

Comment author: Perplexed 17 February 2011 05:08:08PM *  4 points [-]

In some professions, an employer will accept three years of experience in lieu of a college degree, and in some professions they won't. So, I would suggest that the most productive way to continue this conversation would be to provide one or more answers to the following two questions.

  • In what profession is experience treated as being as good or better than a degree?
  • How can you gain that experience and get paid doing it?

Three possible answers to the first question are journalist, restaurant chef, and computer programmer. Some corresponding answers to the second question should be obvious. A fourth answer to the first question would be political campaign operative. I don't know of a corresponding answer to the second question for that profession. (Maybe start out in paid interest-group fund-raising?)

Any other answer pairs?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 17 February 2011 05:39:06PM *  1 point [-]

Perplexed:

In some professions, an employer will accept three years of experience in lieu of a college degree, and in some professions they won't.

Clearly, this is impossible in professions that are organized as powerful guilds, assuming the guild imposes formal credentials as a condition of professional licencing, which is the case for pretty much all high-status professional guilds.

Thus in computer industry one sees quite a few professionals of high rank and/or expertise without a university degree, but this is absolutely unimaginable in law or medicine.

Comment author: James_K 16 February 2011 07:17:51PM 11 points [-]

As an economist myself (though a microeconomist) I share some of your concerns about macroeconomics. The way support and opposition for the US's recent stimulus broke down along ideological lines was wholly depressing.

I think the problem for macro is that they have almost no data to work with. You can't run a controlled experiment on a whole country and countries tend to be very different from each other which means there are a lot of confounding factors to deal with. And without much evidence, how could they hope to generate accurate beliefs?

Add to that the raw complexity of what economists study. The human brain the most complex object known to exist and the the global economy is about 7 billion of them interacting with each other.

None of this is meant to absolve macroeconomics, it may just be that meaningful study in this area just isn't possible. Macro has made some gains, there's a list of things that don't work in development economics and stabilisation policy is better than it was in the 1970s. But apart from that? Not much.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 17 February 2011 05:11:59AM *  6 points [-]

James,

Nice of you to drop by and comment -- I still remember that really interesting discussion about price indexes we had a few months ago!

One thing I find curious in economics is that basically anything studied under that moniker is considered to belong to a single discipline, and economists of all sorts apparently recognize each other as professional colleagues (even when they bitterly attack each other in ideological disputes). This despite the fact that the intellectual standards in various subfields of economics are of enormously different quality, ranging from very solid to downright pseudoscientific. And while I occasionally see economists questioning the soundness of their discipline, it's always formulated as questioning the soundness of economics in general, instead of a more specific and realistic observation that micro is pretty solid as long as one knows and respects the limitations of one's models, whereas macro is basically just pseudoscience.

Is the tendency for professional solidarity really that strong, or am I perhaps misperceiving this situation as an outsider?

Comment author: steven0461 16 February 2011 08:29:31PM *  5 points [-]

Macroeconomics and global warming seem to me like intrinsically political topics, in that the vast majority of us don't have the expertise to comment on them on the object level, and so we're forced to use the indirect evidence provided by the opinions of others; but as I think everyone agrees, at least some of the relevant thinkers believe what they do because of ideological bias one way or the other, and so discussion of these topics either turns into discussion of such bias, or skirts around a crucial part of the problem.

And while I didn't see anything inflammatory in your post, even the least inflammatory comments about an ideologically-charged issue can serve as an invitation for people to empty their cached opinions on the subject in the comments.

I'm not even confident that it's better to completely avoid politics on LW; it's just that it seems to me we've been getting there less through a conscious collective decision than through a general apathy about on-topic and other site norms.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 17 February 2011 04:38:53AM 8 points [-]

steven0461:

And while I didn't see anything inflammatory in your post, even the least inflammatory comments about an ideologically-charged issue can serve as an invitation for people to empty their cached opinions on the subject in the comments.

In your opinion, has this actually happened? Do you see something among the comments that, in your opinion, represents a negative contribution so that provoking it should be counted against the original post? (I understand you might not want to point fingers at concrete people, so feel free to answer just yes or no.)

Comment author: James_Miller 16 February 2011 09:07:03PM 2 points [-]

But colleges use SAT scores in admittance and don't get frequently sued. My program could always have an affirmative action admittance component to compensate for the harm negative childhood environments can inflict on an applicant's ability to perform well on the SATs.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 17 February 2011 04:31:11AM *  5 points [-]

James_Miller:

But colleges use SAT scores in admittance and don't get frequently sued.

The legal precedent in this area is very complex and by no means characterized by objective, clearly formulated, and uniform standards. You definitely cannot assume that the same standards apply to different institutions so that it's possible to reason by such straightforward analogy. I am not a lawyer, but I am virtually certain that according to the existing U.S. law, a private employer cannot evade the liability for illicit means of employee screening such as IQ tests just by outsourcing them to another institution that's in the business of providing them, or otherwise these requirements would have no teeth in practice.

Now, some people argue that universities and other official accredited educational institutions are in reality to a large degree in the business of providing such outsourced services, only in an obfuscated, roundabout, and inefficient way, and you seem to agree with this to some extent. However, this is indicative of the privilege enjoyed by these institutions, not of an opportunity for others to attempt innovative alternatives to what they do.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 17 February 2011 03:17:28AM *  10 points [-]

Clearly, except for a tiny minority of super-conscientious experts, humans aren't capable of maintaining the level of knowledge and especially discipline necessary to keep the computers they operate reliably secure. On several occasions, I've seen hilarious instances of super-smart people with advanced degrees in computing, some of them even security experts, leaving their machines or data wide open to intrusion by some petty accidental oversight.

This isn't limited to computers, of course. For example, Richard Feynman's stories of his hobbyist safe-cracking provide some amusing examples from a previous era. The only way to force people to maintain discipline in security are the old-fashioned military methods, but this requires draconian penalties (up to and including death penalty) for petty negligence.

On the other hand, it can be argued that most people's negligence in computer security is quite rational, in that additional marginal benefit from added security effort wouldn't be worth the (internalized) cost. See e.g. C. Herley, "So Long, And No Thanks for the Externalities: The Rational Rejection of Security Advice by Users." (Ungated link here.)

Comment author: saturn 17 February 2011 02:55:50AM 0 points [-]

He must be referring to the multitudes of die-hard ALGOL 60 users.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 17 February 2011 03:00:21AM 0 points [-]

I don't know about ALGOL, but I've known people who still make more than a decent living thanks to their expertise in COBOL or Smalltalk.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 17 February 2011 02:50:49AM *  17 points [-]

Besides the already mentioned issues, there are at least two very important ones.

First, one important thing that a university diploma signals is the ability to behave in proper ways that are demanded in professional situations, and to credibly maintain this appearance for several years. In particular, one of my pet hypotheses is that the notoriously high level of political correctness on campuses in fact serves a useful signaling role for employers. Even very productive and capable employees can end up as a net loss if they say or do something stupid that results in a harassment or discrimination lawsuit -- and people are much less likely to blunder in these ways if they have passed through several years of scrutiny by an institution that penalizes any indication of propensity for such excesses and relentlessly warns and propagandizes its students about how evil and dangerous they are.

Of course, another thing that universities are in the business of selling is the opportunity to mingle and make connections with high-status people, as well as the inherent increase in status that comes from the affiliation with a high-status institution. Status in human relations is often not reducible to a matter of signaling other traits, and the fact that universities currently possess high status and the power of bestowing it mean that they have control of an inherently scarce and fixed-sum resource, so they're impossible to undercut barring some very great social changes.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 16 February 2011 08:52:56PM 4 points [-]

James_Miller:

An organization could have a one month program which only admits those who get a high score on the SATs or some other intelligence test.

This would indeed be profitable, but only for unsuccessful applicants and their lawyers. Search for "disparate impact" if you don't know what I'm talking about.

There is of course also the issue of signaling weirdness that another commenter has already raised.

In response to Write It Like A Poem
Comment author: Vladimir_M 16 February 2011 07:21:21PM *  1 point [-]

One fascinating question about modern culture and society is the reason for its lack of interest in epic poetry, to the point where it has become impossible to compose new works in it that will be taken seriously. This especially considering that in other ages and cultures epic poetry has often been the primary form of literature, both oral and written, and almost never an insignificant one.

Nowadays it seems strange that in past ages people would often eschew prose, expecting to express their ideas better and elicit more interest through poetry. Lucretius's De rerum natura is probably the best known example. The last major examples in Western philosophical literature I can think of are the poetic parts of Nietzsche's Zarathustra, and perhaps also some poets from three or so generations ago like T.S. Eliot.

Comment author: TobyBartels 15 February 2011 11:25:37PM *  2 points [-]

Regarding endnote [4]: I'd be as interested in examples where we should read contrarian history as in any of your other examples; I'm interested in history. However, I think that you'd probably fall into mind-killing territory.

ETA: Thanks for the suggestions!

Comment author: Vladimir_M 16 February 2011 04:55:21PM 4 points [-]

To give some concrete examples, some topics where the conventional wisdom can be very inaccurate are, for example, wars and revolutions that have significant ideological bearing (like e.g. the world wars, or the French, American, or 1848 revolutions), and the evaluations of the historical performance of various systems of governance.

For some general contrarianism, I second the Moldbug recommendation. Be warned, however, that his writing features some spectacularly good insight but also some serious blind spots, so caveat lector. Generally, worthwhile contrarian sources tend to be good on some particulars but bad on others, so it's not like you can get a fully accurate opinion on any given topic from a single contrarian author.

Comment author: lukeprog 16 February 2011 06:13:51AM 27 points [-]

One marker to watch out for is a kind of selection effect.

In some fields, only 'true believers' have any motivation to spend their entire careers studying the subject in the first place, and so the 'mainstream' in that field is absolutely nutty.

Case examples include philosophy of religion, New Testament studies, Historical Jesus studies, and Quranic studies. These fields differ from, say, cryptozoology in that the biggest names in the field, and the biggest papers, are published by very smart people in leading journals and look all very normal and impressive but those entire fields are so incredibly screwed by the selection effect that it's only "radicals" who say things like, "Um, you realize that the 'gospel of Mark' is written in the genre of fiction, right?"

Comment author: Vladimir_M 16 February 2011 04:41:46PM *  10 points [-]

I agree about the historical Jesus studies. At one point, I got intensely interested in this topic and read a dozen or so books about it by various authors (mostly on the skeptical end). My conclusion is that this is possibly the ultimate example of an area where the questions are tantalizingly interesting, but making any reliable conclusions from the available evidence is basically impossible. At the end, as you say, we get a lot of well written and impressively researched books whose content is however just a rationalization for the authors' opinions held for altogether different reasons.

On the other hand, I'm not sure if you're expressing support for the radical mythicist position, but if you do, I disagree. As much as Christian apologists tend to stretch the evidence in their favor, it seems to me like radical mythicists are biased in the other direction. (It's telling that the doyen of contemporary mythicism, G.A. Wells, who certainly has no inclination towards Christian apologetics, has moderated his position significantly in recent years.)

Comment author: teageegeepea 16 February 2011 02:55:13PM 0 points [-]

Are scientists still claiming that Bogdanovs were hoaxers rather than producers of shoddy work? It seems that the idea arose because they had been TV presenters and the relative recency of the Sokal affair made that possibility salient.

The authors of the linguistics letter never revealed all their assumptions, which is why Poser could not fully critique it. As evidence for your argument you'd have to cite an example where such assumptions were revealed and deemed unsuitable by the academic mainstream.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 16 February 2011 03:59:33PM 2 points [-]

teageegeepea:

The authors of the linguistics letter never revealed all their assumptions, which is why Poser could not fully critique it. As evidence for your argument you'd have to cite an example where such assumptions were revealed and deemed unsuitable by the academic mainstream.

Maybe it wasn't clear enough from my writing, but this is not an isolated phenomenon. There have been many attempts at quantitative methods along these lines that are supposed to yield numerical estimates of the timing of language divergence. The approach is known as glottochronology (be warned that the Wikipedia article isn't very good, though), and there's a large literature discussing it. For a summary of the mainstream criticism, see e.g. the section on glottochronology in Historical Linguistics: An Introduction by Lyle Campbell (you might be able to find it on Google Books preview).

What is important in this context is that the mainstream consensus has never accepted any such estimates into its body of established knowledge, even though they provide superficially plausible answers to tantalizing questions. (This in contrast to the results obtained using the traditional comparative method, which are a matter of consensus.)

Comment author: teageegeepea 16 February 2011 02:40:35AM 3 points [-]

I didn't think footnotes 1 or 7 were very good examples. The fact that low quality work gets published is not enough to establish the soundness of the "academic mainstream". Given enough journals we should expect that to happen, and we should also expect most hypotheses to be false. Low quality work being cited and relied upon is a more serious problem.

Poser was not firmly dismissing the attempted solution as unsound. He said that there wasn't enough information given to properly evaluate the idea (although he could speculate on what the methods might have been), which is why it should have been a full-paper rather than a letter.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 16 February 2011 04:35:07AM *  0 points [-]

teageegeepea:

I didn't think footnotes 1 or 7 were very good examples. The fact that low quality work gets published is not enough to establish the soundness of the "academic mainstream".

Regarding (1), it's an example arguably showing much more than just low quality work being published. Based on the affair and the accompanying public debates, one gets the impression that in some more or less narrow fields the standards for distinguishing sound work from nonsense have collapsed altogether. What I was most struck with was not the apparent carelessness or incompetence of the few people directly involved in the affair, but the fact that even after the affair had become a subject of wide controversy, there was the apparent inability of reputable physicists to come to any clear consensus over whether the work makes any sense. And it's not like the dispute was over some deep controversy, but about whether a given piece of work is a hoax or not. I would expect that in a healthy field a question like that should meet an instant unanimous answer.

Regarding (7), I actually presented it as an example of unsubstantiated work being commendably rejected by the academic mainstream despite its strong seductive qualities.

Poser was not firmly dismissing the attempted solution as unsound. He said that there wasn't enough information given to properly evaluate the idea (although he could speculate on what the methods might have been), which is why it should have been a full-paper rather than a letter.

Whatever words he chose to employ, the mainstream consensus remains that the question is without answer, unmoved by the numerous attempts to answer it by methods similar to the one in that paper. Thus, papers using such methods are effectively rejected by the mainstream, regardless of whether they get more or less harshly worded reviews in the process. Which is in my opinion correct because their attempts at rigor are a house built on sand in terms of their fundamental assumptions.

Comment author: wedrifid 15 February 2011 08:50:25PM 3 points [-]

The first one seems like it could be equally well used as an example of not-smart people doing stupid things:

Ignoring the importance of design and style - When the iPod originally came out, technical people complained about its lack of features and perceived high price ("ooh, who cares about another MP3 player, I can go buy one at Best Buy for $50" http://forums.macrumors.com/show...). In the meantime, it was so cool and easy to use that normal people went out in droves to buy it.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 16 February 2011 02:15:01AM 3 points [-]

Another example is his sneering at old-fashioned non-user-friendly software tools. It sounds like he's never had the experience of overcoming a really steep learning curve. (And what on Earth does he mean by "programming languages... not updated since the 1970s"? C?)

Comment author: SilasBarta 15 February 2011 03:57:59PM 15 points [-]

Here's another one: what I call the layshadow heuristic: could an intelligent layperson produce passable, publishable work [1] in that field after a few days of self-study? It's named after the phenomenon in which someone with virtually no knowledge of the field sells the service of writing papers for others who don't want to do the work, and are never discovered, with their clients being granted degrees.

The heuristic works because passing it implies very low inferential distance and therefore very little knowledge accumulation.

[1] specifically, work that unsuspecting "experts" in the field cannot distinguish from that produced by "serious" researchers with real "experience" and "education" in that field.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 16 February 2011 01:55:20AM *  12 points [-]

SilasBarta:

It's named after the phenomenon in which someone with virtually no knowledge of the field sells the service of writing papers for others who don't want to do the work, and are never discovered, with their clients being granted degrees.

I agree this is indicative of serious pathology of one sort or another, but in fairness, I find it plausible that in many fields there might be a very severe divide between real scholarship done by people on the tenure track and the routine drudgery assigned to students, even graduate students who aren't aiming for the tenure track.

The pathologies of the educational side of the modern academic system are certainly a fascinating topic in its own right.

Comment author: Manfred 16 February 2011 01:41:53AM 0 points [-]

I mostly agree, but I think there's a continuous scale here, not a general rule. The situation of pesticide companies and pharmaceutical companies is very similar, and both have used similar tactics to try and corrupt the science around them, but pharmaceutical companies have been much more effective - probably by spending much more money.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 16 February 2011 01:50:17AM *  2 points [-]

I don't think the amount of money is relevant in this particular comparison. Far more important is the ability of the corrupting special interest to assume the forms and establish the social and legal status enabling it to present itself as a legitimate patron of scholarship, association with which won't be detrimental to the researchers' reputation. Money clearly doesn't hurt in this endeavor, but I think that it's far from being the most important factor.

Comment author: Nornagest 15 February 2011 11:43:11PM *  11 points [-]

Nutrition's also entangled with a horrific mess of body-image issues and cultural expectations. These aren't essential to any of the strains of cultural criticism that they intersect, so I don't think I'd call them ideological; but because they're so closely linked to people's identities, they exhibit a lot of the problems we associate with ideology.

Same goes for related fields like exercise. The mind-killer here doesn't metastasize like ideology tends to, but it's every bit as pathological if you accidentally end up poking one of its hosts in the wrong spot.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 16 February 2011 01:40:33AM 1 point [-]

Nornagest:

Nutrition's also entangled with a horrific mess of body-image issues and cultural expectations. These aren't essential to any of the strains of cultural criticism that they intersect, so I don't think I'd call them ideological; but because they're so closely linked to people's identities, they exhibit a lot of the problems we associate with ideology.

Well said. As you say, "ideological" is not a very accurate term here, but I meant it to also encompass this sort of thing.

Comment author: AShepard 15 February 2011 09:18:05PM 10 points [-]

I'm surprised that you don't mention the humanities as a really bad case where there is little low-hanging fruit and high ideological content. Take English literature for example. Barrels of ink have been spilled in writing about Hamlet, and genuinely new insights are quite rare. The methods are also about as unsound as you can imagine. Freud is still heavily cited and applied, and postmodern/poststructuralist/deconstructionist writing seems to be accorded higher status the more impossible to read it is.

Ideological interest is also a big problem. This seems almost inevitable, since the subject of the humanities is human culture, which is naturally bound up with human ideals, beliefs, and opinions. Academic disciplines are social groups, so they have a natural tendency to develop group norms and ideologies. It's unsurprising that this trend is reinforced in those disciplines that have ideologies as their subject matter. The result is that interpretations which do not support the dominant paradigm (often a variation on how certain sympathetic social groups are repressed, marginalized, or "otherized"), are themselves suppressed.

One theory of why the humanities are so bad is that there is no empirical test for whether an answer is right or not. Incorrect science leads to incorrect predictions, and even incorrect macroeconomics leads to suboptimal policy decisions. But it's hard to imagine what an "incorrect" interpretation of Hamlet even looks like, or what the impact of having an incorrect interpretation would be. Hence, there's no pressure towards correct answers that offsets the natural tendency for social communities to develop and enforce social norms.

I wonder if "empirical testability" is a should be included with the low-hanging fruit heuristic.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 16 February 2011 01:33:33AM *  6 points [-]

AShepard:

I'm surprised that you don't mention the humanities as a really bad case where there is little low-hanging fruit and high ideological content.

Well, I have mentioned history. Other humanities can be anywhere from artsy fields where there isn't even a pretense of any sort of objective insight (not that this necessarily makes them worthless for other purposes), to areas that feature very well researched and thought-out scholarship if ideological issues aren't in the way, and if it's an area that hasn't been already done to death for generations (which is basically my first heuristic).

I wonder if "empirical testability" is a should be included with the low-hanging fruit heuristic.

Perhaps surprisingly, it doesn't seem to me that empirical testability is so important. Lousy work can easily be presented with plenty of empirical data carefully arranged and cherry-picked to support it. To recognize the problem in such cases and sort out correct empirical validation from spin and propaganda is often a problem as difficult as sorting out valid from invalid reasoning in less empirically-oriented work.

Comment author: steven0461 15 February 2011 10:33:01PM 5 points [-]

Am I really in the minority in not wanting political discussion on the site, at least without special precautions?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 16 February 2011 01:14:20AM 12 points [-]

Do you think my post goes too far in this direction, or are you referring to some of the comments?

Comment author: DuncanS 16 February 2011 12:04:53AM *  6 points [-]

I do agree that there are fields where the overall standards of the academic mainstream are not that high, but I'm not sure about the heuristics - I tend to use a different set.

One confusing factor is that in almost any field, the academic level of an arbitrary academic paper is not that high - average academic papers are published by average scientists, and are generally averagely brilliant - in other words, not that good. The preferred route is typically to prove something that's actually already well known, but there are also plenty of flawed papers. There are also plenty of papers that are perhaps interesting if you're interested in some particularly small niche of some particularly minor topic, but are of no relevance to the average reader. None of this says anything much about the quality of the mainstream orthodoxy, which can be very much higher than the quality of the average paper.

My main principle is that human beings are just not that intelligent. They are intelligent enough to follow a logical argument that is set into a system where there are tightly defined rules from which one can reason. They are NOT intelligent enough to reason sensibly AT ALL in regions where such rules are not defined. Well, perhaps a logical step or two is plausible, but anything beyond that becomes very dubious indeed - it is like trying to build a tower on a foundation of jello.

Reasoning based on vague definitions is a red flag - it encourages people to come up with any answer they want, and believe they've logically arrived at it. Reasoning based on a complicated set of not particularly related facts is a red flag, as nobody is intelligent enough to do it correctly.

Someone once said that all science is either physics or stamp collecting. It's close - you have to have some organising principles of decent mathematical quality to do reasoning with any certainty. Without that, stamp collecting is the limit of the possible.

Equally, maths is not a panacea. It's quite possible, in an academic paper, to spend a great deal of time developing a mathematical argument based on assumptions that aren't really connected to the question you're trying to answer - the maths is probably correct, but the vague and fuzzy bit where the maths is trying to connect to the problem is where it all goes wrong. To take the example everyone knows, financial models that assume average house prices can't go down as well as up may have perfectly correct mathematics, but will not predict well what will happen to those investments when house prices do go down.

In summary, those fields with widely accepted logical systems are probably doing something right. Those fields where there are multiple logical systems that are competing are probably also doing something right - the worst they can do is to reason correctly about the wrong thing. Fields where there is an incumbent system which is vague are bad, as are those fields where freeform reason is the order of the day.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 16 February 2011 01:10:36AM 6 points [-]

DuncanS:

Someone once said that all science is either physics or stamp collecting. It's close - you have to have some organising principles of decent mathematical quality to do reasoning with any certainty. Without that, stamp collecting is the limit of the possible.

I disagree with this. In many areas there are methodologies that don't approach a mathematical level of formalization, and nevertheless yield rock-solid insight. One case in point is the example of historical linguistics I cited. These people have managed to reach non-obvious conclusions as reliable as anything else in science using a methodology that boils down to assembling a large web of heterogeneous common-sense evidence carefully and according to established systematic guidelines. Their results are a marvelous example of what some people call "traditional rationality" here.

Comment author: waveman 15 February 2011 09:47:47AM *  45 points [-]

If you are going to suggest that academic climate research is not up to scratch, you need to do more than post links to pages that link to non-academic articles. Saying "you can find lots on google scholar" is not that same as actually pointing to the alleged sub-standard research.

For a long time I too was somewhat skeptical about global warming. I recognized the risk that researchers would exaggerate the problem in order to obtain more funding.

What I chose to do to resolve the matter was to deep dive into a few often-raised skeptic arguments using my knowledge of physics as a starting point, and learning whatever I needed to learn along the way (it took a while). The result was that the academic researchers won 6-0 6-0 6-0 in three sets (to use a tennis score analogy). Most striking to me was the dishonesty and lack of substance on the "skeptic" side. There was just no "there" there.

The topics I looked into were: accuracy of the climate temperature record, alleged natural causes explaining the recent heating, the alleged saturation of the atmospheric CO2 infra-red wavelengths, and the claim that the CO2 that is emitted by man is absorbed very quickly.

In retrospect I became aware that my 'skepticism' was fulled in large part by deliberate misinformation campaigns in the grand tradition of tobacco, asbestos, HFCs, DDT etc. The same techniques, and even many of the same PR firms are involved. As one tobacco executive said "Our product is doubt".

An article about assessing the soundness of the academic mainstream would benefit from also discussing the ways in which the message from, and even the research done in, academia is corrupted and distorted by commercial interests. Economics is a case in point, but it is a big issue also in drug research and other aspects of medicine.

Another thing I have noticed in looking into various areas of academic research is just how much research in every field I looked at is inconclusive, inconsequential, flawed or subtly biased (look up "desk drawer bias" for example).

Edit: fixed a few typos.

Edit: good article by the way, very well reasoned.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 16 February 2011 01:00:44AM *  6 points [-]

Also, to comment on this:

An article about assessing the soundness of the academic mainstream would benefit from also discussing the ways in which the message from, and even the research done in, academia is corrupted and distorted by commercial interests. Economics is a case in point, but it is a big issue also in drug research and other aspects of medicine.

That would fall under the "venal" part of considering the ideological/venal factors involved. I agree that I should have cited the example of drug research; the main reason I didn't do so is that I'm not confident that my impressions about this area are accurate enough.

One fascinating question about the problem of venal influences, about which I might write more in the future, is when and under what exact conditions researchers are likely to fall under them and get away with it, considering that the present system is overall very good at discovering and punishing crude and obvious corruption and fraud. As I wrote in another comment, sometimes such influences are masked by scams such as setting up phony front organizations for funding, but even that tends to be discovered eventually and tarnish the reputations of the researchers involved. What seems to be the worst problem is when the beneficiaries of biased research enjoy such status in the eyes of the public and such legal and customary position in society that they don't even need to hide anything when establishing a perverse symbiosis that results in biased research.

Comment author: waveman 15 February 2011 09:47:47AM *  45 points [-]

If you are going to suggest that academic climate research is not up to scratch, you need to do more than post links to pages that link to non-academic articles. Saying "you can find lots on google scholar" is not that same as actually pointing to the alleged sub-standard research.

For a long time I too was somewhat skeptical about global warming. I recognized the risk that researchers would exaggerate the problem in order to obtain more funding.

What I chose to do to resolve the matter was to deep dive into a few often-raised skeptic arguments using my knowledge of physics as a starting point, and learning whatever I needed to learn along the way (it took a while). The result was that the academic researchers won 6-0 6-0 6-0 in three sets (to use a tennis score analogy). Most striking to me was the dishonesty and lack of substance on the "skeptic" side. There was just no "there" there.

The topics I looked into were: accuracy of the climate temperature record, alleged natural causes explaining the recent heating, the alleged saturation of the atmospheric CO2 infra-red wavelengths, and the claim that the CO2 that is emitted by man is absorbed very quickly.

In retrospect I became aware that my 'skepticism' was fulled in large part by deliberate misinformation campaigns in the grand tradition of tobacco, asbestos, HFCs, DDT etc. The same techniques, and even many of the same PR firms are involved. As one tobacco executive said "Our product is doubt".

An article about assessing the soundness of the academic mainstream would benefit from also discussing the ways in which the message from, and even the research done in, academia is corrupted and distorted by commercial interests. Economics is a case in point, but it is a big issue also in drug research and other aspects of medicine.

Another thing I have noticed in looking into various areas of academic research is just how much research in every field I looked at is inconclusive, inconsequential, flawed or subtly biased (look up "desk drawer bias" for example).

Edit: fixed a few typos.

Edit: good article by the way, very well reasoned.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 16 February 2011 12:45:16AM *  8 points [-]

waveman:

If you are going to suggest that academic climate research is not up to scratch, you need to do more than post links to pages that link to non-academic articles. Saying "you can find lots on google scholar" is not that same as actually pointing to the alleged sub-standard research.

I agree that I should have argued and referenced that part better. What I wanted to point out is that there is a whole cottage industry of research purporting to show that climate change is supposedly influencing one thing or another, a very large part of which appears to advance hypotheses so far-fetched and weakly substantiated that they seem like obvious products of the tendency to involve this super-fashionable topic into one's research whenever possible, for reasons of both status- and career-advancement.

Even if one accepts that the standard view on climate change has been decisively proven and the issue shown to be a pressing problem, I still don't think how one could escape this conclusion.

Comment author: Manfred 15 February 2011 07:52:09PM 1 point [-]

Speaking of which, smoking, asbestos, and pesticides are good examples of the venal interest heuristic where the most respected people on the academic side are pretty damn correct.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 16 February 2011 12:34:36AM 3 points [-]

Manfred:

Speaking of which, smoking, asbestos, and pesticides are good examples of the venal interest heuristic where the most respected people on the academic side are pretty damn correct.

I don't think this is an accurate analysis. Venal interests are relevant when they have ways of influencing researchers in ways that won't make it look like immediately obvious fraud and crude malfeasance, which the modern academic system is indeed very good at stamping out.

If a researcher benefits from affiliation with some individuals or institutions and in turn produces research benefiting these parties, thus forming a suspiciously convenient symbiotic relationship, it will work in practice only if this relationship is somehow obscured. Sometimes it is obscured by channeling funding through neutral-looking third parties and similar swindles, but again, this is difficult to pull off in a way that won't raise all sorts of red flags in the present system. A far more serious and common problem, in my opinion, is when the relationship is completely in the open -- often even boasted about -- because the institutions involved have such high status and exalted image that they're normally perceived as worthy of highest trust and confidence in their objectivity and benevolence.

Comment author: CronoDAS 15 February 2011 10:02:01AM 10 points [-]

On "ideologically charged" science producing good results:

Evolutionary biology, in general. Creationism went down really hard and really quickly.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 15 February 2011 04:28:32PM *  7 points [-]

I don't think this is a good example. My post is intended to apply to the contemporary academia, whereas the basics of evolutionary theory were proposed way back in the 19th century, and the decisive controversies over them played out back then, when the situation was very different from nowadays in many relevant ways. (Of course, creationism is still alive and well among the masses, but for generations already it has been a very low-status belief with virtually zero support among the intellectual elites.)

On the other hand, when it comes to questions in evolutionary theory that still have strong implications about issues that are ideologically charged even among the intellectual elites, there is indeed awful confusion and one can find plenty of examples where prestigious academics are clearly throwing their weight behind their favored ideological causes. The controversies over sociobiology are the most obvious example.

In contrast, when it comes to modern applications of evolutionary theory to non-ideologically-sensitive problems, the situation is generally OK -- except in those cases where the authors don't have a clear and sound approach to the problem, so they end up producing just-so stories masquerading as scientific theories. This however is pretty much the situation that should trigger my first heuristic.

Some Heuristics for Evaluating the Soundness of the Academic Mainstream in Unfamiliar Fields

73 Post author: Vladimir_M 15 February 2011 09:17AM

(This post is an expanded version of a LW comment I left a while ago. I have found myself referring to it so much in the meantime that I think it’s worth reworking into a proper post. Some related posts are "The Correct Contrarian Cluster" and "What is Bunk?")

When looking for information about some area outside of one’s expertise, it is usually a good idea to first ask what academic scholarship has to say on the subject. In many areas, there is no need to look elsewhere for answers: respectable academic authors are the richest and most reliable source of information, and people claiming things completely outside the academic mainstream are almost certain to be crackpots. 

The trouble is, this is not always the case. Even those whose view of the modern academia is much rosier than mine should agree that it would be astonishing if there didn’t exist at least some areas where the academic mainstream is detached from reality on important issues, while much more accurate views are scorned as kooky (or would be if they were heard at all). Therefore, depending on the area, the fact that a view is way out of the academic mainstream may imply that it's bunk with near-certainty, but it may also tell us nothing if the mainstream standards in the area are especially bad.

I will discuss some heuristics that, in my experience, provide a realistic first estimate of how sound the academic mainstream in a given field is likely to be, and how justified one would be to dismiss contrarians out of hand. These conclusions have come from my own observations of research literature in various fields and some personal experience with the way modern academia operates, and I would be interested in reading others’ opinions. 

Low-hanging fruit heuristic

As the first heuristic, we should ask if there is a lot of low-hanging fruit available in the given area, in the sense of research goals that are both interesting and doable. If yes, this means that there are clear paths to quality work open for reasonably smart people with an adequate level of knowledge and resources, which makes it unnecessary to invent clever-looking nonsense instead. In this situation, smart and capable people can just state a sound and honest plan of work on their grant applications and proceed with it.

In contrast, if a research area has reached a dead end and further progress is impossible except perhaps if some extraordinary path-breaking genius shows the way, or in an area that has never even had a viable and sound approach to begin with, it’s unrealistic to expect that members of the academic establishment will openly admit this situation and decide it’s time for a career change. What will likely happen instead is that they’ll continue producing output that will have all the superficial trappings of science and sound scholarship, but will in fact be increasingly pointless and detached from reality. 

Arguably, some areas of theoretical physics have reached this state, if we are to trust the critics like Lee Smolin. I am not a physicist, and I cannot judge directly if Smolin and the other similar critics are right, but some powerful evidence for this came several years ago in the form of the Bogdanoff affair, which demonstrated that highly credentialed physicists in some areas can find it difficult, perhaps even impossible, to distinguish sound work from a well-contrived nonsensical imitation. [1]

Somewhat surprisingly, another example is presented by some subfields of computer science. With all the new computer gadgets everywhere, one would think that no other field could be further from a stale dead end. In some of its subfields this is definitely true, but in others, much of what is studied is based on decades old major breakthroughs, and the known viable directions from there have long since been explored all until they hit against some fundamentally intractable problem. (Or alternatively, further progress is a matter of hands-on engineering practice that doesn't lend itself to the way academia operates.) This has led to a situation where a lot of the published CS research is increasingly distant from reality, because to keep the illusion of progress, it must pretend to solve problems that are basically known to be impossible. [2] 

Ideological/venal interest heuristic

Bad as they might be, the problems that occur when clear research directions are lacking pale in comparison with what happens when things under discussion are ideologically charged or a matter in which powerful interest groups have a stake. As Hobbes remarked, people agree about theorems of geometry not because their proofs are solid, but because "men care not in that subject what be truth, as a thing that crosses no man’s ambition, profit, or lust." [3]

One example is the cluster of research areas encompassing intelligence research, sociobiology, and behavioral genetics, which touches on a lot of highly ideologically charged questions. These pass the low-hanging fruit heuristic easily: the existing literature is full of proposals for interesting studies waiting to be done. Yet, because of their striking ideological implications, these areas are full of work clearly aimed at advancing the authors’ non-scientific agenda, and even after a lot of reading one is left in confusion over whom to believe, if anyone. It doesn’t even matter whose side one supports in these controversies: whichever side is right (if any one is), it’s simply impossible that there isn’t a whole lot of nonsense published in prestigious academic venues and under august academic titles. 

Yet another academic area that suffers from the same problems is the history of the modern era. On many significant events from the last two centuries, there is a great deal of documentary evidence laying around still waiting to be assessed properly, so there is certainly no lack of low-hanging fruit for a smart and diligent historian. Yet due to the clear ideological implications of many historical topics, ideological nonsense cleverly masquerading as scholarship abounds. I don’t think anything resembling an accurate world history of the last two centuries could be written without making a great many contrarian claims. [4] In contrast, on topics that don't arouse ideological passions, modern histories are often amazingly well researched and free of speculation and distortion. (In particular, if you are from a small nation that has never really been a player in world history, your local historians are likely to be full of parochial bias motivated by the local political quarrels and grievances, but you may be able to find very accurate information on your local history in the works of foreign historians from the elite academia.) 

On the whole, it seems to me that failing the ideological interest test suggests a much worse situation than failing the low-hanging fruit test. The areas affected by just the latter are still fundamentally sound, and tend to produce work whose contribution is way overblown, but which is still built on a sound basis and internally coherent. Even if outright nonsense is produced, it’s still clearly distinguishable with some effort and usually restricted to less prestigious authors. Areas affected by ideological biases, however, tend to drift much further into outright delusion, possibly lacking a sound core body of scholarship altogether. 

[Paragraphs below added in response to comments:] 

What about the problem of purely venal influences, i.e. the cases where researchers are under the patronage of parties that have stakes in the results of their research? On the whole, the modern Western academic system is very good at discovering and stamping out clear and obvious corruption and fraud. It's clearly not possible for researchers to openly sell their services to the highest bidder; even if there are no formal sanctions, their reputation would be ruined. However, venal influences are nevertheless far from nonexistent, and a fascinating question is under what exact conditions researchers are likely to fall under them and get away with it.

Sometimes venal influences are masked by scams such as setting up phony front organizations for funding, but even that tends to be discovered eventually and tarnish the reputations of the researchers involved. What seems to be the real problem is when the beneficiaries of biased research enjoy such status in the eyes of the public and such legal and customary position in society that they don't even need to hide anything when establishing a perverse symbiosis that results in biased research. Such relationships, while fundamentally representing venal interest, are in fact often boasted about as beneficial and productive cooperation. Pharmaceutical research is an often cited example, but I think the phenomenon is in fact far more widespread, and reaches the height of perverse perfection in those research communities whose structure effectively blends into various government agencies. 

The really bad cases: failing both tests

So far, I've discussed examples where one of the mentioned heuristics returns a negative answer, but not the other. What happens when a field fails both of them, having no clear research directions and at the same time being highly relevant to ideologues and interest groups? Unsurprisingly, it tends to be really bad. 

The clearest example of such a field is probably economics, particularly macroeconomics. (Microeconomics covers an extremely broad range of issues deeply intertwined with many other fields, and its soundness, in my opinion, varies greatly depending on the subject, so I’ll avoid a lengthy digression into it.) Macroeconomists lack any clearly sound and fruitful approach to the problems they wish to study, and any conclusion they might draw will have immediately obvious ideological implications, often expressible in stark "who-whom?" terms. 

And indeed, even a casual inspection of the standards in this field shows clear symptoms of cargo-cult science: weaving complex and abstruse theories that can be made to predict everything and nothing, manipulating essentially meaningless numbers as if they were objectively measurable properties of the real world [5], experts with the most prestigious credentials dismissing each other as crackpots (in more or less diplomatic terms) when their favored ideologies clash, etc., etc. Fringe contrarians in this area (most notably extreme Austrians) typically have silly enough ideas of their own, but their criticism of the academic mainstream is nevertheless often spot-on, in my opinion.

Other examples

So, what are some other interesting case studies for these heuristics? 

An example of great interest is climate science. Clearly, the ideological interest heuristic raises a big red flag here, and indeed, there is little doubt that a lot of the research coming out in recent years that supposedly links "climate change" with all kinds of bad things is just fashionable nonsense [6]. (Another sanity check it fails is that only a tiny proportion of these authors ever hypothesize that the predicted/observed climate change might actually improve something, as if there existed some law of physics prohibiting it.) Thus, I’d say that contrarians on this issue should definitely not be dismissed out of hand; the really hard question is how much sound insight (if any) remains after one eliminates all the nonsense that’s infiltrated the mainstream. When it comes to the low-hanging fruit heuristic, I find the situation less clear. How difficult is it to achieve progress in accurately reconstructing long-term climate trends and forecasting the influences of increasing greenhouse gases? Is it hard enough that we’d expect, even absent an ideological motivation, that people would try to substitute cleverly contrived bunk for unreachable sound insight? My conclusion is that I’ll have to read much more on the technical background of these subjects before I can form any reliable opinion on these questions. 

Another example of practical interest is nutrition. Here ideological influences aren’t very strong (though not altogether absent either). However, the low-hanging fruit raises a huge red flag: it’s almost impossible to study these things in a sound way, controlling for all the incredibly complex and counterintuitive confounding variables. At the same time, it’s easy to produce endless amounts of plausible-looking junk studies. Thus, I’d expect that the mainstream research in this area is on average pure nonsense, with a few possible gems of solid insight hopelessly buried under it, and even when it comes to very extreme contrarians, I wouldn’t be tremendously surprised to see any one of them proven right at the end.  My conclusion is similar when it comes to exercise and numerous other lifestyle issues.

Exceptions

Finally, what are the evident exceptions to these trends? 

I can think of some exceptions to the low-hanging fruit heuristic. One is in historical linguistics, whose standard well-substantiated methods have had great success in identifying the structure of the world’s language family trees, but give no answer at all to the fascinating question of how far back into the past the nodes of these trees reach (except of course when we have written evidence). Nobody has any good idea how to make progress there, and the questions are tantalizing. Now, there are all sorts of plausible-looking but fundamentally unsound methods that purport to answer these questions, and papers using them occasionally get published in prestigious non-linguistic journals, but the actual historical linguists firmly dismiss them as unsound, even though they have no answers of their own to offer instead. [7] It’s an example of a commendable stand against seductive nonsense.

It’s much harder to think of examples where the ideological interest heuristic fails. What field can one point out where mainstream scholarship is reliably sound and objective despite its topic being ideologically charged? Honestly, I can’t think of one.

What about the other direction -- fields that pass both heuristics but are nevertheless nonsense? I can think of e.g. artsy areas that don’t make much of a pretense to objectivity in the first place, but otherwise, it seems to me that absent ideological and venal perverse incentives, and given clear paths to progress that don’t require extraordinary genius, the modern academic system is great in producing solid and reliable insight. The trouble is that these conditions often don’t hold in practice. 

I’d be curious to see additional examples that either confirm of disprove these heuristics I proposed.

Footnotes

[1] Commenter gwern has argued that the Bogdanoff affair is not a good example, claiming that the brothers have been shown as fraud decisively after they came under intense public scrutiny. However, even if this is true, the fact still remains that they initially managed to publish their work in reputable peer-reviewed venues and obtain doctorates at a reputable (though not top-ranking) university, which strongly suggests that there is much more work in the field that is equally bad but doesn't elicit equal public interest and thus never gets really scrutinized. Moreover, from my own reading about the affair, it was clear that in its initial phases several credentialed physicists were unable to make a clear judgment about their work. On the whole, I don’t think the affair can be dismissed as an insignificant accident. 

[2] Moldbug’s "What’s wrong with CS research" is a witty and essentially accurate overview of this situation. He mostly limits himself to the discussion of programming language research, but a similar scenario can be seen in some other related fields too.

[3] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Chapter XI.

[4] I have the impression that LW readers would mostly not be interested in a detailed discussion of the topics where I think one should read contrarian history, so I’m skipping it. In case I’m wrong, please feel free to open the issue in the comments.

[5] Oskar Morgenstern’s On the Accuracy of Economic Observations is a tour de force on the subject, demonstrating the essential meaninglessness of many sorts of numbers that economists use routinely. (Many thanks to the commenter realitygrill for directing me to this amazing book.) Morgenstern is of course far too prestigious a name to dismiss as a crackpot, so economists appear to have chosen to simply ignore the questions he raised, and his book has been languishing in obscurity and out of print for decades. It is available for download though (warning: ~31MB PDF).

[6] Some amusing lists of examples have been posted by the Heritage Foundation and the Number Watch (not intended to endorse the rest of the stuff on these websites). Admittedly, a lot of the stuff listed there is not real published research, but rather just people's media statements. Still, there's no shortage of similar things even in published research either, as a search of e.g. Google Scholar will show.

[7] Here is, for example, the linguist Bill Poser dismissing one such paper published in Nature a few years ago. 

Comment author: NMJablonski 14 February 2011 04:05:16AM 1 point [-]

You've left me very curious as to what high status beliefs you think are inaccurate.

I myself find that "right thinking" academic elites are blisteringly wrong on many things, and I would be interested to see where others are willing to go out on a limb and challenge orthodoxy.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 15 February 2011 04:05:42AM *  11 points [-]

NMJablonski:

You've left me very curious as to what high status beliefs you think are inaccurate.

Trouble is, the fact that they are high-status means that contradicting them without a very good supporting argument (and usually even otherwise) will make one sound like a crackpot or extremist of some sort.

Nevertheless, I think there are some examples that shouldn't sound too controversial. Take for example modern economics, and macroeconomics in particular. Our governments do many things based on what passes for professional scientific expertise in this field, and if this supposed expertise is detached from reality, the policies based on it can result in catastrophically bad consequences in many imaginable ways. Arguably, this has happened in many times and places historically, some arguable examples being the Great Depression and the present global economic crisis.

Now, to put it bluntly, I see no rational reason to believe that macroeconomists have any clue about anything. The greatest luminaries of scholarship in this field always espouse theories that are suspiciously convenient for their ideological agenda, and are apt to dismiss their equally prestigious ideological opponents as crackpots (more or less diplomatically, depending on the occasion). What's more, even a casual inquiry into the epistemological standards in the field reveals an awfully bad situation, with all signs of cargo cult science plainly obvious.

Accordingly, one is tempted to conclude that all these sophisticated and supposedly scientific economic policies have never been much more than ideologically-driven dilettantism (except for a few elementary principles of political economy that have been well understood since antiquity), and we're just lucky that the economy is resilient enough not to be damaged by it too catastrophically. But even if one doesn't draw such a strong conclusion, it certainly seems to me the height of irrationality to worry about petty folkish superstitions that anyone with any intellectual status scoffs at, while at the same time our prosperity is in the hands of people who dabble with it using "expertise" that at least partly consists of evident pseudoscience, but nevertheless gets to be adorned with the most prestigious academic titles.

I can think of many other examples, most of which are likely to be more controversial.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 13 February 2011 09:50:22PM 15 points [-]

That's nothing, I once saw a restaurant called Genghis Khan's Mongolian BBQ.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 14 February 2011 12:16:06AM *  3 points [-]

I'm not sure if there are any cultures whose folk historical memory of Genghis Khan involves the same visceral horror as the present-day Western reaction to Hitler. So while this is an accurate historical parallel, it might not be one in terms of unintentional hilarity.

Comment author: Emile 13 February 2011 08:36:50PM 15 points [-]

the Nazis believed many things considered insane even by the average Joe's lowly standards, like "mass-murder is a good thing".

I'm not sure they considered it a good thing, maybe they would have preferred to just ship off all the Jews to Madagascar, the Final Solution was a second-best solution that happened to be cheaper and more practical.

And the "average Joe" you're talking about would have to be a Western one - I suspect in many countries, mass murder of some ethnic groups wouldn't be considered insane by everybody's standards, especially in a war situation - either because they're sitting on some land that's "rightfully ours", or they're more economically successful, or they're not-very-well integrated immigrants, etc.

By the way, Hitler isn't always seen as a Big Bad Guy by the non-Western world, sometimes he's just considered a pretty bad-ass leader like Stalin or Napoleon. When a german friend of mine met her new colleagues at a Chinese univiersity's biology lab, one of them said "Oh, you're German! Like Hitler! Cool! thumbs up". And the Chinese find that the Westerners don't seem that aware of how nasty the Japanese were.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 13 February 2011 09:06:23PM *  8 points [-]

Emile:

By the way, Hitler isn't always seen as a Big Bad Guy by the non-Western world, sometimes he's just considered a pretty bad-ass leader like Stalin or Napoleon. When a german friend of mine met her new colleagues at a Chinese univiersity's biology lab, one of them said "Oh, you're German! Like Hitler! Cool! thumbs up".

I've read about some hilarious examples of non-Westerners who perceive Hiter as a distant and exotic historical figure, completely oblivious to how Westerners are apt to react to his mention. Like for example the parents of this Indian politician:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Lu_Hitler_Marak

Comment author: MartinB 13 February 2011 08:07:14PM 0 points [-]

The Nazis also believed many sane things, like exercise and the value of nature and animal welfare and the harmful nature of smoking.

one question I pondered at times is if the experiments done on prisoner by Mengele and others actually lead to anything interesting. In theory the lack of ethics would allow for more research with less effort. But it seems they did not, and actually worked rather sloppy. I guess that is preferably, because otherwise the ethics people would have a hard time keeping eager researchers in check.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 13 February 2011 08:22:01PM *  8 points [-]

There are interesting data on hypothermia based on Nazi human experimentation, which are especially interesting because it's impossible to replicate these measurements for obvious reasons. The ethics of using and citing those have been a matter of controversy for decades:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/holocaust/experi02_no.html

Otherwise, however, the human experiments done by Nazi doctors seem to have been scientifically worthless. Mengele in particular was just a particularly cruel dilettante.

Comment author: Will_Sawin 13 February 2011 05:11:21AM 13 points [-]

If I go around saying "This belief is wrong! Hey everyone, did you know that this belief is wrong?" and it's a low-status belief, high-status people are likely to ask "What's the harm?" If it's a high-status belief, due to correctness of the Titanic analogy, very few high-status people will ask that. They are much more likely, instead, to criticize your argument that the belief is wrong.

What's The Harm is not an introduction to the practice of rationality. It is a response to a specific argument. It makes that counter-argument best and most clearly by only including beliefs that are almost never held by high-status individuals.

(In addition, the whole methodology of collecting individual examples works well for distributed mistakes like the passengers', but not for large, single mistakes like the captain's.)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 13 February 2011 07:24:25PM *  9 points [-]

Will Sawin:

If it's a high-status belief, due to correctness of the Titanic analogy, very few high-status people will ask that [what's the harm]. They are much more likely, instead, to criticize your argument that the belief is wrong.

Would that it were so! When it comes to really pervasive and established high-status delusional beliefs, with very few exceptions, what you'll get is at best a criticism whose content is far below the usual scholarly standards, and at worst just mindless sneering and moral indignation.

This holds both for those high-status false beliefs that are a matter of ideological orthodoxy and those that are a matter of venal interest. (The overlap between those is, of course, larger than the pure part of either category, and people have no problem coming up with honest rationalizations for their professional, ideological, and other interests.)

(In addition, the whole methodology of collecting individual examples works well for distributed mistakes like the passengers', but not for large, single mistakes like the captain's.)

In many cases, high-status delusional beliefs don't result in a single identifiable disaster, but rather in lots of widely distributed harm and suffering. (In this sense, the Titanic analogy breaks down.)

In these cases, however, a collection of touching human-interest stories will likely fail to strike the intended note among high-status readers, and will instead be dismissed as nefarious extremist propaganda.

If I go around saying "This belief is wrong! Hey everyone, did you know that this belief is wrong?" and it's a low-status belief, high-status people are likely to ask "What's the harm?"

Not really. It depends on the exact way the belief in question is perceived in high-status circles. In some cases, you'll win status points out of all proportion with the actual importance of the problem and without much scrutiny of the accuracy of your arguments (the phrase "raising awareness" comes to mind). In other cases, you won't register on high-status people's radar even if you have a solid case, simply because the issue doesn't happen to be a status-fertile cause. In yet other cases, it may happen that while a belief is low-status, it is also considered uncouth to attack it all-out; one is supposed to scoff at it in more subtle and oblique ways instead.

In response to Secure Your Beliefs
Comment author: Daniel_Burfoot 13 February 2011 04:19:11AM *  4 points [-]

That is why your rationality is my business.

You're preaching to the choir. The real question is: how are you going to compel to be rational who aren't otherwise inclined to do so? Demagoguery?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 13 February 2011 04:39:24AM *  11 points [-]

And an even more difficult question: it's easy to preach against those sorts of irrationality whose denunciation will win you status points in reputable, high-status circles -- but what about the irrationalities and delusions that are themselves a matter of consensus and strong moral feeling among high-status people? Who will have the courage to attack those with equal decisiveness and fervor?

In response to Secure Your Beliefs
Comment author: Vladimir_M 13 February 2011 04:24:09AM *  20 points [-]

lukeprog:

WhatsTheHarm.com collects incidents of harm from obvious products of epistemic negligence like AIDS denial, homeopathy, exorcism, and faith healing.

That is all very nice, but I notice that among the beliefs criticized on that website, there does not appear to be a single one that is nowadays widespread in reputable academic circles and other influential elite institutions, or that would enjoy such respect and high status that attacking it might be dangerous for one's reputation, career, or worse.

Therefore, the obvious question is: are we indeed lucky to live in a society whose intellectual elites and respectable shapers of public opinion harbor no significant dangerous false beliefs -- or are the authors of this website themselves in the business of perpetuating a harmful and irresponsible delusion, namely that when it comes to dangerous false beliefs, we have nothing to worry about except for these petty low-status superstitions?

(Not that there aren't people who are harmed by these petty superstitions, but compared to the delusions held by the elites in charge, it's like comparing the personal shortcomings of the passengers on the Titanic with the captain's delusions on the matters of navigation. Some perspective is definitely in order in each case.)

Comment author: CarlShulman 12 February 2011 02:10:28AM *  3 points [-]

Moreover, for individuals scoring in high percentiles, to which you probably belong if you find the stuff written on this blog interesting, there are strong diminishing returns to high scores even statistically.

This doesn't seem to be so up to at least the 1 in 10,000 level. However, I agree that the predictive power of theses tests is still small relative to the remaining sources of variation (although it is one which we are relatively good at measuring) and they shouldn't be over-weighted.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 12 February 2011 05:23:16AM 0 points [-]

Thanks for the link, I wasn't familiar with these results.

Comment author: Costanza 12 February 2011 02:11:52AM 1 point [-]

Strictly speaking, the weight of an individual can fluctuate even in the course of a day, due to the consumption or excretion of fluids. It can fluctuate more permanently when you lose or gain body mass in the form of fat or muscle.

I'm under the impression that, in contrast, measured I.Q. of an individual is supposed to stay more or less within the same approximate range throughout the course of that individual's life (with obvious caveats for brain damage, senility, and as you say, exceptional individuals at the extremes of the distributions).

Comment author: Vladimir_M 12 February 2011 05:17:29AM *  3 points [-]

From what I know, there are high correlations between an individual's IQ test scores at different times, especially in the short run. Depending on the study, it ends up being something like 0.95 in the short run and 0.7-0.9 between different ages (I'm just quoting rough ballpark figures from memory -- they of course differ between studies and age spans). Some impressively high correlations were found even in a study that compared test scores of a group of individuals at 11 and 77 years of age.

On the other hand, people can be coached to significantly improve their IQ test scores. At least so says Rushton, of all people.

Then of course, as with all issues where you might want to make some sense of what IQ scores exactly imply, the Flynn effect throws a wrench into any attempt to come up with a neat, plausible, and coherent theory.

But even regardless of all this, one should still not forget that the connection between IQ and any realistic measure of success is itself just probabilistic. This is especially true for high-scoring individuals: instead of worrying whether one's score is 120, 130, 140, or whatever, one would be better advised to worry about whether one is deficient in other factors important for success and accomplishment in life.

Comment author: Charlie_OConnor 11 February 2011 07:09:41AM 5 points [-]

Where can I get an IQ test? I am an adult and was never tested as a child. Searching google has only given me online tests. I want a professionally done test.

I considered myself intelligent, but some of the sequences/posts on this site are quite challenging for me. It has made me curious on exactly how intelligent I am. I don’t want to be too over or under confident when it comes to intelligence. I try to learn new things and that helps me find the limits of my intelligence, but I figure my IQ will also be interesting to know as well.

Thanks.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 12 February 2011 01:48:26AM *  2 points [-]

Note however that IQ is not a property of individuals measurable on an individual basis like, say, height or weight is. Its utility lies in its statistical power to predict the average performance of large groups of people. When it comes to testing a specific individual, except perhaps for the greatest extremes (like diagnosing mental retardation), the fact that you achieved a certain score gives only probabilistic information about you.

Moreover, for individuals scoring in high percentiles, to which you probably belong if you find the stuff written on this blog interesting, there are strong diminishing returns to high scores even statistically. It's like e.g. wondering about your height with regards to your basketball prospects: your potentials are indeed likely to be much greater if you're, say, 6'2" rather than 5'10", but if you already know that you're more than a few inches above average, the difference between, say, 6'9" and 6'5" won't matter anywhere as much.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 11 February 2011 05:24:50PM *  8 points [-]

Some linguistics nitpicks:

The greater monogenesis theory of all extant languages and cultures from a single distant historical proto-language is a matter of debate amongst linguistics, but the similarity in many low-level root words is far beyond chance.

If you mean the similarity between word roots on a world-wide scale, the answer is decisively no. Human language vocabularies are large enough that many seductive-looking similarities will necessarily exist by pure chance, and nothing more than that has ever been observed on a world-wide scale. Mark Rosenfelder has a good article dealing with this issue on his web pages.

In fact, the way human languages are known to change implies that common words inherited from a universal root language spoken many millenniums ago would not look at all the same today. It's a common misconception that there are some "basic" words that change more slowly than others, but in reality, the way it works is that the same phoneme changes the exact same way in all words, or at most depending on some simple rules about surrounding phonemes, with very few exceptions. So that "basic" words end up diverging like all others.

One confounding factor here is that because of quirks of child development, kids around the world start babbling with more or less the same meaningless sounds first, and enthusiastic parents and relatives often interpret this as referring to them and adopt these "words" themselves. For this reason, words for parents, grandparents, older siblings, etc. in languages all around the world are often derived from babbling sounds like "ma-ma," "ba-ba," "na-na," etc. but this again has nothing to do with a common ancestral language.

The restrained theory of a common root Proto-Indo-European language is near universally accepted.

It is universally accepted. The problem is understood well enough that figuring out whether a given language is IE is answerable with as high certainty as anything else in any science. (And it's been like that ever since mid-to-late 19th century.)

All of this divergence occurred on a timescale of five to six millenia.

That's actually doubtful. The order magnitude is in thousands of years, and it's clearly over ~4,000 years, but anything more than that is doubtful. (I'm pointing this out specifically because there are people who propose more precise numbers based on spurious methods.)

Generally speaking, the standard and well-substantiated methods in historical linguistics are capable of proving language relatedness with practically zero chance of false positives, but at the same time provide almost no information on the timing of their divergence. Even the lower bound on the age of proto-Into-European is based on the fact that we have written sources reaching almost ~3,000 years into the past for some of the branches.

Comment author: jamesnvc 11 February 2011 02:34:07AM 3 points [-]

I'd definitely be interested in this.

For of location, I'd put forward Molly Bloom's or O'Grady's, both around College and University.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 11 February 2011 04:42:59PM *  1 point [-]

I might drop by, work circumstances permitting.

Regarding the choice of pub, out of these two O'Grady's is a better option; Molly Bloom is a bigger dump, noisier, and with worse service. However, I'd recommend the Duke of York better than either of these. It's classier, more comfortable for sitting and talking, with about the same prices but better service, and in the same area but closer to the subway (it's just around the corner from the St. George subway stop exit on Bloor and Bedford.)

Comment author: false_vacuum 10 February 2011 04:56:01AM 1 point [-]

Yes, this seems plausible, and it gives a fascinating insight, for me, into how other people process language. I've been noticing lately how frequent wrong homophones are in writing; in fact I just encountered one--are for our--in a textbook I'm currently working through (Lawvere & Schanuel's Conceptual Mathematics). This is a type of mistake I can't imagine myself making. But if, for many people, the textual encoding is not maintained, in parallel with the audial, when spoken competence increases past some threshold, the phenomenon is explained.

What can be done to help correct this bug?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 10 February 2011 08:08:51PM 3 points [-]

I don't think it's a very pressing concern. Spelling errors impede understanding very rarely, and they don't lower your status as long as they plausibly look accidental.

Here's another related example I found fascinating. It was only recently that I realized that "rose" in its two different meanings (the flower and the past tense of "rise") is in fact pronounced the same by native speakers. Yet I somehow managed to register these pronunciations as totally different. When I introspected about it, I realized that my mind had them stored separately with a phonemic tonal contrast of a sort that doesn't exist in English at all but is common in my native language; I was even pronouncing them in this tonal way. God knows how many such things are still coloring my accent when speaking English.

Comment author: wedrifid 10 February 2011 10:25:46AM 0 points [-]

Ahh, wikipedia tells me a tuque is what we commonly referred to a beanie here. A good idea. Fairly individual specific, as you say. I'll definitely have to get a hat though. Are fedoras too overdone these days or could that work too?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 10 February 2011 07:45:19PM 0 points [-]

Actually, I meant wearing a beanie for a while to iron out your hair and make the overgrown parts stick out less conspicuously, not wearing it around to hide bad hair.

Fedoras can look cool, but like other uncommon headwear, it can be a major fail if it fits you less than perfectly. I suppose if you decide to wear it, you should also stick to the old custom that it's impolite to wear indoors, so I don't think it's a good option for hiding bad hair.

Comment author: wedrifid 09 February 2011 11:19:25AM 0 points [-]

I love 2, 7 and 9.

To everyone who's day this comment makes: you're welcome.

With a Bon Jovi hairstyle recommendation? You've definitely made mine. And it doesn't look like it would be too hard to grow out to that length either. Any suggestions on how to grow from short to medium length without it looking terrible in between?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 10 February 2011 10:08:40AM *  2 points [-]

Any suggestions on how to grow from short to medium length without it looking terrible in between?

When I'm overdue for a haircut, I find that wearing a tuque for a while makes it look significantly less bad. This might be highly individual-specific, though.

Comment author: HughRistik 09 February 2011 09:59:12AM *  5 points [-]

I don't think these photos make such a good case.

Then I think I failed to be clear about what case I was making with them. The point is that there are many ways for men to do hair that barbers don't support, and that barbers are not at the cutting edge of what is fashionable. I showed the photos to display some of the "design space" for men's hair that is kept off limits to them.

This can indeed be spectacularly successful if done with utmost competence and in a suitable context, but it's apt to backfire with an even more spectacular failure if any of these conditions are less than perfect.

I see the costs and benefits about differently. Peacocking can be super-powerful, and getting it wrong while learning isn't actually terribly costly, especially for those who are already low in social status and attractiveness. Of course, this depends on culture: some cultures punish male appearance nonconformism (particularly around gender) more harshly than others.

I'd say there's a more important general lesson here: just because high-status, sex-symbol men do something, it doesn't mean that it's wise for the average Joe to try imitating it.

True, but it's useful to understand the cultural schemas around masculinity. Once he does, then he can tap into them in more subtle ways.

You must learn to walk before trying to run

Yes. I wouldn't advise jumping straight to one of these hairstyles until you can put together the right sort of outfit to support it.

Which means that if you're not able to pull off a rock-solid and competent "conservative normal guy" image, you probably won't be able to pull off any of those more advanced peacocking/countersignaling strategies.

Putting together a strong normal guy image can quickly start overlapping with peacocking. If you can pick out good pieces that fit you, then you are practically peacocking already.

Normal guy looks just don't suit some guys very well, and developing a normal guy look isn't necessarily the best use of effort. In my case, even though I'm probably above average in looks, I just don't look very remarkable in jeans and a T-shirt, with <1 inch hair. Other guys with different builds would look much better in those clothes and hair. Eventually I realized that I wasn't going to beat guys at doing the normal guy look. So I started doing something more niche, and the attention I got skyrocketed.

I'm actually much better positioned to try a normal guy look now. In some ways, doing a normal guy look well is actually hard, because the options are so limited. There is a benefit to doing a crazy look, then incorporating elements of it backwards to spice up your normal look.

This is why modern pop-culture is highly confusing and misleading for shy and socially inept men who look for role-models.

That's true. And I probably traumatized some of those guys with the pictures I linked to. But those pictures demonstrate the end results of runaway sexual selection, and they need to understand what the playing field looks like.

There are few, if any examples of straightforward masculinity among the celebrities nowadays whose behavior and image would be a realistic direction for men like that; what they see instead is unfathomably complex and subtle counter-signaling and peacocking, which they can't possibly imitate with any success.

Unfortunately, Western middle-class "straightforward masculinity" has very little design space for hair. Rockstars and subcultural are making out like bandits in the unused design space.

While some of those hairstyles do seem like unfathomably complex signaling games, peacocking isn't all that they are about. They are also about culture, and subculture. The notion of short hair as "straightforward masculinity" is ethnocentric.

Even some of those seemingly crazy hairstyles are normal in some subcultures. In some cultures, dreads are "straightforward masculinity." In other subcultures, Jade Puget's hairstyle is "straightforward masculinity," even though it looks effeminate or gay to mainstream male observers. Mainstream heterosexual men often make fun of "hipster" and "emo" men, yet the joke is on them. While they snicker, the hipster and emo boys are getting with the cute hipster and emo girls, and have less competition in their niche.

The peacocking of rockstars only looks crazy and complex because typical Western middle-class heterosexual white men have been aesthetically straight-jacketed and lobotomized by their culture, and they don't even know it. It's understandable that in their straight-jacketed state, these men would benefit from models of aesthetically straight-jacketed masculinity. But I would like to see if the straight-jacket can be taken off, assuming that corporations, gender-typical heterosexual women, and men's own comfort zones will allow it.

Rockstar hair countersignals against current white middle-class Western masculinity, but it also speaks to how masculinity has been performed in the past, and how it could be performed in the future. Look at the mohawk, for instance. It's considered a shocking signal in mainstream culture now, but that's only because men have been forced to surrender it. Rockstars don't own the mohawk, unless normal guys let them. If you were an Iroquois Indian or Scythian warrior, a mohawk was part of your work attire.

That's why I think many men could find much more valuable inspiration in pre-1970s movies than in anything produced today.

For behavior, definitely. Movies provide horrible models of behavioral masculinity. Yet I wouldn't look to the past for hair, unless you are deliberately doing a retro look.

The prime example would be Beckham -- how much return does he get in terms of good looks with that elaborate fauxhawk relative to a simple buzz cut? Not much, I'd say, if any at all.

Not much for him, because he already good-looking and high status. But a guy other than Beckham could get significant returns.

Different hair length changes the apparent proportions of the head and face. This influences perceptions of masculinity/femininity, and perception of age. Hair long enough to frame the face changes the perception of facial structure. This is all design space that is thrown out with a buzz cut.

What looks good in those often looks much worse in real life, even if you take the huge effort to keep it picture-perfect at all times

That's true. But it can be better to have a haircut that looks awesome 50% of the time and crappy 50% of the time, rather than a haircut that looks bland 100% of the time.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 10 February 2011 09:58:13AM *  2 points [-]

Also, regarding this:

The peacocking of rockstars only looks crazy and complex because typical Western middle-class heterosexual white men have been aesthetically straight-jacketed and lobotomized by their culture, and they don't even know it. It's understandable that in their straight-jacketed state, these men would benefit from models of aesthetically straight-jacketed masculinity. But I would like to see if the straight-jacket can be taken off, assuming that corporations, gender-typical heterosexual women, and men's own comfort zones will allow it.

I think you're being much too idealistic about subcultures. Any subcultural or countercultural milieu will feature the same human universals that exist everywhere else, and will therefore impose its own status markers and standards of conformity no less strict and demanding than the mainstream society. (Of course, the mainstream can usually threaten more severe punishments for disobedience, but the loss of status among people whose opinion one cares about is a terrifying enough threat for anyone.)

What you see as escaping the straight-jacket is at best just a change of masters, not an escape into freedom. (With the exception of a small minority who find that their natural inclinations and abilities lend themselves to achieving high status in some particular milieu especially well, but even this works both ways.)

Mainstream heterosexual men often make fun of "hipster" and "emo" men, yet the joke is on them. While they snicker, the hipster and emo boys are getting with the cute hipster and emo girls, and have less competition in their niche.

Trouble is, the girls in various groups like those respond positively to the same essential traits in men as anywhere else. Whether you have a mainstream image or any particular subcultural image, it's basically orthogonal to how attractive you are to women. Now clearly, a given way of dress and behavior will be acceptable in one place and unacceptable in another, but chances are that if you adjust your dress and manners to a different milieu, the women there will find you about as attractive as those in the previous place found you with your previous image. That has at least been my experience, both personal and observational, and I've certainly changed my image and the circles I've hung out in a great deal through the years.

Comment author: HughRistik 09 February 2011 09:59:12AM *  5 points [-]

I don't think these photos make such a good case.

Then I think I failed to be clear about what case I was making with them. The point is that there are many ways for men to do hair that barbers don't support, and that barbers are not at the cutting edge of what is fashionable. I showed the photos to display some of the "design space" for men's hair that is kept off limits to them.

This can indeed be spectacularly successful if done with utmost competence and in a suitable context, but it's apt to backfire with an even more spectacular failure if any of these conditions are less than perfect.

I see the costs and benefits about differently. Peacocking can be super-powerful, and getting it wrong while learning isn't actually terribly costly, especially for those who are already low in social status and attractiveness. Of course, this depends on culture: some cultures punish male appearance nonconformism (particularly around gender) more harshly than others.

I'd say there's a more important general lesson here: just because high-status, sex-symbol men do something, it doesn't mean that it's wise for the average Joe to try imitating it.

True, but it's useful to understand the cultural schemas around masculinity. Once he does, then he can tap into them in more subtle ways.

You must learn to walk before trying to run

Yes. I wouldn't advise jumping straight to one of these hairstyles until you can put together the right sort of outfit to support it.

Which means that if you're not able to pull off a rock-solid and competent "conservative normal guy" image, you probably won't be able to pull off any of those more advanced peacocking/countersignaling strategies.

Putting together a strong normal guy image can quickly start overlapping with peacocking. If you can pick out good pieces that fit you, then you are practically peacocking already.

Normal guy looks just don't suit some guys very well, and developing a normal guy look isn't necessarily the best use of effort. In my case, even though I'm probably above average in looks, I just don't look very remarkable in jeans and a T-shirt, with <1 inch hair. Other guys with different builds would look much better in those clothes and hair. Eventually I realized that I wasn't going to beat guys at doing the normal guy look. So I started doing something more niche, and the attention I got skyrocketed.

I'm actually much better positioned to try a normal guy look now. In some ways, doing a normal guy look well is actually hard, because the options are so limited. There is a benefit to doing a crazy look, then incorporating elements of it backwards to spice up your normal look.

This is why modern pop-culture is highly confusing and misleading for shy and socially inept men who look for role-models.

That's true. And I probably traumatized some of those guys with the pictures I linked to. But those pictures demonstrate the end results of runaway sexual selection, and they need to understand what the playing field looks like.

There are few, if any examples of straightforward masculinity among the celebrities nowadays whose behavior and image would be a realistic direction for men like that; what they see instead is unfathomably complex and subtle counter-signaling and peacocking, which they can't possibly imitate with any success.

Unfortunately, Western middle-class "straightforward masculinity" has very little design space for hair. Rockstars and subcultural are making out like bandits in the unused design space.

While some of those hairstyles do seem like unfathomably complex signaling games, peacocking isn't all that they are about. They are also about culture, and subculture. The notion of short hair as "straightforward masculinity" is ethnocentric.

Even some of those seemingly crazy hairstyles are normal in some subcultures. In some cultures, dreads are "straightforward masculinity." In other subcultures, Jade Puget's hairstyle is "straightforward masculinity," even though it looks effeminate or gay to mainstream male observers. Mainstream heterosexual men often make fun of "hipster" and "emo" men, yet the joke is on them. While they snicker, the hipster and emo boys are getting with the cute hipster and emo girls, and have less competition in their niche.

The peacocking of rockstars only looks crazy and complex because typical Western middle-class heterosexual white men have been aesthetically straight-jacketed and lobotomized by their culture, and they don't even know it. It's understandable that in their straight-jacketed state, these men would benefit from models of aesthetically straight-jacketed masculinity. But I would like to see if the straight-jacket can be taken off, assuming that corporations, gender-typical heterosexual women, and men's own comfort zones will allow it.

Rockstar hair countersignals against current white middle-class Western masculinity, but it also speaks to how masculinity has been performed in the past, and how it could be performed in the future. Look at the mohawk, for instance. It's considered a shocking signal in mainstream culture now, but that's only because men have been forced to surrender it. Rockstars don't own the mohawk, unless normal guys let them. If you were an Iroquois Indian or Scythian warrior, a mohawk was part of your work attire.

That's why I think many men could find much more valuable inspiration in pre-1970s movies than in anything produced today.

For behavior, definitely. Movies provide horrible models of behavioral masculinity. Yet I wouldn't look to the past for hair, unless you are deliberately doing a retro look.

The prime example would be Beckham -- how much return does he get in terms of good looks with that elaborate fauxhawk relative to a simple buzz cut? Not much, I'd say, if any at all.

Not much for him, because he already good-looking and high status. But a guy other than Beckham could get significant returns.

Different hair length changes the apparent proportions of the head and face. This influences perceptions of masculinity/femininity, and perception of age. Hair long enough to frame the face changes the perception of facial structure. This is all design space that is thrown out with a buzz cut.

What looks good in those often looks much worse in real life, even if you take the huge effort to keep it picture-perfect at all times

That's true. But it can be better to have a haircut that looks awesome 50% of the time and crappy 50% of the time, rather than a haircut that looks bland 100% of the time.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 10 February 2011 09:21:37AM *  1 point [-]

I've thought about our disagreement, and I think there are several important points.

First, at the risk of sounding vain, it is possible that I'm biased because I'm handsome enough that I didn't have problems attracting attention even in the most misguided years of my youth. (My problem was that I'd usually be oblivious to indications of interest, or I'd sabotage myself by responding to them in naive and clumsy ways, not that I was invisible to girls.) It is possible that for less handsome men, being invisible in the crowd is a big enough obstacle that trying to break it by peacocking is a better option than I'd think.

Then, it also depends on what exactly your goal is. If you're striving to become a full-blown player -- which I never did, both because I was already a bit too old to start working on it when I realized that it's actually a feasible goal, and also because it doesn't suit me temperamentally -- then I suppose more extreme options like heavy peacocking become the order of the day. For less adventurous goals, however, I still think that working on a strong and solid "normal" image is overall a better option for most men.

I've already pointed out that if your face or head shape is not very handsome, you can significantly improve your looks with a suitably shaped haircut. But if you already look handsome with a buzz cut, there are rapidly diminishing returns to what you can do with your hair, if we consider it in terms of handsomeness rather than peacocking. (I hope it's clear what I mean by that distinction.)

Regarding various subcultural styles, I'll reply in a separate comment.

Otherwise, I agree that our age is probably too restrictive in what passes for mainstream respectable men's fashion, and has in fact been ever since the early-to-mid 19th century. I find the 18th century aristocratic men's fashion very appealing, and the 17th century Cavalier style even more.

Comment author: false_vacuum 09 February 2011 10:37:44AM 1 point [-]

as your spoken English gets better with practice, you're likely to start making more of such errors, not less.

This is fascinating. It's not at all clear to me why such a thing would happen. I can't think of anything in my own experience that seems analogous.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 09 February 2011 10:12:12PM *  7 points [-]

When you learn English mainly from written sources with little speaking practice (and I was an extreme example of that), you end up composing written English sentences in your head and reading them aloud when speaking (or just writing them down directly when typing). This makes your pronunciation awful and your speaking stilted and unnatural, but on the other hand, your mind categorizes differently spelled homophones as completely different entities, so there is almost zero chance of mixing them up.

In contrast, if you're a native speaker or otherwise a truly fluent speaker, you compose natural spoken English in your head and, so to say, dictate it to yourself when writing. This makes it easy to confuse homophones, since your mind emits words encoded as audial, not textual information, and you have to disambiguate spelling on the fly based on the context.

This is of course a simplified picture, but still a more or less correct one in my experience. And as your spoken English gets better, you start gradually moving from the first category to the second.

Comment author: Blueberry 09 February 2011 08:50:33AM 13 points [-]

This is actually implementation dependent. Though the most common implementation of a thermostat is just an on-off switch for the heater, it is possible to have a heater with multiple settings and a thermostat that selects higher heat settings for greater temperature differentials.

Also, turning the thermostat up extra-high means that you don't have to go back and make the temperature higher if your initial selection wasn't warm enough.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 09 February 2011 09:18:54PM *  46 points [-]

Even with an ordinary thermostat, cranking it up can be effective in some realistic situations. If some corners of the house take longer to heat up than the location of the thermostat, they'll reach the desired temperature faster if you let the thermostat itself and the rest of the house get a few degrees warmer first. Or to put it differently, scoffing at people who crank up the thermostat is justified only under the assumption that it measures the temperature of the whole house accurately, which is a pretty shaky assumption when you think about it.

As the moral of the story, even when your physics is guaranteed to be more accurate than folk physics, that's still not a reason to scoff at the conclusions of folk physics. The latter, bad as it is, has after all evolved for robust grappling with real-world problems, whereas any scientific model's connection with reality is delicately brittle.

That's an important lesson, generalizable to much more than just physics.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 09 February 2011 05:26:30AM 4 points [-]

Turning the thermostat up extra-high does not make it get warm faster.

Ok. I confess that this one more than any of the others makes me seriously worry about how good my theory of mind is. How do they think their heating systems work?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 09 February 2011 09:08:19AM 9 points [-]

Do you actually think a typical person has a coherent theory of how a heating system with a thermostat works?

It's a very human and intuitive way of thinking. People bundle together various things that seem like they should somehow be related, and assume that if something has a good or bad influence on one of these things, it must also influence other related things in the same direction. When you think about it, it's not a bad heuristic for dealing with a world too complex to understand with full accuracy.

Comment author: HughRistik 09 February 2011 06:24:04AM *  5 points [-]

A good barber knows not only what kind of haircuts look fashionable for men, but the also how to cut the hair so it's easy to maintain.

Barbers can help you look like a fashionable normal guy, but what's most likely to happen with a barber is that you come out looking like an average normal guy.

Here are a bunch of haircuts that your barber probably can't help you with. All these guys are very popular, and most of them are sex symbols.

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15

To everyone who's day this comment makes: you're welcome.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 09 February 2011 07:26:45AM *  7 points [-]

HughRistik:

Here are a bunch of haircuts that your barber probably can't help you with. All these guys are very popular, and most of them are sex symbols.

I don't think these photos make such a good case.

First and foremost, some of them are examples of extreme peacocking, or in case of that guy with dreadlocks, of extreme "I'm shabby but still high-status" countersignaling. This can indeed be spectacularly successful if done with utmost competence and in a suitable context, but it's apt to backfire with an even more spectacular failure if any of these conditions are less than perfect.

I'd say there's a more important general lesson here: just because high-status, sex-symbol men do something, it doesn't mean that it's wise for the average Joe to try imitating it. You must learn to walk before trying to run, which means that if you're not able to pull off a rock-solid and competent "conservative normal guy" image, you probably won't be able to pull off any of those more advanced peacocking/countersignaling strategies. (There are examples of men who can naturally do the latter but not the former, but it's very rare.)

This is why modern pop-culture is highly confusing and misleading for shy and socially inept men who look for role-models. There are few, if any examples of straightforward masculinity among the celebrities nowadays whose behavior and image would be a realistic direction for men like that; what they see instead is unfathomably complex and subtle counter-signaling and peacocking, which they can't possibly imitate with any success. That's why I think many men could find much more valuable inspiration in pre-1970s movies than in anything produced today.

(Also, we can compare some of these guys to what they look like with much simpler haircuts. The prime example would be Beckham -- how much return does he get in terms of good looks with that elaborate fauxhawk relative to a simple buzz cut? Not much, I'd say, if any at all. Finally, some of these are professionally done promotional photos. What looks good in those often looks much worse in real life, even if you take the huge effort to keep it picture-perfect at all times.)

Comment author: HughRistik 09 February 2011 05:20:21AM *  2 points [-]

Also, for men with a handsome face and a nicely shaped head, spending resources on an elaborate haircut is a complete waste -- a simple very short cut or even a buzz-cut will look as good as anything else.

If you are doing a normal guy look, sure. But if you want to do something crazier or more subcultural, then ditch the barber.

One of the simplest ways a guy can increase the amount of sexual attention he gets is to get a cool haircut (i.e. not a normal guy barber haircut).

Very expensive, elaborate, and high-maintenance cuts are likely a waste in any case.

There are costs, but in some cultures there are big benefits. Hair is an important signaling device. The signal can be costly... and that's part of the point. It's really hard to go wrong having awesome hair. Maintenance is a pain, but if you know what you're doing, it's not so bad.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 09 February 2011 06:35:00AM *  3 points [-]

HughRistik:

It's really hard to go wrong having awesome hair.

Actually, I disagree, unless you take this in a tautological sense. There are several important points here.

First, a "crazier and more subcultural" look is essentially a form of peacocking. Like all peacocking, it can be extremely effective, but it's difficult to pull off competently and tends to backfire badly if done in a less than stellar way. So I definitely wouldn't recommend it to a typical guy, who almost certainly has much more advisable options than attempting peacocking.

Even attempting a more conventional elaborate hairstyle can backfire. You know when a man tries dressing sharply but instead of looking sharp ends up projecting that bad "I'm trying too hard" look? (I don't have in mind being badly dressed by any clear standard, but rather giving off that vague impression that it's not his natural image, and it just doesn't fit him in some hard-to-describe way.) My impression is that it's even easier to fail in a similar way by attempting a sophisticated haircut.

That said, as I already pointed out, if you don't have a nicely shaped skull and a handsome face, a competently chosen and executed haircut can significantly improve your looks, while a really bad hairstyle can make any man look like a dork. Otherwise, however, I have the impression that men's efforts put in hairstyle rapidly hit diminishing returns, except perhaps in a peacocking context. Certainly it seems to me that countless other aspects of looks and behavior are far more important outside of these basic limits.

What apparent evidence I've seen to the contrary can all be explained by confounding factors, i.e. it's about men who have self-improved in other more important ways along with changing their hairstyle. (Of course, like any other change, it can be effective via "inner game," i.e. if it makes you genuinely feel better about yourself, it will likely change your outside behavior for the better, regardless of any immediate effect on your looks.)

Comment author: sfb 09 February 2011 06:11:53AM 0 points [-]

The trouble is, you can burn a significant amount of energy by physical effort only if you're in a great shape to begin with; otherwise, you can exert yourself for hours and still burn what amounts to (literally) just three or four bites of food.

Why does exercising when unfit burn fewer calories? Is it because you cannot exercise as intensely?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 09 February 2011 06:25:21AM 2 points [-]

sfb:

Why does exercising when unfit burn fewer calories? Is it because you cannot exercise as intensely?

Pretty much, both when it comes to the maximum power you can exert and the time you can sustain it. To take a very extreme example, Michael Phelps can exercise intensely enough to burn almost 10,000 calories in a few hours every day (of course, there's a large genetic component to it). An average couch potato would likely collapse before managing to burn the equivalent of a single Starbucks muffin in a stretch.

Comment author: janos 09 February 2011 04:57:01AM 2 points [-]

But I drink orange juice with pulp; then the fiber is no longer absent, though I guess it's reduced. The vitamins and minerals are still present, though, aren't they?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 09 February 2011 05:08:43AM *  1 point [-]

You still get an enormous amount of sugar, with or without the pulp.

Regarding the vitamins and minerals, my understanding is that you need a certain amount of each of those to avoid various nasty and fatal diseases, and an amount over a certain limit can be poisonous, but there isn't any real evidence that anything in-between makes a difference. From what I understand, it also requires a very extreme diet (by modern developed world standards) to develop provably harmful micronutrient deficiencies.

(One exception might be vitamin D if the winters are especially dark and cold where you live, but you won't get that one from fruit juice.)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 09 February 2011 04:49:04AM *  5 points [-]

Here are some things I was ignorant about until a few years ago, when I realized I'd have to lose a few pounds or buy a new set of pants, which was followed by some successful self-experimentation.

Unless you consciously discipline yourself, and unless you're extremely athletic or have unusually low appetite, you'll end up consuming way more calories than you spend. It depends on your metabolism whether these will end up stored as fat, and in what proportion. For many people, this proportion is near zero, but only until some point in life. For me, this point came sometime in my late twenties.

One wrong-headed belief many people have is that they'll lose weight just by exercising. The trouble is, you can burn a significant amount of energy by physical effort only if you're in a great shape to begin with; otherwise, you can exert yourself for hours and still burn what amounts to (literally) just three or four bites of food. The key is to figure out a regime of exercise that makes you eat less, not more, which I managed; I'm not sure if this is possible for everyone, though.

There are insane amounts of sugar in almost any sweet-tasting drink, more insane than most people perceive them to be even if they've read the figures on the labels. (I don't really perceive those awful artificial sweeteners as "sweet.") The pictures on sugarstacks.com are worth checking out. One would do well to develop a feeling of disgust towards anything that's liquid and sweet-tasting. All this holds even for the hip and supposedly healthy pure fruit juices.

Carbonated water can be a fairly satisfying zero-calorie substitute for sweet drinks and beer. Try looking for Eastern European brands that are sold in ethnic deli stores. They're far superior to anything mass-marketed in North America.

Losing even a modest amount of weight can dramatically lower your alcohol tolerance. After losing something like 11-12 pounds, I realized that it took about half as much booze as before to get me drunk, and caused more severe hangovers. (Some of that was also due to less drinking in general during these months, but this can't possibly account for the whole effect.)

(This one I'd known even earlier.) Chin-ups are by far the most cost-effective way of working out for people with very little time and/or willpower. Just a doing a few sets every day every now and then while you're going around the house is enough to see rapid results. Again, this might be a genetic quirk of mine, not a universal law.

Comment author: false_vacuum 09 February 2011 02:06:11AM *  1 point [-]

English speakers ought to know that its is the possessive adjective and it's is the contraction for 'it is'. It drives me crazy when people use it's to mean its, and I do not understand why they do it. Do people not learn how to write by reading? (I certainly did, and I don't see how else you could do it, but I realise I'm somewhat abnormal.) Or is the incorrect use of it's so ubiquitous now that even if people learn to write by reading, unless they read mostly stuff more than ten years old they aren't being exposed to a data set from which they can infer the correct rule? Or is it more a question of being published on paper than of age? And incidentally, does anyone know if schools have stopped teaching this and similar rules? (And if so, why?)

ETA: At least two people downvoted this, so perhaps I should make the following two points more explicit.

  1. My comment was not intended to be censorious in tone (and rereading it I still don't think it is). The bulk of what I wrote takes the form of wondering about the cause of this, to me particularly irritating, phenomenon. (Thanks to Vladimir M, I am a little less confused now.)

  2. The reason why I find the phenomenon so irritating is primarily that I value my ability to effortlessly produce correct grammar, spelling, etc., and seeing the same mistake consistently a large enough fraction of the time bollixes up my machinery, tending to decrease the effortlessness with which I can perform correctly. Also, I fear that others are subject to the same effect, and that there could be a threshold of criticality, and even that that threshold may already have been reached. So it's a (fairly minor) group rationality issue.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 09 February 2011 03:54:35AM *  3 points [-]

It's (heh) usually a matter of accidental error, not ignorance, at least in my experience. When writing fast, it's easy to substitute a differently spelled homophone by accident.

The funny thing when you're a non-native English speaker who learned the language mostly from reading is that as your spoken English gets better with practice, you're likely to start making more of such errors, not less.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 08 February 2011 06:17:33AM 1 point [-]

It depends on the environment. For some things one just asks explicitly for less change. This works well with taxis. (Say there's an 7$ taxi ride, give a $10 and ask for $1 back). Another option in many contexts is to pay with the tip included and have it included in a way that shows it is obviously a tip based on the denominations in question (for example, if our taxi cost $9 and you hand them $11.25 it is obvious that you intended to tip $2.25)

Things to avoid: Do not give a large bill and say "keep the change" even if this is makes a generous tip or makes precisely the tip you want to give. The standard connotations of this are all negative (including but not limited to that you are rich, can't be bothered to think about change, can't be bothered to think about what is the right size tip, and don't really care much about the person you are tipping). If you only have a single bill it is better to tip less and get some small amount of change back than to say "keep the change." Another related thing to avoid is that when one is asking back for a specific amount of change, some people get annoyed if you ask for bills in specific denominations or specific coins. This seems to vary more by area and specific individual but it seems better to just avoid as an issue.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 09 February 2011 01:05:52AM *  4 points [-]

JoshuaZ:

Things to avoid: Do not give a large bill and say "keep the change" even if this is makes a generous tip or makes precisely the tip you want to give.

What is the exact source of this information? In a few years of living in (Anglophone) Canada, I've never heard of this. In fact, once you get the bill and put the money on the table, the waiter will often ask if you need any change. (Especially if the bill comes in that small folder and you close it over the money so he can't see how much you left when taking it.)

Comment author: BenLowell 08 February 2011 05:44:52AM 6 points [-]

Personal hygiene. The internet has eluded me on what is the best method for washing your body. I've always put soap on a washcloth and used that to scrub myself. I used to get really dry skin and I don't know if this was from my method. It seems like there are lots of different techniques---sponges, washcloths, scrubbers, body wash, lotions. What do they do?

How do you keep hair looking nice? Sometimes I use a comb, but it still goes all over the place. I usually keep my hair short to avoid dealing with this.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 08 February 2011 10:36:35PM *  3 points [-]

Regarding haircuts for men: the best way in my experience is to become a regular at a cheap place that's been in business for a long time. You'll likely get much better service than a random customer.

Also, for men with a handsome face and a nicely shaped head, spending resources on an elaborate haircut is a complete waste -- a simple very short cut or even a buzz-cut will look as good as anything else. The only important thing is that it's not strikingly uneven and flawed. Otherwise, a well selected and executed haircut can make you look more handsome, but finding the cost-benefit optimum here is very difficult and individual-specific.

Very expensive, elaborate, and high-maintenance cuts are likely a waste in any case. Generally, a big problem with all short hairstyles is that they become visibly uglier due to hair growth after only a week or two, which makes elaborate cuts even less cost-effective.

Finally, if you're losing hair visibly, a shaved head is definitely the way to go. Just make sure you don't look too scrawny.

Comment author: Matt_Duing 08 February 2011 07:49:07PM 1 point [-]

Khan Academy also has a sequence of videos on stock market basics.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 08 February 2011 09:51:56PM *  2 points [-]

The idea of educational videos on "stock market basics" for amateurs strikes me as about equally sensible as having educational videos for amateurs on abdominal surgery. Unless of course these videos limit themselves to explaining the concept of weak EMH, but somehow I doubt it.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 06 February 2011 06:40:01PM *  10 points [-]

I don't think your approach is good. From what I see, you would like to discuss this topic from a practical self-improvement perspective. But there are already lots of places on the web that offer much better opportunities for such discussions than LW ever could, so I see no point at all in seeking them here.

What is, in my view, really interesting in this topic from the perspective of the LW mission statement is the possibility of distilling more general insight about human thought and behavior. As I wrote in a recent comment, this topic is unique in that it provides a no-nonsense dissection of a large and important area of human social interaction with a level of detail, accuracy, and depth that no other approach has managed to reach. This is a true intellectual breakthrough in an area that has otherwise been hopelessly fruitless, confused, and overburdened with nonsense and bullshit. For people who are able and wiling to discuss it in an unbiased and intelligent way, this should open a floodgate of first-rate insight, much of it directly relevant for the essential questions about the ways human minds function realistically.

So, if you'd like to open discussions of this topic on LW, I'd suggest this latter angle: what can we learn about human minds and human behavior in general by applying insights gathered from it? That is where the real challenge and the real potential for insight is.

In response to comment by Louie on Optimal Employment
Comment author: datadataeverywhere 01 February 2011 12:46:10AM *  11 points [-]

I had a fairly similar response. I spent $900/mo. on rent when I was making $33k, and I am now spending $600/mo. while making $92k. Obviously whether or not someone spends a constant fraction of their income on housing is an individual decision, just as whether or not someone heads to Australia is.

I'm actually really shocked that you spent more than 95% of a $100k+ income. Even on a $24k student salary I managed to save around $6k/yr., and indulging in all the luxuries I care for I spend less than 35% of my current after-tax pay. I don't feel like I've ever had to "micromanage" my finances or spend more than a few extra minutes a week to do this.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 02 February 2011 09:43:32PM *  7 points [-]

datadataeverywhere:

Even on a $24k student salary I managed to save around $6k/yr., and indulging in all the luxuries I care for I spend less than 35% of my current after-tax pay. I don't feel like I've ever had to "micromanage" my finances or spend more than a few extra minutes a week to do this.

The trouble is that students (including graduate students) have ways to live extremely cheaply while maintaining reasonably high status. For people who are beyond that stage in life, either because they're too old or because they have families, there are no such options.

As a general rule, unless you're living in the middle of nowhere, housing costs are very high in all places nice enough to provide a respectable middle class environment for raising kids. Even if you don't have kids, pursuing cheap living options beyond a certain age tends to signal low class and/or disreputability.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 29 January 2011 04:45:20PM *  1 point [-]

Or it might be that he has actually thought about these matters, and honestly found them confusing.

Possible but not likely. He seems to not be confused about the genuinely confusing aspects but more confused about the fact that he wants his religion to be true.

Among the contemporary high-status intellectuals who would enthusiastically affirm their belief in the theory of evolution and condemn all disbelievers in it, how many have a real understanding of it, and how many are just going along with the mainstream without any real understanding of the matter? I'

Oh certainly quite a lot. (In fact I just had a discussion with someone a few days ago who was bashing creationism and after a few minutes of discussion it was clear that the person had close to zero understanding of how evolution worked.)

Darwinian evolution is a very difficult subject, which requires a great deal of counterintuitive thinking to grasp with any degree of accuracy. Smart and well-informed people who oppose it often have interesting arguments that deserve a serious refutation rather than sneering.

This I disagree with. Smart people often have superficially plausible arguments often connected to their lack of actual understanding or investigation and religious motivation. The set of people who are both smart and well-informed and have a problem with evolution is tiny. This sort of claim would have been valid in the 1920s or 1930s or maybe even a bit later than that. But at this point evolution is understood well enough that failure to understand it reflects one's own ignorance or cognitive biases more than it says anything else.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 02 February 2011 09:06:49PM *  5 points [-]

JoshuaZ:

This I disagree with. Smart people often have superficially plausible arguments often connected to their lack of actual understanding or investigation and religious motivation. The set of people who are both smart and well-informed and have a problem with evolution is tiny.

The number of such people is indeed small, but they do exist. The point I'm driving at is that although their ultimate conclusion that Darwinism is false reflects their cognitive biases, typically due to religious motivation, the objections they raise in the process are sometimes not at all ignorant and superficial. Unlike the usual canards and fallacies put forth by run-of-the-mill creationists, sometimes they indeed strike at the heart of things that are still a matter of controversy, confusion, and enigma even among evolutionary biologists. (Hence my analogy with Einstein's 1930s attempts to refute quantum theory.)

This sort of claim would have been valid in the 1920s or 1930s or maybe even a bit later than that. But at this point evolution is understood well enough that failure to understand it reflects one's own ignorance or cognitive biases more than it says anything else.

The very basic ideas between evolution are indeed understood very well nowadays, but as soon as we get into more complex and more concrete issues, often a great deal of controversy and confusion persists even among experts in evolutionary biology. Just think of all the controversies about punctuated equilibrium vs. gradualism, spandrels vs. "Panglossian" adaptationism, the existence and extent of group selection, the epistemological soundness of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, all the numerous case studies where it can be difficult to establish whether a plausible-looking evolutionary explanation is a real insight or a just-so story, etc., etc. Even the ways in which the very basic principles of Darwinism can be validly formulated are a matter of some controversy (witness the arguments over whether the full-blown Dawkinsian gene-centric formulation is valid and complete).

In this situation, one can pose many questions that will get contradictory and confused answers from the experts, and sometimes the only honest answer will be "we have no idea." Of course, it is fallacious to use this to conclude that the very basics of evolution are false. However, there are some smart and well informed people who derive this invalid conclusion, and even though the conclusion itself is biased, it's by no means justified to dismiss their entire arguments as ignorant and uninteresting without hearing. (And however biased and misguided they are, they are still, in my opinion, committing lesser intellectual sins than people who adopt belief in evolution on pure authority and without any real understanding, especially when they use it as a status marker or ideological weapon.)

Comment author: JoshuaZ 28 January 2011 01:54:42AM 1 point [-]

BTW, people do realize that this guy wasn't himself a creationist. He was simply willing to tolerate creationism.

That's misleading. He claims not to be a Young Earth Creatonist. but he respects "people who hold this view because they are strongly committed to the Bible" (see his own website here) and he notes that that view clashes with science. However, he is careful to say that he prefers labeling that view as YECism and apparently self-identifies as a creationist.

Moreover, some of his views are unambiguously anti-evolution, and he has repeatedly cited all sorts of borderline nonsense about biological matters written by creationists and ID-proponents.

Overall, the impression I get of him, especially from this interview is that he's either mendacious or very confused. I suspect the second. He seems to be a textbook case of cognitive dissonance in action.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 29 January 2011 08:32:43AM *  8 points [-]

JoshuaZ:

Overall, the impression I get of him, especially from this interview is that he's either mendacious or very confused. I suspect the second. He seems to be a textbook case of cognitive dissonance in action.

Or it might be that he has actually thought about these matters, and honestly found them confusing.

Among the contemporary high-status intellectuals who would enthusiastically affirm their belief in the theory of evolution and condemn all disbelievers in it, how many have a real understanding of it, and how many are just going along with the mainstream without any real understanding of the matter? I'd say the former group includes the actual evolutionary biologists (obviously), and also a lot of people who are literate in hard sciences and characterized by broad intellectual curiosity, but almost nobody outside of these categories -- which account for only a small minority of modern academics, and an even tinier minority of the respectable intellectual classes overall. The rest would have no problem denouncing evolution in the same terms as the most fervent creationists if it just happened to become a high status marker tomorrow; for them it would require no greater intellectual adjustment than adapting to a new fashion in hairstyles.

Darwinian evolution is a very difficult subject, which requires a great deal of counterintuitive thinking to grasp with any degree of accuracy. Smart and well-informed people who oppose it often have interesting arguments that deserve a serious refutation rather than sneering. To make a historical analogy, it's as if someone sneered at Einsten's 1930s arguments against quantum theory -- some of them were indeed a product of confusion and have been decisively refuted since, but mindlessly sneering at them is not a way to prove oneself an intellectual superior of Einstein.

Comment author: [deleted] 27 January 2011 02:17:07PM *  18 points [-]

I disagree with Dawkins on this.

A guy who goes around talking about creationism in public, and wants to be an astronomer, either lacks common sense or wants to use the university as a platform for ideology. Those are bad signs in a job candidate.

But of all the crazy things a potential employee could believe, religious beliefs are the most likely to coexist with professional competence. Religion is usually instilled in childhood and linked up with a child's first introduction to morality; people frequently compartmentalize religious beliefs and go on to develop genuine real-world skills. In other words, a religious belief tells you a lot about an individual's upbringing, a little about his character, and not much about his intellect. (Robert Aumann is everyone's favorite religious-but-brilliant guy around here; but the ranks of mathematicians, at least, are full of Orthodox Jews who do excellent work while holding lots of plainly false beliefs. And Ramanujan was a believing Hindu. It's not rare at all.)

By contrast, a belief that the earth is flat tells you nothing about the individual's upbringing and a whole lot about his character and intellect -- he wasn't under thousands of years of pressure to believe bullshit, he came up with it on his own.

Dawkins wants to bite the whole bullet and actively encourage employers to refuse to hire people who have ridiculous beliefs, on the grounds that one stupid belief indicates bad character or unfitness for the job. He believes in judging people holistically. But think about what that means if it's extended beyond religion. Is it professional behavior to reject job applicants for their politics? Is it smart to reject a job applicant because she believes the Singularity is coming, or believes in polyamory, or believes that humans should colonize space one day, or wants to be cryo-preserved?

Some employers already do judge the "whole person," and to a greater or lesser degree reject people for private beliefs and life choices that are tangiential to job performance. Some industries care much more about demonstrated competence and less about whether you're weird in private life. I have a guess as to which hiring style actually gets more able employees.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 27 January 2011 07:22:12PM *  11 points [-]

It seems clear to me that this is matter of status and reputation, not competence.

One of the worst nightmares of every university department is that they might let in someone smart and capable who is however concealing some seriously disreputable beliefs -- until the day he gets tenure and starts using the prestige and resources of this position for voicing them. Since academia are largely in the business of selling status and reputation, this is clearly an extremely serious threat, and from this perspective it's imperative for them to obsessively screen tenure-track job applicants and promotion candidates for even the slightest sign of disreputable ideas, whether or not related to their area of research.

In my opinion, this is a much more important issue than any considerations about whether and how much various kinds of delusional beliefs are indicative of technical incompetence and flaws of character. Indeed, in practice universities have no problem hiring academics with delusional beliefs of high-status sorts as long as they have the necessary technical competence.

(Of course, in some areas the academic mainstream itself consists largely of high-status delusional ideas, so espousing them may actually be a technical job requirement.)

Comment author: fiddlemath 27 January 2011 05:46:23PM 2 points [-]

Yes, but unfortunately not in a form that could be presented convincingly in a blog comment.

Please try? If not in a blog comment, maybe a top-level post or a discussion post - or, if you think LW would react badly to the topic, in a blog post somewhere else, with a link?

I ask for two reasons: a) I'd like to be a little more certain that there's truth in PUA before I incorporate yet another heresy into my worldview, and b) for your own sake, it's immensely clarifying to reify any "mass of observation" into explicit claims with explicit accounts of your evidence. I've found (b) immensely helpful before; it's helped my clear away cant that I didn't know I labored under.

In fact, I suspect "this is a bad way to express my knowledge" may be a mental stop sign here, as I know it's been for me in the past. Similarly, "This summarizes my experience," full stop. It's hard to argue with, so it's hard to make clear in your own head.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 27 January 2011 06:34:45PM *  2 points [-]

b) for your own sake, it's immensely clarifying to reify any "mass of observation" into explicit claims with explicit accounts of your evidence. I've found (b) immensely helpful before; it's helped my clear away cant that I didn't know I labored under

I agree. However, the problem is that for reasons you'll probably understand, I'm not sure if I want to write too much about my personal life in public comments on the internet. It's very hard to write about such things without letting into the public more information than is desirable or prudent.

Fortunately, I am not the only source on this topic. I recommend that you look at the comments left in this thread (and many other ones you'll easily find by googling) by the commenter HughRistik. He has much more expertise than me in this area and has written a great many lengthy comments about it, all very well written and argued.

Comment author: Emile 24 January 2011 11:28:45AM 1 point [-]

Is there any account of things you'd recommend for curious western readers? Either written by you in the comments here (I haven't been obsessively reading all comments here), or somewhere else.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 26 January 2011 07:12:37PM *  2 points [-]

For someone interested in this topic, I would first recommend making sure to gain an accurate understanding of the general historical framework in which this and other modern-era European ethnic and ideological conflicts have occurred. Without that, one is likely to get lost in the flood of complicated details and confused by the various parties' contradicting attempts to present their case as favorably as possible (or worse, successfully propagandized by some of them).

The ex-Yugoslav wars were, in my view, not a unique grand event that by itself decisively shaped history, like e.g. the world wars were, but rather just another instance of wider phenomena that have manifested themselves in many other places and times. Therefore, in my opinion, an interested reader should approach this topic by first gaining general insights about the origins and development of democratic and nationalistic ideologies in Europe in recent centuries, then studying the pre-1990 historical background of the ex-Yugoslav peoples, and only then getting into the concrete details of what happened in the 1990s. In my opinion, at each step a correct grasp of generalities, even if vague, is much more valuable than knowledge of details.

I'm not familiar with the academic sources on ex-Yugoslav wars, but for a detailed factual account, the (English) Wikipedia pages are generally not bad.

Comment author: [deleted] 25 January 2011 05:02:53PM 14 points [-]

so the modern respectable opinion, even in venues like LW, is appalled at the idea that these aspects of human life -- which are in our society treated with an extreme level of both idealization and ideologization -- can be analyzed in such an undignified and desecrating but nevertheless correct way.

This idea -- that everyone skeptical of PUA is simply too prudish to handle the truth -- sounds like a self-flattering way to avoid engaging with critics on a substantive level. I haven't seen a single comment here that can be accurately described as "appalled at the idea that these aspects of human life...can be analyzed." By contrast, many of the comments that raise some criticism of PUA, or simply register skepticism, start by ceding that skeptic can see helpful or useful aspects to the techniques.

However, PUA is not settled science, and the idea that the simplified evopsych theories behind PUA represent incontrovertible and unassailable truth -- that's a statement of faith, not reason.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 25 January 2011 11:59:06PM *  -2 points [-]

I think "prudish" is a completely wrong characterization of the problem here. The idea that this aspect of human life is surrounded by some sacred mystery and that it works (or could or should work) according to some idealized principles, as well as the tendency to instantly sniff out and be struck by the ideological implications (intended or not) of people's expressed opinions about it, are not at all limited to people who could be described as "prudish" in any meaningful way.

Now, of course that such biases will usually not manifest themselves in a transparent way, especially not in a place like this. Rather, they take the form of biased treatment of evidence, judging people's attitudes and behavior with unusual and inconsistent ethical standards, turning up one's sensitivity to offense, etc., etc. For a lot of evidence of these phenomena, see the numerous discussions in which the commenter HughRistik, who has a particular interest and expertise in this area, has had to deal with them. (He writes with great clarity and invariably treats his interlocutors with saintly patience and kindness, and these biases are thus especially apparent in his discussions.)

Also, regarding the folk evo-psych theories often heard in this context, I agree that they are more often than not just idle speculation; in fact, I don't have very high opinion even about much of the academic evolutionary psychology. I am much more interested in first establishing an accurate phenomenological view of things before moving on to any such speculation.

Comment author: [deleted] 25 January 2011 05:40:37PM 2 points [-]

No, that's not what I had in mind. (And how on Earth did you get from the topic of self-help to that? Does my writing really evoke such strong stereotypical associations with those dark corners of the web?)

I wasn't the only one. But I apologize for misreading you.

I jumped there from the line "there are some quite ugly truths which I'd bet these books don't say, for example how depressingly little you can do beyond the limits imposed by heredity." The HBD crowd talks a lot about "ugly truths" involving "the limits imposed by heredity," too. I admit there's not much connection to self-help, although I'm moderately confident that a real HBD proponent would probably manufacture one if asked.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 25 January 2011 11:21:50PM *  4 points [-]

No need to apologize; in retrospect it's clear to me how you could have made that association. "HBD" (a term which I find quite silly) is not among my intellectual leitmotifs. In fact, I'm still not sure what to think of these controversies.

That said, however dangerous and incendiary this topic might be in the mainstream, on LW it's rarely approached but not at all problematic in the sense of inflaming passions and destroying discourse. Those few times I've seen it raised here, the discussion was entirely polite, knowledgeable, and without moral condemnations and protestations of offense. What exactly determines the patterns of dangerous discourse-breaking topics on LW and makes them different from the mainstream is a quite fascinating question, in my view.

Comment author: R3dpill 24 January 2011 08:43:10PM 0 points [-]

You Speak much truth.

It is really a gross failure if LW that we do not allow the elephant to be discussed. No matter how evil one thinks it is, surely it is worth analyzing thoroughly just as an example of successful instrumental rationality.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 25 January 2011 02:58:39AM *  3 points [-]

I find this topic fascinating not only because of its practical utility, but also because it presents a dissection of complex human social interactions in a way that's uniquely suitable for study and reaching genuine and reliable insight. Nothing even remotely like that, to my knowledge, has ever come out of any other attempt to study human social behavior.

Alas, the dissection analogy can be extended to people's reactions to it. Just like the prevailing religious opinion in ancient times was appalled at the idea of desecrating dead bodies even for the good of science, so the modern respectable opinion, even in venues like LW, is appalled at the idea that these aspects of human life -- which are in our society treated with an extreme level of both idealization and ideologization -- can be analyzed in such an undignified and desecrating but nevertheless correct way.

Comment author: [deleted] 24 January 2011 04:09:17PM 22 points [-]

Um... hinting about how your opinions are too dark and dreadful to be posted publicly will make people assume that your opinions are whatever they imagine to be incredibly dark and dreadful. This is not a great communication strategy.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 24 January 2011 05:09:58PM *  3 points [-]

Well, there's a significant difference between "too sensitive and potentially offensive to describe with a few casual words" and "too dark and dreadful to be posted publicly." I think some other factors also played an important part in the association, especially since I don't even see how these things could be plausibly connected to the topic at hand in the given context.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 24 January 2011 10:03:58AM *  8 points [-]

As one data point, I'm allergic to almost every aspect of the modern American nerd culture, but I don't find it problematic here because I simply tune out any manifestations of it. However, I have an unusual level of ability and inclination to filter out the elements I dislike and concentrate on the interesting stuff whenever I find some venue offering original perspective and insight. I'm sure lots of people find such things more actively repulsive.

Comment author: [deleted] 22 January 2011 11:15:16AM *  11 points [-]

Yet if they are nevertheless afraid to touch topics like politics where these biases and delusions are particularly severe and widespread, or worse, if discussions of such topics here tend to display the same problems as elsewhere, one must ask -- what good is all this "rationality" then?

Delusions that are truly widely held and not merely believed to be widely held are far too dangerous to attack. There are sociopolitical Eldritch Abominations that it would serve LW well to stay well clear of and perhaps even pretend they don't exist for the time being. People here could loose jobs, not just friends or family and the forum where discussion would take place would be routinely attacked. Worse it would attract all the contrariness who happen to agree with the particular stance, but may not be very inclined towards participating in a rationalist community.

There is no sense in having someone lower a truck on you so you can try to lift it to demonstrate your dedication to making the gym hours spent count for something.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Politics is a fact of life
Comment author: Vladimir_M 24 January 2011 09:48:44AM *  7 points [-]

Konkvistador:

Delusions that are truly widely held and not merely believed to be widely held are far too dangerous to attack.

I don't think that's true as a general rule. Clearly, modern Western society has its own truly dangerous taboos, and attacking those head-on would indeed be stupid, for all the reasons you have listed. However, there are many topics where the modern public opinion is widely biased and delusional that can nevertheless be discussed safely without raising any dangerous red flags, especially if a high standard of discourse is maintained (which has the additional benefit of keeping away the swarms of uninteresting and status-lowering-by-association intruders).

There is no sense in having someone lower a truck on you so you can try to lift it to demonstrate your dedication to making the gym hours spent count for something.

That's undoubtedly true, when it comes to truly dangerous topics. The real problem, however, is that if the supposedly high level of "rationality" and epistemic skill claimed by so many people here can't be put to use to clear up even perfectly safe topics muddled by political/ideological biases and delusions, that in my view casts the same doubt on the benefits of all this rationality stuff as the refusal or inability to do a few pushups would do for the gym.

Comment author: multifoliaterose 22 January 2011 06:46:39AM 2 points [-]

Specifically, it was the fact that my family members had this exact attitude in ex-Yugoslavia circa 1991 that caused a lot of avoidable trouble for us (which some other people I know indeed avoided thanks to their better insight into the situation).

Elsewhere you said:

I lived through a time and place -- late 1980s and early 1990s in ex-Yugoslavia -- where most people were blissfully unaware of the storm that was just beyond the horizon, even though any cool-headed objective observer should have been able to foresee it.

I'd be interested in hearing more about this sometime; all I know is the western media depictions of the Yugoslav wars, it would be interesting to know how things looked from the inside preceding them.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 24 January 2011 09:12:28AM 0 points [-]

Well, I could write a lot about it, but I think I've underscored the aspects relevant for this topic well enough already. If you have some more specific questions, feel free to PM me.

Comment author: Anatoly_Vorobey 23 January 2011 01:06:37AM 7 points [-]

Fair enough. I was just thinking that "ever devised" is a tall order, and perhaps you're not casting your net wide enough when thinking about it. For example, consider books of manners in general, or correct behavior for women in particular, in the 19th century, when they were ubiquitous, and apparently very useful due to increased social mobility. Or Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends etc., which probably outsells all PUA material by a wide margin. Is it possible that some of these have been more successful and effective?

Anyway, thanks for satisfying my curiosity.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 24 January 2011 08:54:26AM *  5 points [-]

These are indeed good examples, especially the first one. It is possible that by some reasonable measures of effectiveness some of them might be ahead. So yes, I agree that I might have cast my net too narrowly.

Comment author: [deleted] 23 January 2011 03:17:47AM 14 points [-]

I voted your comment down for two reasons. The first is this:

Another topic that comes to mind is parenting. I'm not familiar with the self-help literature in this area, but there are some quite ugly truths which I'd bet these books don't say, for example how depressingly little you can do beyond the limits imposed by heredity.

Making sweeping statements about a subject with which you are admittedly unfamiliar seems like the sort of thing this community should discourage.

And in this particular case, I think you would be surprised. Parents come up against the limits of their power very, very early on, and modern parenting books are actually very forthright about it. Of course they try and put it nicely -- generally something like "You can't make a sweetpea into an azalea, but with good watering and fertile soil you can help your little sprout become the very best sweetpea he or she can be" -- but the message of being unable to push your child beyond the limits of their own aptitudes is made quite clearly and quite often.

The other reason I downvoted your comment was this:

Some other examples I can think of are too sensitive and potentially offensive to describe with a few casual words, so I'll stop at this for now.

This just seems unnecessarily coy. My guess is that you're talking about HBD, but I think you should either make your case or not bring it up at all.

I'm relatively new here and still learning the ropes--are comments explaining downvotes considered useful? I know I'd appreciate explanations when I get downvoted, but I don't know if others have the same preferences.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 24 January 2011 08:47:55AM *  9 points [-]

siduri:

Parents come up against the limits of their power very, very early on, and modern parenting books are actually very forthright about it.

I stand corrected, if that's the case. I'm glad if things have changed so much for the better then. (My other point from that paragraph still stands, though.)

This just seems unnecessarily coy. My guess is that you're talking about HBD, but I think you should either make your case or not bring it up at all.

No, that's not what I had in mind. (And how on Earth did you get from the topic of self-help to that? Does my writing really evoke such strong stereotypical associations with those dark corners of the web?)

I wanted to make it clear that I do have more examples in mind (rather than generalizing from one example), but the trouble is that it's hard to state them briefly and bluntly in a way that's likely to be taken seriously and without offense on anyone's part.

Comment author: RichardKennaway 21 January 2011 09:46:08AM 10 points [-]

I guessed you were talking about PUA from the very first paragraph. But as you conclude by saying (without naming it) that PUA is but one example, what other areas of self-help do you believe fit your description?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 21 January 2011 08:24:06PM *  19 points [-]

I don't know if I should take that to mean that my writing is praiseworthy for its clarity, or that I've become repetitive. In any case, that's an excellent question!

An immediately obvious example would be analogous advice for women. From what I know about the relevant matters, my impression is that if accurately formulated, it would in fact end up sounding even worse for mainstream sensibilities than the PUA stuff. Similarly for further advice (for both sexes) that builds on the PUA insights for successful long-term relationships and marriages.

Another topic that comes to mind is parenting. I'm not familiar with the self-help literature in this area, but there are some quite ugly truths which I'd bet these books don't say, for example how depressingly little you can do beyond the limits imposed by heredity. Moreover, fully accurate no-nonsense advice about what you can do to maximize your kids' expected success in life and happiness would require a cynical analysis of many respectable social institutions, customs, and beliefs, to the point where it would probably be too offensive for mainstream sensibilities.

Some other examples I can think of are too sensitive and potentially offensive to describe with a few casual words, so I'll stop at this for now.

Comment author: prase 21 January 2011 07:09:50PM 7 points [-]

Why are people deleting comments with subcomments? It is annoying.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 21 January 2011 07:50:09PM *  1 point [-]

My apologies for that blunder -- please see the above reply to Vladimir Nesov for explanation.

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 21 January 2011 07:03:56PM 0 points [-]

In what cases you shouldn't just rely on your gut feeling telling that everything is likely fine for the near future, and instead have to work on understanding the situation better? That gut feeling doesn't require additional work, and it does inform you about the current situation.

I'd expect that if anything so serious as to require action on my part was going on, and it would be possible to know it given more effort, my attention would be drawn to it, without the need to research things in advance. (This is the kind of state that I intended when asking for examples, and it's not clear what such examples are.)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 21 January 2011 07:49:34PM *  3 points [-]

My apologies for deleting the above comment -- after writing it, I concluded that it was unsatisfactory and decided to rewrite it. I wasn't aware that you had started writing a reply almost immediately after I had posted it. This was careless, although it wasn't my intention to be inconsiderate, and thanks for replying in any case.

Basically, the point at which we disagree is the following:

I'd expect that if anything so serious as to require action on my part was going on, and it would be possible to know it given more effort, my attention would be drawn to it, without the need to research things in advance.

As I've mentioned in previous discussions of this topic, my opinion about this specific question was strongly influenced by personal experiences. Specifically, it was the fact that my family members had this exact attitude in ex-Yugoslavia circa 1991 that caused a lot of avoidable trouble for us (which some other people I know indeed avoided thanks to their better insight into the situation). It doesn't seem to me that this example is particularly extreme or unique historically; I can easily think of many others that have happened around the world only in recent decades, and I'm sure you can too.

Now of course, one could argue that I am biased in overestimating the probability of such events, or that I'm overestimating the possibility that one could ever actually gain useful enough insight for this purpose, the things being just too unpredictable. I'm open to arguments on both these counts, but it certainly seems to me that based on my current state of knowledge, it would be irrational to just cease any interest in these issues.

There are also, in my view, other situations in life where acquiring political knowledge can be very cost-effective, and I think this holds even if you actively shun any political engagement in your life. But I suspect we would reach similar disagreements if we were to discuss any specific examples.

Comment author: Anatoly_Vorobey 21 January 2011 05:02:40PM 6 points [-]

This is a terrible argument:

  • it affirms the consequent;
  • the assumption that all social activity reduces to fitness strategies is in sharp contrast with reality and lacks evidence;
  • even allowing for the unreasonable assumption and overlooking the fallacy, the problem remains that apart from some anecdotal evidence, nobody has a clue as to whether PUA works, including people who denounce it. The most that could be concluded, even under the manifestly unreasonable assumptions, is that people who denounce PUA believe that it works, or have anecdotal evidence that it works. However, since it's reasonably common for people to both denounce PUA and believe that it's practiced by pathetic unsuccessful creeps, this conclusion is wrong, too.
Comment author: Vladimir_M 21 January 2011 07:29:12PM 8 points [-]

[the above argument] affirms the consequent;

To be fair, the above commenter only said that this constitutes "weak evidence" in favor of the hypothesis, and deducing mere evidence (as opposed to certainty) by affirming the consequent is correct reasoning. (How strong evidence should be deduced, of course, is another question that depends on the concrete case. But "shokwave" did say "weak.")

Comment author: Anatoly_Vorobey 21 January 2011 04:37:08PM 6 points [-]

I have in mind, of course, what is probably the most successful and effective body of self-help expertise ever devised

How do you figure? Do you have any evidence?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 21 January 2011 07:19:19PM *  6 points [-]

Yes, but unfortunately not in a form that could be presented convincingly in a blog comment. It's mostly evidence from a mass of observation and anecdote, and the relevant facts I have established are indeed consistent with (and often successfully predicted by) these principles. More evidence also comes from their consistency with the facts about human nature and social dynamics I have observed in other areas of life, as well as the evident (to me) mispredictions and errors of logic and fact committed by pretty much all other popular sources of advice about the problems in question, especially those that, in contrast, enjoy mainstream respectability.

Comment author: cousin_it 21 January 2011 05:43:58PM *  3 points [-]

how can you be confident that you're better than average in other areas

Duh, by noticing that you are better than average in other areas, but poor at politics. This is the situation a lot of us face.

Vladimir_M, you have stated the same opinions and arguments long ago, in the discussions I have linked to. Our failure to reach agreement even on the simple question "should we discuss politics here?" should be strongly suggestive! Also please note that SarahC has updated from answering "yes, but be careful" to answering "no". Has anyone updated in the opposite direction?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 21 January 2011 06:19:29PM *  1 point [-]

cousin_it:

Duh, by noticing that you are better than average in other areas, but poor at politics. This is the situation a lot of us face.

But what are these criteria by which you can reliably conclude that you are better in other areas than in politics? Moreover, what are these peculiar sources of bias and delusions that manifest themselves in politics but not elsewhere, so that you can be confident that they cloud only your judgment about matters of politics but not other things? (And that they can therefore be set aside as a separate and unique problem.)

Of course, the answers are evident if we compare politics only with hard sciences. However, I have got the impression (perhaps incorrect) that in the space of all possible topics, you also draw another boundary specifically around politics (not least due to your frequent comments about non-hard-scientific topics).

Also please note that SarahC has updated from answering "yes, but be careful" to answering "no". Has anyone updated in the opposite direction?

I am somewhat puzzled by the fact that SarahC nevertheless replies to my comments that deal with politically sensitive topics from time to time (most recently today), not to condemn them, but in fact prompting further discussion. My conjecture is that she has in mind a much narrower definition of political topics than we do, one where even I might agree that the questions themselves are often senseless to begin with.

She is presumably reading this, so I hereby invite her to clarify this.

[Edit - forgot to add:] It's similar with other people -- I'm observing their revealed preferences, not abstract statements. I would never be so impertinent to make comments about politically sensitive topics on this forum if it actually provoked unfriendly reactions in terms of votes and replies. But instead, when I do make them, I almost invariably encounter upvotes and interested replies. Or do you think I should make some additional considerations here? (I'm really asking in good faith.)

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 21 January 2011 02:11:58PM 8 points [-]

I don't think anybody can really afford to ignore politics.

I completely ignore politics. What am I losing?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 21 January 2011 04:46:38PM *  9 points [-]

Vladimir_Nesov:

I completely ignore politics. What am I losing?

You will probably agree that historically there have been at least some times and places where completely ignoring politics could be very costly. Therefore, if you believe that you're not losing anything by ignoring politics at the present time and place where you live, this can be rational only if you have some evidence that the present social order you live under is not in that category. However, you cannot have any such evidence if you really ignore politics completely.

It follows that either you're being irrational, or your level of interest in politics is perhaps very low, but still above zero.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 21 January 2011 04:37:02PM *  8 points [-]

In my opinion, this is indeed a very important question, considering the stated goals of this forum. Many people here take pride in being "rationalists" who are supposedly head and shoulders above the common folk when it comes to eliminating biases and popular delusions. Yet if they are nevertheless afraid to touch topics like politics where these biases and delusions are particularly severe and widespread, or worse, if discussions of such topics here tend to display the same problems as elsewhere, one must ask -- what good is all this "rationality" then? It's as if there was a weightlifting club whose members had an agreement not to touch weights over, say, fifty kilos. (In fact, even worse -- these people would at least know for sure they can handle up to 50kg weights, whereas if your biases are too strong to think about political topics rationally, how can you be confident that you're better than average in other areas?)

Now of course, posts and comments that talk about politics in the usual way full of biases, delusions, and strong emotions should be downvoted and discouraged, but only to the extent that, for example, people commenting about physics with stubborn ignorance and incorrigible inaccuracy get treated similarly. In other words, what should be targeted are errors of logic and fact as such, not the topic at hand in which they are committed. To some extent, this is indeed what happens, and it's one feature of this forum that I really like. I have made many comments here about politically and ideologically sensitive topics, and most of them have been well received in terms of upvotes and responses.

One question I find fascinating is what exactly determines the range of sensitive topics that tend to break down the discourse even on LW (and which is, in my observations, quite different from most other venues). Maybe one day I'll post a compendium of my conclusions about this.

Comment author: [deleted] 21 January 2011 03:33:14PM 5 points [-]

Ok, so in a word, you recommend tracking. In a few more words, de facto IQ tests, and education geared towards employment at each ability level.

Thanks for explaining. (I don't think the substance of your views is anywhere near as scary as your tone makes it out to be. It all sounds at least plausible.) It's more an educational policy/social engineering set of ideas, though, than what I think OP was looking for, namely hypotheses about which teaching methods are most effective at conveying skills and understanding. (Or do you think teaching methods matter at all?)

In response to comment by [deleted] on I Want to Learn About Education
Comment author: Vladimir_M 21 January 2011 04:03:53PM *  3 points [-]

SarahC:

Ok, so in a word, you recommend tracking. In a few more words, de facto IQ tests, and education geared towards employment at each ability level.

Tracking and IQ tests will be done one way or another if the educational system is to perform any useful function at all. Nowadays these things are buried in pious rationalizations and baroque rituals, but they are still there, and they are essential for those parts of the system that actually work tolerably well. People in the academic establishment understand this perfectly well at the gut level, regardless of all the pious proclamations to the contrary (which I think are usually honest doublethink).

As for these ideas not being scary, I can only repeat what JoshuaZ already said. Try discussing these things publicly without the usual pious rationalizations and see what the reactions will be.

(Or do you think teaching methods matter at all?)

They do matter, but less than commonly assumed. A great teacher can certainly be a crucial positive influence on a kid's life (and a bad teacher a negative one, of course). What needs to be recognized, however, is that while a good teacher can make kids interested in smart and useful things that are within their level of ability by making these things appear cool and fascinating, it's impossible to raise this level much. Moreover, contrary to the assumptions of the present system, it's impossible to select good teachers by formalized bureaucratic and credentialist procedures. Their ability is simply not amenable to formal bureaucratic evaluation, certainly not in a way that would be immune to Goodhart's law.

Comment author: [deleted] 21 January 2011 04:40:25AM 0 points [-]

I won't jump down your throat here, I'm genuinely curious what these forbidden ideas are. I assume you mean by "sounding like Charles Murray" talking about IQ, and viewing it as (mostly) heritable. Does that tell us anything about how best to educate? Or only about the possible limits of education?

In other words, do you think there are effective education methods whose only drawback is ideological unpalatability?

In response to comment by [deleted] on I Want to Learn About Education
Comment author: Vladimir_M 21 January 2011 03:06:48PM *  10 points [-]

To be frank, I think that the level of ideologically driven delusions in the modern American educational system -- fueled both by venal interests and honest true believers, two categories by no means disjoint -- has reached Soviet levels in recent times. (Of course, this doesn't mean that us non-Americans need not worry, since ideological influences are nowadays going exclusively in our direction.) Just like the U.S.S.R. was a horrid failure because its official, all-permeating ideology was insane and there was a limit to how much compromise with reality was possible, the U.S. educational system is a failure except to the extent that it compromises with reality against the ideological consensus under various euphemisms and rationalizations.

Regarding IQ, you don't even need to assume that intelligence is heritable -- merely that it varies and is somewhat non-malleable. Even if it varied in completely random ways, it would mean that the prevailing blank-slatism is out of touch with reality. (Again, we see one of those compromises with reality here: the universities use de facto IQ tests for admission, justified with the euphemistic rationalization of "scholastic aptitude," and stick to their guns when questioned about it.)

Now, you ask:

Does that tell us anything about how best to educate? Or only about the possible limits of education?

Clearly, an accurate view of reality does tell us how best to educate. The trouble is, many would presumably not like these answers.

In my view, the key insight is that the educational system together with the labor market and other social institutions, both formal and informal, must provide a gainful and dignified path for people in all percentiles of intellectual ability. For this, two things are necessary: an educational system (and other supporting institutions, primarily functional families) that effectively direct people of all ability levels towards occupations that are realistically within their reach, and of course an economy offering gainful and dignified employment to people at all ability levels. Without either of that, what results is a large underclass with the most awful social pathologies rampant.

It should be noted that it's not only leftists who are out of touch with reality in this regard, but also many libertarian/neoliberal free-trader types, who believe that the U.S. could outsource all its menial and physical work abroad and let the American work force specialize in highbrow intellectual pursuits in the global economy. Clearly their ideology is also threatened by a realistic appraisal of the situation.

In response to comment by [deleted] on I Want to Learn About Education
Comment author: JoshuaZ 21 January 2011 05:07:33AM 4 points [-]

One related problem is that even when one doesn't sound like Charles Murray, opponents will try to spin things to sound like they are racist claims. For example, try arguing that cultural attitudes matter for how much kids are willing to learn, and then see how long it takes to get accused of racism.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 21 January 2011 02:32:26PM 3 points [-]

Frankly, when I mentioned Murray, I didn't even have in mind these most controversial and incendiary topics he's ever written on. (This was in my opinion a mistake on his part, since his association with them now automatically detracts from other interesting stuff about which he's written much more.) As you note, you don't have to go anywhere as far to get to ideas that will be unacceptable to the modern mainstream ideological consensus about issues of education, which will provoke angry denunciations that deny any legitimacy to your position instead of rational debate.

Comment author: [deleted] 20 January 2011 07:16:08PM 4 points [-]

I actually agree. The academic discipline of "education," as taught in ed schools, is somewhat mysterious to me and doesn't seem to have proven its value. It would be interesting to see if it could be improved on (with actual experimental studies, perhaps?)

Piaget on child development, as I understand, has held up pretty well, but that's not education per se.

In response to comment by [deleted] on I Want to Learn About Education
Comment author: Vladimir_M 21 January 2011 04:03:13AM 5 points [-]

SarahC:

The academic discipline of "education," as taught in ed schools, is somewhat mysterious to me and doesn't seem to have proven its value. It would be interesting to see if it could be improved on (with actual experimental studies, perhaps?)

The problem is not in the lack of relevant data, of which there are plenty. The problem is how to devise theories that are logically coherent, with some predictive power, and consistent with the data, but also not too far in the ideologically unpalatable territory for mainstream sensibilities (in other words, not sounding like Charles Murray).

Comment author: Vladimir_M 21 January 2011 03:31:05AM *  17 points [-]

One problem with self-help literature, very generally speaking, is that identifying one's shortcomings correctly and addressing them effectively requires, first and foremost, an accurate model of the relevant aspects of one's personality and typically also of the relevant social interactions. Humans, however, are notoriously self-delusional and hypocritical about these matters, and speaking the truth openly and explicitly is often taboo -- even though successful individuals recognize it at some level and adjust their actions accordingly, no matter how much (often honest) outrage they would feel if it were stated explicitly.

Therefore, in order to be palatable to public sensibilities, self-help literature must operate under two crippling constraints. First, it must sugar-coat the problem diagnosis and express it in a way that won't sound cruel, hurtful, and offensive to the relevant audience (and people almost invariably take accurate remarks about their flaws badly). Second, it must frame its solutions in a way that doesn't break the prevailing hypocritical rules about discussing the relevant social norms and social dynamics, or otherwise it will end up too far in the politically incorrect territory for mainstream success.

The best concrete illustration is also the biggest elephant in the room when it comes to discussions of self-help. I have in mind, of course, what is probably the most successful and effective body of self-help expertise ever devised, whose very mention however is guaranteed to arouse passions and provoke denunciations.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 20 January 2011 06:36:26PM *  11 points [-]

What I know about education is patched together from all kinds of written sources and real-life observations, so I don't have an on-topic and self-contained literature list to recommend. However, you should be warned that this topic is nowadays politically and ideologically charged to an extreme degree, and directly relevant for powerful special interests financed from the public purse. Also, among intellectuals, it is tremendously popular to signal one's sophistication and humanism via nice-sounding but unsubstantiated opinions about it.

Therefore, anything publicly written and spoken about education should be taken with a high level of skepticism and caution, even the most prestigious and seemingly most objective and scholarly academic work.

Comment author: topynate 19 January 2011 04:03:17PM 1 point [-]

I thought we were talking about how to use necessary requirements without risking a suit, not how to conceal racial preferences by using cleverly chosen proxy requirements. But it looks like you can't use job application degree requirements without showing a business need either.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 20 January 2011 05:42:50PM *  7 points [-]

topynate:

But it looks like you can't use job application degree requirements without showing a business need either.

The relevant landmark case in U.S. law is the 1971 Supreme Court decision in Griggs v. Duke Power Co. The court ruled that not just testing of prospective employees, but also academic degree requirements that have disparate impact across protected groups are illegal unless they are "demonstrably a reasonable measure of job performance."

Now of course, "a reasonable measure of job performance" is a vague criterion, which depends on controversial facts as well as subjective opinion. To take only the most notable example, these people would probably say that IQ tests are a reasonable measure of performance for a great variety of jobs, but the present legal precedent disagrees. This situation has given rise to endless reams of of case law and a legal minefield that takes experts to navigate.

At the end, as might be expected, what sorts of tests and academic requirements are permitted to different institutions in practice depends on arbitrary custom and the public perception of their status. The de facto rules are only partly codified formally. Thus, to take again the most notable example, the army and the universities are allowed to use what are IQ tests in all but name, which is an absolute taboo for almost any other institution.

Comment author: timtyler 19 January 2011 07:17:32PM 2 points [-]

"Post-scarcity economy" is an impossible concept even in principle (assuming a human society, at any rate).

How about a totalitarian government with high technology and fertility management?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 19 January 2011 07:29:36PM 5 points [-]

It doesn't matter. Whatever the institutions of this totalitarian government might look like, there will still be the usual human zero-sum struggle for status, and whatever goods (material or not) are necessary to gain status will be the object of this struggle, just like they are now. Even under the assumption (entirely impossible for a human society) that material zero-sum goods like land are distributed strictly equitably and the population is kept low enough that the amount per capita is large, status is still scarce by definition.

Comment author: FeepingCreature 19 January 2011 01:27:44PM *  3 points [-]

The second reason is invalid unless the actor is self-deluding - a smart actor that faces being put out of work would silently adopt a SPR as his decision-making system without admitting to it. Since the superiority of SPR continues in many fields, either relevant actors are consistently not smart, performance is not a significant contributing criterion to their success, or they're self-deluding ie. overrating their own judgment as the poster stated. [edit] I'd guess a combination of the last two.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 19 January 2011 05:51:15PM *  5 points [-]

Yes, I'd say it's a combination of the last two points, with emphasis on the second last.

The critical question is whether maximizing the accuracy of your judgments is a practical way to get ahead in a given profession. Sometimes that is indeed the case, and in such fields we indeed see tremendous efforts to automate as much expert work as possible, often with great success, as in the electronics industry. But in professions that operate as more tightly-knit guilds, adherence to accepted standards is much more important than any objective metrics of effectiveness. Stepping outside of standard work procedures is often treated as a serious infraction with potentially severe consequences. (Especially if your non-standard methodology fails in some particular case, as it will sooner or later, and you can't cover your ass by claiming that you followed all the standard accepted procedures and having your profession back you up organizationally.)

Now, you could try enhancing your work with decision models in secret. But even then, it's hard to do it in a completely secretive way, and moreover, human minds being what they are, most people can achieve professional success only if they are really sincerely convinced in their expertise and effectiveness. Keeping a public facade is hard for everyone except a very small minority of people.

Comment author: mutterc 19 January 2011 02:58:49PM 6 points [-]

It's a good contrast between two types of post-scarcity economies: one where a capitalist status quo still applies (the dystopia), and one where material goods end up like open-source software does today (the utopia).

I think that's the big takeaway - you shouldn't eliminate labor scarcity without deploying some kind of new economic distribution model.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 19 January 2011 05:13:09PM *  9 points [-]

"Post-scarcity economy" is an impossible concept even in principle (assuming a human society, at any rate). Beyond a certain minimal standard of living, which is in fact quite low by today's standards, most of the things people really care about are zero-sum. They will struggle just as mightily and eagerly to wrest those for themselves no matter how cheap, plentiful, and high-quality non-zero-sum stuff gets. Moreover, habitable land is always zero-sum, which further complicates things.

For those with less ambition and/or ability, this has a twofold effect. On the one side, it benefits them because in a decently functioning polity, people's efforts to get ahead in life in the hope of zero-sum gains will result in a growing economy making non-zero-sum stuff increasingly cheap, plentiful, and high-quality. On the other hand, it is bad because some things are zero-sum but nevertheless essential for life, most notably habitable land, and people's struggle to get ahead in zero-sum efforts drives the price of these way up. This makes it necessary to work almost as hard as the most ambitious and prosperous folk to be able to afford the increasing price of lodging and other essential access to zero-sum things.

Thus in the contemporary developed world we have a situation where nobody is in danger of starving or not having warm enough clothes, but homelessness is a very realistic threat for poorer people. (As an even more striking illustration of the same phenomenon, in recent years even cell phones and computers have become affordable to many of the homeless folk.) The Manna story also illustrates the same principle accurately: the state finds feeding and clothing the unemployable masses adequately a trivial expense, but the land to house them is expensive and scarce so they have to live packed together like sardines.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 19 January 2011 09:25:01AM *  6 points [-]

On a related note, here is the economist Nick Rowe's recent excellent post about what will happen if most human labor can be automated fully and cheaply at some point in the future:
http://worthwhile.typepad.com/worthwhile_canadian_initi/2011/01/robots-slaves-horses-and-malthus.html

It's by far the best and clearest analysis of the issue I've seen so far. In case anyone is interested, I left a few comments in the discussion there, which I'd say resulted in some additional insight.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 19 January 2011 09:07:13AM *  32 points [-]

Also, if I may be permitted to make a more general criticism in response to this post, I would say that while the article appears to be well-researched, it has demonstrated some of the worst problems I commonly notice on this forum. The same goes for the majority of the comments, even though many are knowledgeable and informative. What I have in mind is the fixation on concocting theories about human behavior and society based on various idées fixes and leitmotifs that are parts of the intellectual folklore here, while failing to notice issues suggested by basic common sense that are likely to be far more important.

Thus the poster notices that these models are not used in practice despite considerable evidence in their favor, and rushes to propose cognitive biases à la Kahneman & Tversky as the likely explanation. This without even stopping to think of two questions that just scream for attention. First, what is the importance of the fact that just about any issue of sorting out people is nowadays likely to be ideologically charged and legally dangerous? Second, what about the fact that these models are supposed to throw some high-status people out of work, and in a way that makes them look like they've been incompetent all along?

Regardless of whether various hypotheses based on these questions have any merit, the fact that someone could write a post without even giving them the slightest passing attention, offering instead a blinkered explanation involving the standard old LW/OB folklore, and still get upvoted to +40 is, in my opinion, indicative of some severe and widespread biases.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 19 January 2011 08:42:18AM *  6 points [-]

Besides the legal issues with discrimination and disparate impact, another important issue here is that jobs that involve making decisions about people tend to be high-status. As a very general tendency, the higher-status a profession is, the more its practitioners are likely to organize in a guild-like way and resist intrusive innovations by outsiders -- especially innovations involving performance metrics that show the current standards of the profession in a bad light, or even worse, those that threaten a change in the way their work is done that might lower its status.

Discussions of such cases in medicine are a regular feature on Overcoming Bias, but it exists in a more or less pronounced form in any other high-status profession too. How much it accounts for the specific cases discussed in the above article is a complex question, but this phenomenon should certainly be considered as a plausible part of the explanation.

Comment author: Quirinus_Quirrell 19 January 2011 01:31:54AM 12 points [-]

If the best way to choose who to hire is with a statistical analysis of legally forbidden criteria, then keep your reasons secret and shred your work. Is that so hard?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 19 January 2011 02:11:02AM 1 point [-]

See the last sentence of my first paragraph above (the one in parentheses).

Comment author: Vladimir_M 18 January 2011 09:37:22PM *  34 points [-]

So why aren't SPRs in use everywhere? Probably, we deny or ignore the success of SPRs because of deep-seated cognitive biases, such as overconfidence in our own judgments. But if these SPRs work as well as or better than human judgments, shouldn't we use them?

Without even getting into the concrete details of these models, I'm surprised that nobody so far has pointed out the elephant in the room: in contemporary society, statistical inference about human behavior and characteristics is a topic bearing tremendous political, ideological, and legal weight. [*] Nowadays there exists a firm mainstream consensus that the use of certain sorts of conditional probabilities to make statistical predictions about people is discriminatory and therefore evil, and doing so may result not only in loss of reputation, but also in serious legal consequences. (Note that even if none of the forbidden criteria are built into your decision-making explicitly, that still doesn't leave you off the hook -- just search for "disparate impact" if you don't know what I'm talking about.)

Now of course, making any prediction about people at all necessarily involves one sort of statistical discrimination or another. The boundaries between the types of statistical discrimination that are considered OK and those that are considered evil and risk legal liability are an arbitrary result of cultural, political, and ideological factors. (They would certainly look strange and arbitrary to someone who isn't immersed in the culture that generated them to the point where they appear common-sensical or at least explicable.) Therefore, while your model may well be accurate in estimating the probability of recidivism, job performance, etc., it's unlikely that it will be able to navigate the social conventions that determine these forbidden lines. A lot of the seemingly absurd and ineffective rituals and regulations in modern business, government, academia, etc. exist exactly for the purpose of satisfying these complex constraints, even if they're not commonly thought of as such.

--

[*] Edit: I missed the comment below in which the commenter Student_UK already raised a similar point.

Comment author: Costanza 15 January 2011 11:18:44PM 2 points [-]

Hence the Pigouvian tax in which the taxes and the negative externalities cancel should each other out.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 15 January 2011 11:59:26PM 1 point [-]

Or Coasian bargaining, which also may or may not work in practice.

Comment author: CronoDAS 15 January 2011 08:47:09PM 7 points [-]

The biggest problem with market prices is externalities, such as pollution.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 15 January 2011 11:57:17PM *  5 points [-]

Some other serious problems with market prices are rent-seeking endeavors and arms races in signaling behavior.

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 14 January 2011 11:48:40PM *  3 points [-]

To me, this sounds like a typical example of a theory that sounds neat and plausible when stated vaguely, but which turns out to be unsubstantiated on a closer examination.

Could be. But most beliefs (even most correct beliefs) are like that, you can't set some magical default level of certainty for everything that was not formally studied. The power of scientific evidence is in ability to conclusively destroy incorrect beliefs upon closer examination, but it doesn't hold monopoly on construction of correct beliefs.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 15 January 2011 06:57:10AM 0 points [-]

There are many different grades of understanding and evidence between the extremes of absolute ignorance/confusion and a true no-nonsense scientific approach. Based on what Drexler writes in this article, I do think that my understanding of the issues at hand (i.e. the state of the current public opinion about Darwinism, the factors influencing it, and various linguistic claims he's made) is significantly more accurate than his, and my understanding suggests that his hypothesis is false. Of course, to substantiate this claim I would have to explain my position at length, for which I could hardly find the necessary time and space in the context of this discussion.

Nevertheless, if some evidence could be found for his position, it would provide an interesting challenge to my own ideas about these issues, and it could lead to an interesting discussion which wouldn't require me to first write a lengthy explanation for why I believe his ideas are mistaken. That's why I asked.

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 14 January 2011 11:32:16PM *  0 points [-]

However, "rationalist" is not separable from "rationalism".

Word forms are very important when we are talking about connotations. "Rationalist" is a different story, see current version of the post.

(Added google results data on "rationalist" to the post.)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 15 January 2011 06:40:59AM *  2 points [-]

You say:

So, my suggestion is to use "rationality" consistently and to avoid using "rationalism". Via similarity to "scientist" and "physicist", "rationalist" doesn't seem to have the same problem.

I think this analogy is inaccurate. The suffix -ist has several distinct meanings, and my impression is that the general public will be apt to understand "rationalist" to mean "someone who subscribes to rationalism" (whatever exactly that connotes in the given context), not "a practitioner of/expert in rationality."

I suppose you have the latter meaning in mind when you make the analogy with "physicist," but I don't think that's how the term is likely to be perceived outside of LW. (Just like e.g. "historicist" doesn't mean "historian.")

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 14 January 2011 11:13:50PM *  2 points [-]

I don't have specific references sufficient to convince someone who doesn't agree ("evidence"), but I have my reasons. I believe this probable, via feeling the negative connotation with "-ism" myself, knowing of other people who feel similarly, and understanding arguments for why such feelings could appear by association, so I don't need such references to hold the level of believe I have. The opposite effect (of "-ism" being beneficial) looks less probable for similar reasons. The effect is important because if it's real, it affects many people (or simply, it affects a big expected number of people).

(I welcome any references that would convince me of this claim more strongly or disprove it.)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 14 January 2011 11:40:47PM 0 points [-]

To me, this sounds like a typical example of a theory that sounds neat and plausible when stated vaguely, but which turns out to be unsubstantiated on a closer examination. You can certainly tell a neat story to make it sound convincing, but when I consider in more detail the concrete mechanisms by which opinions of different sorts of people are formed in the modern society, I don't see any grounds to conclude that this concrete issue has much relevance.

(On a related note, the actual dynamics of the contemporary public opinion with regards to evolution and Darwinism are, in my opinion, very different from the standard story within which, among others, Drexler also frames his argument.)

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 14 January 2011 11:05:28PM *  2 points [-]

As the bottom line, the "rationalism" terminology is probably too deeply embedded in the LW folklore to ever be abandoned

The term "rationalism" is not actually used on LW much, "rationality" is much more frequent. (I understand that you meant both in that phrase, but it's not clearly expressed.)

(3720 Google results for "rationality" against 251 for "rationalism"; added to the post.)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 14 January 2011 11:15:51PM 1 point [-]

That's true, but "rationalist" is used extremely frequently as a noun or adjective. (Google claims about four thousand hits on LW for the plural "rationalists.") The word "rationality" indeed has a meaning separate from the traditional polemical sense of "rationalism," and it's not too far from what's commonly meant by it on LW. However, "rationalist" is not separable from "rationalism."

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 14 January 2011 10:27:20PM *  4 points [-]

Connotations don't study history or philosophy, what matters in the context of Drexler's article is prevalence in popular perception, and resulting normative recommendation.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 14 January 2011 11:04:59PM *  3 points [-]

I don't see any evidence that the specific practice of naming scientific theories by the names of their founders, with or without the -ism suffix, actually has the effect that Drexler complains about, let alone that this effect is of such magnitude and importance that it would justify describing it as "pernicious." Do you?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 14 January 2011 10:44:50PM *  8 points [-]

As for the terms "rationalism" and "rationalist," they have a strong established historical meaning quite different from the way they're commonly used by many people here. The first thing that occurs to me when I hear them is the old philosophical notion of "rationalism" as opposed to "empiricism."

Also, it's important to note that historically these have never been terms of uncontroversial and unambiguous praise. In many contexts, they have been traditionally understood to convey criticism, not compliment. For example, when Michael Oakeshott titled his essay Rationalism in Politics, he definitely didn't aim to make the reader positively disposed towards the subject from the title. Whether and to what extent people on LW tend to commit the same errors and hold the same unsubstantiated beliefs that have traditionally been connoted by this term is certainly a complex and amusing question.

As the bottom line, the "rationalism" terminology is probably too deeply embedded in the LW folklore to ever be abandoned, but I would certainly advise against using it when talking to outsiders. Even if people understand the term precisely the way it's used here, describing oneself like that explicitly is a status-lowering way of qualifying oneself.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 14 January 2011 10:18:39PM *  5 points [-]

Drexler's article is, in my opinon, simply inaccurate. The suffix -ism is used not only for political, ideological, and religious opinions, but also for philosophical opinions and theories in exact sciences and mathematics whose accuracy is a matter of dispute, or has historically been a matter of dispute. He's also displaying what appear to be strange gaps in his vocabulary -- Mendelism (alternatively Mendelianism) and Newtonianism have been widely used terms for centuries, as a simple search of Google Books will show.

In the concrete case of Darwinism, the term is very useful to differentiate Darwinian evolution from other theories of biological evolution that have been proposed historically, like Lamarckism or intelligent design.

Comment author: jimmy 12 January 2011 01:37:41AM 1 point [-]

Thats interesting. Do you have to keep pushing later and later, or does a fixed offset give you this benefit?

I ended up in this routine fairly recently and was quite surprised how functional I was on so much sleep debt- given how worthless I feel when waking up a couple hours early. There were other factors that might be at play, but I hadn't considered this one.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 12 January 2011 08:49:32PM 0 points [-]

jimmy:

Thats interesting. Do you have to keep pushing later and later, or does a fixed offset give you this benefit?

For the same number of reduced sleeping hours, I feel much better if I'm pushing both bedtime and waking up time later and later each day. But even if I wake up at my regular time, the loss of the first few hours of sleep hurts far less than if I were waking up that much earlier, at least for the first two days or so.

Comment author: Perplexed 11 January 2011 04:03:40PM 12 points [-]

I don't see why truth seekers should have any extra difficulty attracting friends. Truth speakers are a different story.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 11 January 2011 09:33:48PM 2 points [-]

Trouble is, it's very hard to prevent these things from influencing one another.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 11 January 2011 09:27:42PM *  4 points [-]

One sort of alternative sleep schedule I've practiced on occasions that enables me to get more active hours for a few days in a row without being too sleepy is going to bed later and later each day and sleeping fewer hours than usual. Normally, if I go to bed at my usual time and wake up after, say, five hours, I'll be sleepy, irritable, and unproductive all day, and after a few days of sleeping less than 7 hours or so, I'm good for nothing. But if I go to bed very late and wake up sometime after my regular waking time, I feel much better, so that constant pushing ahead of both bedtime and waking up time enables me to sleep much less for several days while feeling tolerable.

Of course, this is practical only when working on projects where you don't need to coordinate with others. Also, it probably wouldn't work for many other people, especially those who become extremely sleepy late at night, and who wake up easily and full of enthusiasm in the morning. (Whom I envy -- I always find it hard to fall asleep in the evening, getting up after less than ~8 hours of sleep is for me sheer torture, and after waking up I'm slow and sluggish for at least an hour.)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 08 January 2011 09:18:32PM 4 points [-]

If you want to keep this secret, I would advise removing that Russian Wikipedia link. Less Wrong tends to come up very high in Google search, so that searching for the name might bring up this post.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 08 January 2011 06:01:26AM 3 points [-]

Funny you mention that -- two days ago I started working on a new project, and I managed to get an almost ideal "non-work" feeling about it. I haven't been this productive and I haven't enjoyed work so much in quite a while. Right now it's Friday night in my time zone, and I'm frankly having more fun working than if I were somewhere out boozing.

The project however is not especially cool or interesting in any way. For me, the actual content of the work is much less important than the feeling that I'm getting good money for it, and even more importantly, that seeing the eventual results will give me the feeling of useful accomplishment. Either of these two can be enough to make me apply myself with genuine joy and enthusiasm to even the hardest toil, whether physical or intellectual. In contrast, what absolutely kills my enthusiasm and pushes me into severe akrasia is the feeling that the work I'm forced to do is ultimately without real value and useful purpose.

Another potentially significant factor are the co-workers I'm stuck with. Having to work with people whose company irritates or depresses me can make otherwise OK work feel awful, and this actually spills over into those parts of the work where they're not even present. Conversely, fun and likable co-workers can make even the worst drudgery enjoyable.

Comment author: simplyeric 07 January 2011 01:13:22PM 0 points [-]

There is substantial literature that suggests that language acquisition is more difficult, slower, and ultimately less successful in adults than in younger people. I believe it's often mentioned that it's at about 12-14 yrs old that the neural plasticity for language acquisition fades. http://pandora.cii.wwu.edu/vajda/ling201/test4materials/secondlangacquisition.htm http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/biology/b103/f03/web2/mtucker.html

I never said that it's impossible for an adult to learn a foreign language, just not as fast or effective. That man's blog seems interesting...but I'm quite skeptical that he becomes "fluent" in a language in 2-3 months. I'd be interested to see how fluent he actually is (nevermind the similarities between several of those languages, which aids in acquisition...I've experienced that first hand). Then again, maybe he's an unusual case.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 07 January 2011 09:37:24PM *  2 points [-]

simplyeric:

There is substantial literature that suggests that language acquisition is more difficult, slower, and ultimately less successful in adults than in younger people. I believe it's often mentioned that it's at about 12-14 yrs old that the neural plasticity for language acquisition fades.

I think the confusion here is about what exactly is meant by "learning" a language.

If the goal is to quickly build some rudimentary skill for finding one's way around in a foreign language (which basically boils down to memorizing a lot of words and stock phrases, along with a few very basic syntactic patterns), an intelligent adult will likely be able to achieve it faster because of better work ethic and superior general experience in tackling intellectual problems.

On the other hand, if the goal is to become indistinguishable from a native speaker, then the kid clearly has an advantage no matter how long it takes, because the task is impossible for the overwhelming majority of adults (which for this purpose means anyone over 12 or so). You may become a fluent speaker and perhaps even a good writer, but you're stuck with a foreign accent, and even if you manage to get rid of it with special training, you'll still make occasional subtle but noticeable syntactic and semantic errors.

If the goal is something in-between, the winner will depend on the exact benchmarks of success.

Comment author: Emile 03 January 2011 10:57:43AM 2 points [-]

I know our irregulars suck but you've got to give us credit for depth of vocabulary.

You should see French - we have even more exceptions to our rules. German manages a much more sane exception/rule ratio, but that's mostly by having much more rules.

I think the biggest problem for foreign learners isn't irregulars, but the preposition in phrasal verbs - the way say "give up", "give in", "give out" or "get up", "get away", "get about" etc. all mean different things that can't just be deduced by what you know about the verb or the preposition alone.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 06 January 2011 09:03:18AM 2 points [-]

Emile:

I think the biggest problem for foreign learners isn't irregulars, but the preposition in phrasal verbs - the way say "give up", "give in", "give out" or "get up", "get away", "get about" etc. all mean different things that can't just be deduced by what you know about the verb or the preposition alone.

These are indeed very difficult, but in my experience (and also from my observations of other fluent non-native English speakers), by far the hardest problem is the definite article. With a lot of practice and experience, you learn to use it with perhaps 90% or 95% accuracy, but then your improvement stagnates and it's impossible to ever get it 100% right like a native speaker.

Comment author: Costanza 05 January 2011 06:47:46PM *  1 point [-]

English is the result of Norman men-at-arms attempting to pick up Saxon barmaids and is no more legitimate than any of the other results.
H. Beam Piper (Little Fuzzy or Fuzzy Sapiens)

For "Norman" read "French-speaking" and for "Saxon" read "Germanic-language-speaking." I'm told that English is now a Germanic language with a more-than-half Latinate (mostly French) vocabulary. Here's a quote which evokes a time in which the two languages had not fully mixed, at least not in every context -- it is a record from a court of criminal law:

[A judge] fuit assault per Prisoner la condemne pur Felony; que puis son condemnation ject un Brickbat a le dit Justice que narrowly mist, & pur ceo immediately fuit Indictment drawn per Noy envers le prisoner, & son dexter manus ampute et fix al Gibbet, sur que luy mesme immédiatement hangé in presence de Court.

P.S. Originally copied and pasted this quote from the web. Later, looked it up in a dead trees copy of "The Language of the Law" by Mellinkoff. The book cited a passage with spelling that was further from standard French...updated to reflect.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 06 January 2011 08:55:28AM *  0 points [-]

Costanza:

I'm told that English is now a Germanic language with a more-than-half Latinate (mostly French) vocabulary.

That's true only for highbrow written English (and even then, I'm not sure if French words would outnumber those coming directly from Latin). Everyday spoken English still overwhelmingly consists of Germanic words.

Also, that sample you cite is Law French, a very peculiar historical sort of formal legal language. Nobody ever used anything like that as everyday spoken language.

Comment author: Desrtopa 05 January 2011 06:41:11PM *  10 points [-]

It's not exactly a novel business model. You can read the testimony of a worker in that field here.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 05 January 2011 07:57:18PM *  7 points [-]

Another pseudonymous confession from a worker in that field:

http://www.eacfaculty.org/pchidester/Eng%20102f/Plagiarism/This%20Pen%20for%20Hire.pdf

Comment author: diegocaleiro 05 January 2011 09:26:31AM 3 points [-]

Scholarship: Thumbs up.

Classic Scholarship: Thumbs down http://brainstormers.wordpress.com/2010/03/03/sobre-ler-os-classicos/

Just in case someone forgot all the Teacher Pasword, Cached Thoughts, and related posts from which I got the link to the above text.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 05 January 2011 07:42:04PM *  18 points [-]

diegocaleiro:

Classic Scholarship: Thumbs down http://brainstormers.wordpress.com/2010/03/03/sobre-ler-os-classicos/

That article is very poorly argued. Your argument is more or less correct in those fields where the progress of scholarship has a monotonous upward trend, in the sense that knowledge is accumulated without loss, and all existing insights continuously improved. This is true for e.g. Newtonian physics, and indeed, nobody would ever read Newton's original works instead of a modern textbook except for historical interest.

What you fail to understand, however, is that in many fields there is no such monotonous upward trend. This means that in the old classics you'll often find insight that has been neglected and forgotten, and you'll also find ideas that have fallen out of fashion and ideological favor, and been replaced with less accurate (and sometimes outright delusional) ones. Almost invariably, these insights and ideas are absent from modern texts, even those dealing specifically with the old authors, and there is often nothing comparable being written nowadays that could open your eyes to the errors of the modern consensus.

As a rule of thumb, the softer and more ideologically charged a field is, the more such cases you'll find where the modern range of mainstream opinion has in fact regressed away from reality relative to old authors. In economics, for example, you'll find a lot important insight in The Wealth of Nations that modern economics textbooks, and even modern treatments of Adam Smith, are silent about.

Even in hard sciences, when it comes to questions that raise deeper philosophical issues, revisiting classics can be a fruitful source of ideas. For example, Julian Barbour developed his ideas by studying the history of mechanics and relativity, and Arthur Ekert claims that the idea of quantum cryptography first occurred to him due to an insight he gathered from the classic EPR paper. (Ekert writes, "I guess I was lucky to read it in this particular way. The rest was just about rephrasing the subject in cryptographic terms.")

Another point you're neglecting is that truly good writers are extremely rare. Many classic works have remained in print after so many years exactly because people who wrote them were such good writers that virtually none of the modern authors working in the same field are able to produce anything as readable.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 05 January 2011 03:50:10AM 9 points [-]

A major problem with these approaches is that for the majority of real-life questions, the circuits in your brain that are best capable of analyzing the situation and giving you an answer along with a vague feeling of certainty are altogether different from those that you can use to run these heuristics. This is why, in my opinion, attempts to assign numerical probabilities to common-sense judgments usually don't make sense.

If your brain has the ability to make a common-sense judgment about some real-world phenomenon, this ability will typically be implemented in the form of a black-box module that will output the answer along with some coarsely graded intuitive feeling of certainty. You cannot open this black box and analyze its algorithms in order to upgrade this vague feeling into a precise numerical probability estimate. If you instead use heuristics that yield numerical probabilities, such as finding reference classes, this means side-stepping your black-box module and using an altogether different algorithm instead -- and the probability estimate you'll arrive at this way won't be pertinent to your best analysis that uses the black-box intuition module.

Comment author: Mass_Driver 05 January 2011 03:08:23AM 9 points [-]

This doesn't work great even if you deal with moderate probabilities, because you need high fractions of net worth to get people to stop signaling...if I am a Yankees fan who earns $50,000 a year, I will bet $10 at even odds that the Yankees will win even if my available data would only predict a 40% chance for the Yankees to win. The expected loss of $1 doesn't even come close to the expected loss of appearing not to love the pinstriped sluggers with all my heart.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 05 January 2011 03:31:19AM 2 points [-]

Mass_Driver:

This doesn't work great even if you deal with moderate probabilities, because you need high fractions of net worth to get people to stop signaling...

Yes, and there's also the issue of transaction costs. Especially since transaction costs are basically the opportunity costs of the time spent arranging the bet and the payment, and for people with higher net worth, these opportunity costs are typically also higher.

In response to comment by Vladimir_M on Vegetarianism
Comment author: datadataeverywhere 26 December 2010 06:34:53AM -1 points [-]

Internalizing future negative externalities without accounting for them now doesn't solve the problem, especially if people aren't aware of it. In a larger sense, the negative externalities of climate change are fully internalized to the human race, but as long as they don't affect us yet, we have little individual incentive to care.

Which is to say that a farmer that may go bankrupt in 20 years because the farm will no longer be able to sustain production is not going to increase prices unless the farmer is quite cognizant of the fact and is planning for it. Most won't.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 28 December 2010 07:35:25PM 1 point [-]

Which is to say that a farmer that may go bankrupt in 20 years because the farm will no longer be able to sustain production is not going to increase prices unless the farmer is quite cognizant of the fact and is planning for it. Most won't.

But why? In countries with stable governments and secure property titles, plenty of economic activity takes place with time horizons of this magnitude, and even much longer ones. What is it that makes landowners so irrationally shortsighted?

In response to comment by DanArmak on I'm scared.
Comment author: Perplexed 23 December 2010 02:44:53PM 5 points [-]

Once one groks these three principles, what should one do next?

Succeed.

No, that is exactly wrong. The whole problem is that no course of action guarantees success. The world is throwing curveballs.

My own solution is to shift my terminal values to the meta level. Instead of demanding success of myself (and then feeling bad if success turns out to be unattainable) I reward myself with a gold star if I judge that I have done my best. I live my life so as to have no regrets.

The difficulty (you might call it a trap) in this approach is in the need to retain a brutal honesty. It may be very tempting to respond to failures by giving yourself the star anyways, with the excuse "How could I have known?". How could I have known that wouldn't work? How could I have known that is not what they wanted? How could I have known that my 'friend' was a con artist? There may well have been a way you could have known - clues that you missed.

It can be tricky finding the middle road of learning from your mistakes, without falling into the error of denying mistakes or obsessing over them.

In response to comment by Perplexed on I'm scared.
Comment author: Vladimir_M 24 December 2010 09:17:34PM *  3 points [-]

Perplexed:

My own solution is to shift my terminal values to the meta level. Instead of demanding success of myself (and then feeling bad if success turns out to be unattainable) I reward myself with a gold star if I judge that I have done my best. I live my life so as to have no regrets.

Trouble is, "doing one's best" is an elusive concept. Sure, there are situations where you have a clear goal and see a clear plan of action for how to give your best shot at it, so if you fail despite following it, you can still give yourself a gold star for doing your best. But at least in my experience, typical mistakes and failures in life are nothing like that. Truly critical problems and dilemmas usually can't be tackled with such a clear and accurate model of reality.

When I reflect on my own mistakes and failures, most of them were due to misunderstandings of the situation and errors of judgment that seem clear in retrospect and would have been avoided by someone more shrewd and knowledgeable in the same situations, but were completely beyond my mental and intellectual powers at the time. Others were due to lack of willpower that seems like "failure to do my best" in retrospect, but back at the time, the necessary level of willpower seemed (and probably was) impossible. In both sorts of situations, I did "give my best" in a very real sense, since nothing else could have been expected from me. But this leads to a tautological interpretation of "doing one's best" that would imply that nobody should ever have regrets about anything.

In response to comment by Raemon on Vegetarianism
Comment author: ShardPhoenix 24 December 2010 01:12:48PM *  7 points [-]

At any rate this is an argument in favour of pricing externalities better, not an argument against meat in general.

In response to comment by ShardPhoenix on Vegetarianism
Comment author: Vladimir_M 24 December 2010 06:16:17PM *  4 points [-]

What exactly are the externalities supposed to be here? If the farming land is privately owned and the property rights secure in the long run, the cost of soil depletion is fully internalized. Or is there some wider-scale process going on that presents a collective action problem for farmers?

Comment author: cousin_it 20 November 2010 06:17:16PM *  31 points [-]

LW has helped me a lot. Not in matters of finding the truth; you can be a good researcher without reading LW, as the whole history of science shows. (More disturbingly, you can be a good researcher of QM stuff, read LW, disagree with Eliezer about MWI, have a good chance of being wrong, and not be crippled by that in the least! Huh? Wasn't it supposed to be all-important to have the right betting odds?) No; for me LW is mostly useful for noticing bullshit and cutting it away from my thoughts. When LW says someone's wrong, we may or may not be right; but when LW says someone's saying bullshit, we're probably right.

I believe that Eliezer has succeeded in creating, and communicating through the Sequences, a valuable technique for seeing through words to their meanings and trying to think correctly about those instead. When you do that, you inevitably notice how much of what you considered to be "meanings" is actually yay/boo reactions, or cached conclusions, or just fine mist that dissolves when you look at it closely. Normal folks think that the question about a tree falling in the forest is kinda useless; nerdy folks suppress their flinch reaction and get confused instead; extra nerdy folks know exactly why the question is useless. Normal folks don't let politics overtake their mind; concerned folks get into huge flamewars; but we know exactly why this is counterproductive. I liked reading Moldbug before LW. Now I find him... occasionally entertaining, I guess?

Better people than I are already turning this into a sort of martial art. Look at Yvain cutting down ten guys with one swoop, and then try to tell me LW isn't useful!

Comment author: Vladimir_M 21 November 2010 09:21:03AM *  25 points [-]

cousin_it:

Normal folks don't let politics overtake their mind; concerned folks get into huge flamewars; but we know exactly why this is counterproductive.

Trouble is, the question still remains open: how to understand politics so that you're reasonably sure that you've grasped its implications on your personal life and destiny well enough? Too often, LW participants seem to me like they take it for granted that throughout the Western world, something resembling the modern U.S. regime will continue into indefinite future, all until a technological singularity kicks in. But this seems to me like a completely unwarranted assumption, and if it turns out to be false, then the ability to understand where the present political system is heading and plan for the consequences will be a highly valuable intellectual asset -- something that a self-proclaimed "rationalist" should definitely take into account.

Now, for full disclosure, there are many reasons why I could be biased about this. I lived through a time and place -- late 1980s and early 1990s in ex-Yugoslavia -- where most people were blissfully unaware of the storm that was just beyond the horizon, even though any cool-headed objective observer should have been able to foresee it. My own life was very negatively affected by my family's inability to understand the situation before all hell broke loose. This has perhaps made me so paranoid that I'm unable to understand why the present political situation in the Western world is guaranteed to be so stable that I can safely forget about it. Yet I still have to see some arguments for this conclusion that would pass the standards that LW people normally apply to other topics.

In response to comment by Vladimir_M on What is bunk?
Comment author: gwern 15 November 2010 11:38:50PM 4 points [-]

If it's not presumptuous of me, I'd like the Bogdanov affair removed as an example. I was one of the Wikipedia administrators deeply involved in the BA edit-wars on Wikipedia, and while I originally came to it with an open mind (why I was asked to intervene), quickly there came to be not a single doubt in my mind that the brothers were complete con artists and possess only a talent for self-promotion and media manipulation.

This is unlike string theory, where there are good arguments on both sides and one could genuinely be uncertain.

In response to comment by gwern on What is bunk?
Comment author: Vladimir_M 16 November 2010 06:10:41AM *  2 points [-]

However, would you agree that Bogdanoff brothers' work has been, at least at some points, approved and positively reviewed by credentialed physicists with official and reputable academic affiliations? After all, they successfully published several papers and defended their theses.

Now, it may be that after their work came under intense public scrutiny, it was shown to be unsound so convincingly that it led some of these reviewers to publicly reverse their previous judgments. However, considering that the overwhelming majority of research work never comes under any additional scrutiny beyond the basic peer review and thesis defense procedures, this still seems to me like powerful evidence that the quality of many lower-profile publications in the field could easily be as bad.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 15 November 2010 05:37:45AM *  3 points [-]

More formally, you have an initial distribution of "weights" on possible universes (in the currently most general case it's the Solomonoff prior) that you never update at all. In each individual universe you have a utility function over what happens. When you're faced with a decision, you find all copies of you in the entire "multiverse" that are faced with the same decision ("information set"), and choose the decision that logically implies the maximum sum of resulting utilities weghted by universe-weight.

I've read both the original UDT post and this one, and I'm still not sure I understand this basic point. The only way I can make sense out of it is as follows.

The UDT agent is modeled as a procedure S, and its interaction with the universe as a program P calling that procedure and doing something depending on the return value. Some utility is assigned to each such outcome. Now, S knows the prior probability distribution over all programs that might be calling S, and there is also the input X. So when the call S(X) occurs, the procedure S will consider how the expected utility varies depending on what S(X) evaluates to. However, changing the return value for S(X) affects only those terms in the expected utility calculation that correspond to those programs that might (logically) be calling S with input X, so whatever method is used to calculate that maximum, it effectively addresses only those programs. This restriction of the whole set of programs for the given input replaces the Bayesian updating, hence the name "updateless."

Is this anywhere close to the intended idea, or am I rambling in complete misapprehension? I'd be grateful if someone clarified that for me before I make any additional comments.

Comment author: AdeleneDawner 13 November 2010 05:45:32AM 1 point [-]

Okay, so given that I'm in an apartment and can't fix those things, what should I be doing?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 13 November 2010 08:39:10AM 1 point [-]

I'm not an expert on home security, and I'm not familiar with all the details of your situation, so I don't want to give any advice beyond my knowledge and competence. I'm merely pointing out things where I'm confident that the information I'm giving is accurate. It does seem obvious to me that if your outside doors and windows are reasonably well-secured, it will provide a stronger barrier than anything you can expect from interior doors without very extraordinary effort and investment. So I would definitely focus on the former, as far as security based on physical barriers goes. My impression is that reasonable measures like window grates should be sufficient deterrent for the overwhelming majority of potential intruders.

As for the other things mentioned by various commenters, like weapons, guard dogs, etc., even if I were an expert, there is too much that depends on your specific situation, from the relevant laws in your jurisdiction (for example, even mace is illegal to possess where I live) to your own physique and disposition.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 13 November 2010 06:48:52AM *  5 points [-]

The U.S. Constitution says nothing at all about the issue of secession, and the question was controversial in the years before the Civil War. In retrospect, it seems crazy that states should form a union without specifying whether they'll be allowed to secede from it, but this is what actually happened, with the worst imaginable consequences following eventually. (Though it should be noted that the main focal point of the antebellum constitutional controversies was the issue of nullification rather than secession.)

Needless to say, the seceding Confederate states considered that the states' right to secession was implicit in the U.S. Constitution, which was according to them an arrangement between sovereign states from which they reserved the right to withdraw at will. It's notable that the Confederate Constitution was largely a literal copy of the U.S. one, and the Confederate secessionists made a point by refusing to add anything more about the issue of secession into it.

On the other hand, the ruling precedent in the U.S. constitutional law was set by the post-Civil War Supreme Court decision in Texas v. White. Unsurprisingly, the court ruled that the states have no right to secession, so that the Confederate States had legally remained part of the U.S. throughout the Civil War and Reconstruction, and all the acts of secession and the subsequent legal acts of the Confederacy were thus null and void.

Comment author: NihilCredo 12 November 2010 03:38:25PM 2 points [-]

It seems you're already prepared for all but the worst-case scenario. What about the worst-case scenario - i.e. if he goes completely unhinged and smashes in through the window? Do you have a room you can run into that (a) contains a telephone and (b) has a sturdy lock?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 13 November 2010 04:48:11AM *  0 points [-]

NihilCredo:

Do you have a room you can run into that (a) contains a telephone and (b) has a sturdy lock?

If you're considering the absolute worst-case scenario, i.e. someone who has gained access to your place and is hell-bent on harming you, locking yourself into a room won't help unless it has an extremely sturdy high-security door, which costs a lot of money and requires some difficult work by a skilled professional to install. Ordinary interior doors are not much of a barrier, regardless of what lock you put on them. (Not to even mention how fragile drywall is.)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 13 November 2010 02:23:36AM 3 points [-]

It seems like your apartment has easily accessible windows. I'd consider installing window grates on each such window. They're reasonably priced and easy to mount, and they make breaking in through the window much more difficult.

Comment author: Jack 09 November 2010 05:33:05AM *  5 points [-]

I realize the analogy doesn't perfectly map. Having rare crazy beliefs is a bigger red flag than having common crazy beliefs.

Also, a religion has features that greatly appeal to people in a way country club membership does not and these features may lead people to become or remain members despite disagreeing with the religion's social policy. Plus, though I don't particularly like defending the Catholic church, they don't refuse membership to homosexuals or revoke the membership of couples who use birth control.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 09 November 2010 06:39:01AM *  2 points [-]

Jack:

Plus, though I don't particularly like defending the Catholic church, they don't refuse membership to homosexuals or revoke the membership of couples who use birth control.

Even the claim that "[l]eadership positions are reserved to unmarried males" isn't entirely correct, if ordinary priesthood is counted as a "leadership position." Latin Rite Catholic priests indeed have to be celibate, but there are other Catholic rites that permit married men to become priests, and married priests of other Christian denominations who convert to Catholicism can be accepted without having to renounce either their priesthood or marriage (see here for more detail). On the other hand, even in Eastern Catholic churches, bishops have to be celibate (just like among the Eastern Orthodox). An interesting question is what would happen if a married Anglican bishop converted to Catholicism; I don't think this has ever happened, but it seems like it will soon.

Comment author: AngryParsley 09 November 2010 05:57:51AM *  2 points [-]

I don't think I can give very good answers to your questions. I'm much better at morality discussion closer to the object-level.

But could it be that there are some equally false beliefs -- perhaps even equally "crazy" by whatever criteria you use to differentiate "craziness" from mere falsity -- that you don't recognize as such, and you might be sharing yourself?

Sure, but I wish to have correct beliefs.

In particular, are there some such beliefs that are, unlike traditional religious beliefs, universally shared by respectable people in your society, to the point where it's unwise to be on record as questioning them?

There are lots of things I don't say, especially during job interviews.

are you sure that you would come off as innocent if similar criteria for the assignment of blame were applied to all the institutions to which you extend your support and allegiance?

Actually, yes. I'm pretty sure I am not a supporter or voluntary member of any organization that causes as much harm as the Catholic church.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 09 November 2010 06:23:52AM *  3 points [-]

AngryParsley:

Sure, but I wish to have correct beliefs.

So does everyone, at some level. But in my experience, whenever I felt superior over people because I didn't share some of their beliefs that seemed crazy to me, after several years I'd usually feel embarrassed on recollection, considering how much even stupider stuff I believed myself at the same time. From what I've observed, once you've assessed someone's character and abilities relevant to the business at hand, making conclusions based on their general religious and ideological beliefs is a fool's game, unless perhaps it's something that just screams weirdness.

I'm pretty sure I am not a supporter or voluntary member of any organization that causes as much harm as the Catholic church.

Well, that depends not just on factual questions, but also on normative questions of how exactly harm should be quantified. But still, I'd point out that the same principle applies here. You're talking about an institution that faces strong opposition by many prominent high-status people, and you've clearly been exposed to their convincingly argued accusations against it. However, are you really sure that all the institutions that command much more unanimous respect and allegiance by respectable people, and are attacked only by various disreputable fringe individuals, could not be blamed equally convincingly by a truly neutral observer?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 09 November 2010 06:03:27AM 2 points [-]

You might be interested in this old comment of mine where I touched on this question from a different angle:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/2d9/open_thread_june_2010_part_4/26dm

Comment author: AngryParsley 09 November 2010 04:32:21AM 2 points [-]

I was inspired to write this post after conversing with a real candidate for a real job.

I realize the analogy doesn't perfectly map. Having rare crazy beliefs is a bigger red flag than having common crazy beliefs. But that doesn't eliminate discrimination entirely. Given two comparable candidates, one religious and one an atheist, I'd favor the atheist.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 09 November 2010 05:09:04AM 2 points [-]

AngryParsley:

Having rare crazy beliefs is a bigger red flag than having common crazy beliefs.

Which should lead you to ask yourself the following. You recognize certain widely held religious beliefs as false. However, this is happening in a situation where there exists a large number of people who don't share these beliefs, some of them reputable, high-status, and publicly prominent, and you are aware of their existence and exposed to various arguments they set forth against these beliefs. But could it be that there are some equally false beliefs -- perhaps even equally "crazy" by whatever criteria you use to differentiate "craziness" from mere falsity -- that you don't recognize as such, and you might be sharing yourself? In particular, are there some such beliefs that are, unlike traditional religious beliefs, universally shared by respectable people in your society, to the point where it's unwise to be on record as questioning them?

Furthermore, your post indicates that you have some criteria that you use to assign blame for the misdeeds of members and leaders of an institution to the institution itself, and by extension to those who support it and profess allegiance to it. Now, you haven't spelled out these criteria, so I can only speculate on what exactly they are, but I'd still like to ask: are you sure that you would come off as innocent if similar criteria for the assignment of blame were applied to all the institutions to which you extend your support and allegiance?

Comment author: wedrifid 07 November 2010 07:53:26AM *  1 point [-]

Technical misuse of 'racist'. Bigoted is a potential substitute. Egocentric would serve as spice.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 07 November 2010 06:50:29PM *  7 points [-]

One could speculate on how deep the act actually is here. One recurring feature of the Clippy character is that he attempts to mimic human social behavior in crude and clumsy ways. Maybe Clippy noticed how humans throw accusations of "racism" as an effective way to shame others into shutting up about unpleasant questions or to put them on the defensive, and is now trying to mimic this debating tactic when writing his propaganda comments. So he ends up throwing accusations of "racism" in a way that seems grotesque even by the usual contemporary standards.

Whoever stands behind Clippy, if this is what's actually going on, then hats off for creativity.

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 07 November 2010 04:20:57PM 0 points [-]

Don't see how this remark is relevant, but here's a reply:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/l6/no_evolutions_for_corporations_or_nanodevices/

Comment author: Vladimir_M 07 November 2010 06:34:24PM *  1 point [-]

The main point of that post is clearly correct, but I think the example of corporations is seriously flawed. It fails to appreciate the extent to which successful business practices consists of informal, non-systematic practical wisdom accumulated through long tradition and selected by success and failure in the market, not conscious a priori planning. The transfer of these practices is clearly very different from DNA-based biological inheritance, but it still operates in such ways that a quasi-Darwinian process can take place.

Applying similar analysis to modern science would be a fascinating project. In my opinion, a lot of the present problems with the proliferation of junk science stem not from intentional malice and fraud, but from a similar quasi-Darwinian process fueled by the fact that practices that best contribute to one's career success overlap only partly with those that produce valid science. (And as in the case of corporations, the transfer of these practices is very different from biological inheritance, but still permits quasi-Darwinian selection for effective practices.)

Comment author: cousin_it 05 November 2010 10:32:05AM *  1 point [-]

Yeah, I did the same thing with tests. Wrote about ten of them and rigged the suite to scream "YOU FAIL" at me without even printing the line number. Couldn't believe it when they all passed on the first try :-)

Did you consider that comparing floating point numbers with '==' doesn't make much sense?

No. What do you propose? Use some sort of "comparison tolerance"?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 05 November 2010 08:07:00PM *  1 point [-]

cousin_it:

No. What do you propose? Use some sort of "comparison tolerance"?

That depends on the concrete numerical application. Typically you'd define some threshold for the difference, and use "abs(x-y)<threshold" instead of "x==y", or some variation on that theme. But exact bit-by-bit equality comparisons of floats practically never make sense, since even very simple arithmetic will likely produce rounding errors, so seeing '==' between floats almost always means that something nonsensical is going on. (See e.g. here for some elaboration.)

These issues with limited floating point precision make numerical programming extremely tricky. You have a whole alternative set of rules for arithmetic, very different from those you normally follow on paper.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 04 November 2010 09:12:58PM *  1 point [-]

Tangentially related: a blogger asks visitors to write a correct binary search routine without testing it even once, then test it and report the results.

Haha, it really is more tricky than it sounds. I succeeded (it passed a bunch of tests including various corner cases on first compilation), but I'm not sure if it would be correct if I hadn't been more cautious than usual.

I'm not surprised, though. The human capacity for formal logical inference is extremely unreliable and short-sighted, even for very intelligent people.

I succeeded - look for "Vladimir Slepnev" - but it was a surreal experience.

Did you consider that comparing floating point numbers with '==' doesn't make much sense? (I assume it implements exact value comparison in this language you used, like in C.)

Comment author: satt 03 November 2010 01:21:14PM 1 point [-]

Thanks for listing these examples! They indeed seem to provide counterexamples to the trend of increasing bureaucratization and credentialism, though I must note that they are all several decades old.

True. I thought about acknowledging this in my post, but decided it didn't make much difference because (1) their age would be partly explained by availability bias, because younger scientists are less well-known just because they haven't been around as long, and (2) if I move the bureaucratic cutoff date forward from the early 20th century to the mid-1980s, I find your point of view less credible, because science was already much more oriented around credentials & peer review by then than it was c. 1905.

Still, my list of anecdotal examples is no stronger evidence than taw's. Really, one would have to do a systematic survey of author affiliations in published papers or something to be sure of an actual trend, but I can't be bothered.

However, more importantly, my main point is that bureaucratization tends to have the same negative effect on science as on any other field of human endeavor. The number one tendency in every bureaucracy is that things should be done in such a way that everyone can cover his ass and avoid any personal responsibility no matter what happens.

That's endemic in bureaucracies (or at least all those I've had to deal with!), but I'd expect incentives for arse-covering in any system where people feel a need to protect their image, and that includes honour-and-rep social networks too.

In contrast, productive work always requires personal responsibility: someone must accept the blame if things go wrong, or otherwise there is no incentive to do things right, unless people are driven by sheer personal enthusiasm.

This seems like a fairly impoverished view of motivation to me. What about professionalism: a simple wish to do one's job well, whether one has particular enthusiasm for it or not? There must be people with PhDs out there who dragged themselves through the PhD process and got worthwhile results through sheer force of will rather than special enthusiasm for their project; I'd be amazed if there weren't professional scientists out there fitting that description too. There are probably other motivations too that I can't think of off-the-cuff.

But the modern peer-review system absolves everyone of responsibility -- everyone involved has his little piece of bureaucratic duty, and no matter what happens, there is no personal responsibility at all.

Again, though, I don't see why the lack of personal responsibility (which I think is a slight exaggeration) is unique to bureaucratic science. There's no intrinsic reason why journals where, say, the editor glances over a paper themselves and informally shows it to a few friends before deciding whether or not to publish (instead of soliciting formal peer reviews from experts) would be better in this respect.

Some supposedly "scientific" features of the present system are in fact the height of ass-covering perversity, like for example the "double-blind" peer-review -- how on Earth can you be an expert capable of reviewing a novel research paper, but unable to figure out who the authors are from the content of the paper?

It's certainly possible if the authors aren't already established workers in the expert's field. If I submitted an econometrics/ecology/history/statistics paper to an econometrics/ecology/history/statistics journal with real double-blind review, I'd bet a lot of money that the reviewer(s) couldn't guess who I was! But yes, double-blind (and single-blind) review's often trivial to get around.

So, at the end of the day, I don't see any advantage that the present heavily bureaucratized system might have over the old system that was based on honor and reputation. In my view, the present system functions well only insofar as in many fields, the top people are still driven by enthusiasm and sense of honor and doing their best to keep their field sound.

But surely this is inevitable in any system of science, as long as science is run by people? Regardless of the system used for accepting diamonds and rejecting turds, as long as people are doing the judging, the quality of what's published hinges on the competence & motivations of whoever's running the show, bureaucracy or not.

But this is despite the bureaucratizing tendencies, not thanks to them.

I suspect those tendencies make little difference either way, overall.

In fields where the personal enthusiasm of prominent insiders hasn't been strong enough to keep bureaucratically backed pseudoscience at bay, the mainstream work has long since degenerated into sheer nonsense.

What I think's happening here is that you see poor science that's backed by parts of the establishment, and you're inferring that because the establishment is bureaucratic, bureaucracy's to blame for the poor science. But I doubt the chosen social structure is the root cause. I'd expect similar sections of rot in an Einstein-era honour-based system.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 04 November 2010 07:14:09AM *  5 points [-]

satt:

I don't see why the lack of personal responsibility (which I think is a slight exaggeration) is unique to bureaucratic science. There's no intrinsic reason why journals where, say, the editor glances over a paper themselves and informally shows it to a few friends before deciding whether or not to publish (instead of soliciting formal peer reviews from experts) would be better in this respect.

The contrast I'm pointing out is between a system where each decision and each claim puts the responsible person's reputation on the line, and a system where decisions are made according to established bureaucratic rules that allow everyone involved to escape any personal responsibility no matter what happens (except if crude malfeasance like data forgery or plagiarism is proven).

Thus, for example, if a junk paper gets published in a journal, this should tarnish the reputation of the both the authors and the editor. Yet, in the present bureaucratic system, the editor can comfortably hide behind the fact that the regular bureaucratic procedure was followed, and even the authors can claim that you can't really blame them if their false claims sounded convincing enough for the reviewers (who are in turn anonymous and thus completely absolved of any responsibility). If the existing heavily bureaucratized modes of publishing make it difficult to publish criticism (as is often the case), this situation coupled with the usual human tendencies may easily lead to utter corruption covered by an impeccable bureaucratic facade that makes it impossible to put blame on anyone.

It's certainly possible [that double-blind review works] if the authors aren't already established workers in the expert's field. If I submitted an econometrics/ecology/history/statistics paper to an econometrics/ecology/history/statistics journal with real double-blind review, I'd bet a lot of money that the reviewer(s) couldn't guess who I was! But yes, double-blind (and single-blind) review's often trivial to get around.

The key problem, however, is that blind review is ultimately another way of eliminating personal responsibility. For the reviewer, there is no incentive whatsoever to do a good job: the work is unpaid, uncredited, and without any repercussions no matter how badly it's done. On the other hand, considering how tightly-knit specific research communities typically are, the supposed blindness is a farce more often than not.

What I think's happening here is that you see poor science that's backed by parts of the establishment, and you're inferring that because the establishment is bureaucratic, bureaucracy's to blame for the poor science. But I doubt the chosen social structure is the root cause. I'd expect similar sections of rot in an Einstein-era honour-based system.

Often it's not about poor science being backed by the establishment for ideological reasons (though this also happens), but merely about the fact that a field can be run by a clique that produces junk science under a veneer of bureaucratic perfection, conscientiously going through all the bureaucratic motions despite the actual substance being worthless (or worse).

But, yes, all sorts of pseudoscience also flourished under the Einstein-era system of honor and reputation. Psychoanalysis is the prime example. The question is whether the subsequent bureaucratization has alleviated or exacerbated these problems. My opinion is that, at best, it hasn't put any real barriers against pseudoscience, and arguably, it has made things worse by allowing pseudoscience to be given a veneer of respectability (and sources of funding) much more easily.

Comment author: Mercy 02 November 2010 11:37:41AM *  0 points [-]

A psychotic egoist like Stalin or an non-humanist like Hitler is indeed terrifying but I'm not convinced that giving a great increase in power and intelligence to someone like a Mao or a Lord Lytton, who caused millions of deaths by doing something they thought would improve people's lives, would lead to a worse outcome than we got in reality. Granted, for something like the cultural revolution these mistakes might be subtle enough to get into an AI, but it's hard to imagine them getting a computer to say "yes, the peasants can live on 500 calories a day, increase the tariff" unless they were deliberately trying to be wrong, which they weren't.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 03 November 2010 03:07:13AM *  6 points [-]

Moral considerations aside, the real causes of the mass famines under Mao and Stalin can be understood from a perspective of pure power and political strategy. From the point of view of a strong centralizing regime trying to solidify its power, the peasants are always the biggest problem.

Urban populations are easy to control for any regime that firmly holds the reins of the internal security forces: just take over the channels of food distribution, ration the food, and make obedience a precondition for eating. Along with a credible threat to meet any attempts at rioting with bayonets and live bullets, this is enough to ensure obedience of the urban dwellers. In contrast, peasants always have the option of withdrawing into an autarkic self-sufficient lifestyle, and they will do it if pressed hard by taxation and requisitioning. In addition, they are widely dispersed, making it hard for the security forces to coerce them effectively. And in an indecisive long standoff, the peasants will eventually win, since without buying or confiscating their food surplus, everyone else starves to death.

Both the Russian and the Chinese communists understood that nothing but the most extreme measures would suffice to break the resistance of the peasantry. When the peasants responded to confiscatory measures by withdrawing to subsistence agriculture, they knew they'd have to send the armed forces to confiscate their subsistence food and let them starve, and eventually force the survivors into state-run enterprises where they'd have no more capacity for autarky than the urban populations. (In the Russian case, this job was done very incompletely during the Revolution, which was followed by a decade of economic liberalization, after which the regime finally felt strong enough to finish the job.)

(Also, it's simply untenable to claim that this was due to some special brutality of Stalin and Mao. Here is a 1918 speech by Trotsky that discusses the issue in quite frank terms. Now of course, he's trying to present it as a struggle against the minority of rich "kulaks," not the poorer peasants, but as Zinoviev admitted a few years later, "We [the Bolsheviks] are fond of describing any peasant who has enough to eat as a kulak.")

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 02 November 2010 10:52:34PM 1 point [-]

Yes, that's what I meant by crowd-sourcing.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 02 November 2010 11:47:36PM *  3 points [-]

In fact, I'd say that the principal reason why such a system is not implemented in many areas is the sheer desire for ass-covering. Just imagine all the emperors in various degrees of nakedness who are presently hiding behind thick, impressive-sounding publication records, whose validity would however be seriously brought into question by this practice.

The way things are now, a paper can be retracted or marked as invalid only if outright plagiarism or data faking is proved. Otherwise, even those junk papers that have been debunked so convincingly that their authors were forced to publicly admit it still stand proudly in publication archives, both on paper and online, ready to fool any unsuspecting visitor who stumbles onto them.

Comment author: ciphergoth 02 November 2010 11:05:59PM 1 point [-]

Ah, so it's about whether a plan meets some absolute standard, rather than which plan is best, and the moral is that just because I don't know of a plan that meets standard X is no reason to think your plan will - in fact the reverse.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 02 November 2010 11:26:40PM 4 points [-]

Basically, yes. For instance, the alcohol prohibitionists of Mencken's day were a prime example of the sort of people he targeted with this quote.

Comment author: ciphergoth 02 November 2010 10:43:00PM -2 points [-]

No, it speaks of remedy. It's not about beliefs about the world, but about courses of action, and there he's dead wrong - a course of action can only be bad by comparison to a better alternative.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 02 November 2010 10:55:21PM *  7 points [-]

I don't think either of you are getting it right. I'm not familiar with the context of this particular quote, but knowing it's from Mencken, he's clearly referring to various idealistic busybodies and their grand (and typically disastrously unsound) plans to solve the world's problems. The quote is directed against idealists who assume moral high ground and scoff at those who question their designs.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 01 November 2010 11:52:26AM 0 points [-]

What do you think of peer review vs. crowd-sourcing?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 02 November 2010 10:04:13PM 4 points [-]

I'm not sure what exactly you have in mind by "crowd-sourcing" in this context. Do you mean publishing online in a way that's open for public comments and debate, whose content will come up whenever someone looks up the paper? If that's what you mean, I do have a favorable view of this approach.

Comment author: satt 01 November 2010 02:45:16AM 10 points [-]

It's likely true that nowadays it's unnecessarily harder to establish oneself in science, but I seriously doubt it's so much unnecessarily harder as to warrant the scepticism I see in this subthread.

Off the top of my head, some post-Einstein examples that give me doubt:

  • George R. Price was able to break into population genetics after fleeing the USA and his on-again off-again science career (none of which involved training in population genetics, as far as I know) by sending his work on the Price equation to W. D. Hamilton
  • John R. Skoyles managed to get a speculative single-author publication in Nature while still an undergraduate student
  • Nigel Calder got a similarly speculative Nature publication about ice age cycles despite having no university affiliation (nor any university qualification, as far as I know, although he was/is a science writer)
  • Until earlier this year, PNAS (which is something like the 3rd most prestigious general science journal in the world) accepted papers communicated by National Academy of Sciences members on behalf of non-members

More generally, it's not obvious to me that convincing other scientists to publish one's papers based on personal connections is actually easier (or better) than convincing them to publish one's papers based on peer review.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 01 November 2010 07:38:13AM *  6 points [-]

Thanks for listing these examples! They indeed seem to provide counterexamples to the trend of increasing bureaucratization and credentialism, though I must note that they are all several decades old.

However, more importantly, my main point is that bureaucratization tends to have the same negative effect on science as on any other field of human endeavor. The number one tendency in every bureaucracy is that things should be done in such a way that everyone can cover his ass and avoid any personal responsibility no matter what happens. In contrast, productive work always requires personal responsibility: someone must accept the blame if things go wrong, or otherwise there is no incentive to do things right, unless people are driven by sheer personal enthusiasm.

When Max Planck decided to promote Einstein's work, he was putting his own reputation on the line: his career and prestige would have suffered greatly if it had turned out that he was swindled by a crackpot. But the modern peer-review system absolves everyone of responsibility -- everyone involved has his little piece of bureaucratic duty, and no matter what happens, there is no personal responsibility at all.

Some supposedly "scientific" features of the present system are in fact the height of ass-covering perversity, like for example the "double-blind" peer-review -- how on Earth can you be an expert capable of reviewing a novel research paper, but unable to figure out who the authors are from the content of the paper? Even with a simple "blind" peer review, it's a complete farce, considering how small and tightly-knit any bleeding-edge research community necessarily is: either your paper will be given for review to clueless incompetent outsiders, or you can guess pretty reliably who the "anonymous" insider reviewers are. (And in any case, you know who is on the editorial board, and what nepotistic considerations are driving them!)

So, at the end of the day, I don't see any advantage that the present heavily bureaucratized system might have over the old system that was based on honor and reputation. In my view, the present system functions well only insofar as in many fields, the top people are still driven by enthusiasm and sense of honor and doing their best to keep their field sound. But this is despite the bureaucratizing tendencies, not thanks to them. In fields where the personal enthusiasm of prominent insiders hasn't been strong enough to keep bureaucratically backed pseudoscience at bay, the mainstream work has long since degenerated into sheer nonsense.

Comment author: Jack 01 November 2010 12:00:52AM 1 point [-]

Good stuff. Can you expand on:

For start, Einstein's early 20th century breakthrough into the milieu of elite scientists was performed in a way that would likely be impossible these days.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 01 November 2010 01:39:37AM *  8 points [-]

I'm not an expert on Einstein's biography, but I always had the impression that his path from youthful anonymity to the annus mirabilis papers and the subsequent fame and prestige -- and the discovery of general relativity a decade later, followed by even greater fame and prestige -- was extremely unusual by today's standards. In particular, observe the way the famous 1905 papers were published: a fairly obscure patent bureaucrat and part-time physics student mailed them to Max Planck, one of the top physicists of the time, who was impressed enough to publish them in the top journal of the time and promote them among his colleagues on his own initiative and authority. Such avoidance of bureaucratic and credentialist obstacles is hardly possible nowadays, especially considering the greatly controversial nature of the special relativity paper.

Now, one could argue that a genius of Einstein's caliber would nevertheless be able to jump through all the bureaucratic and credentialist hoops he'd face nowadays, but I can certainly imagine ingenious people put off or discouraged by the present system. Also, it should be noted that, at least according to my impressions, physics is generally among the healthiest and best-functioning areas of science nowadays, and I'm sure this problem is pronounced even more in various fields that are not in such a good shape.

Comment author: Jack 31 October 2010 10:22:21PM 7 points [-]

Einstein wouldn't be considered a scientist by modern criteria?

As far as I can tell the main reason people are blinded to all problems of practice of "science" is the very word "science" itself.

Science by any other name...I think the reason science criticism is difficult and rare is that while the scientific establishment is a mess and desperately needs reform it is constantly under siege by parts of the religious establishment. Good people look at this battle, come to the defense of the lesser evil and ignore the bad in science. It starts as Contrast effect and then turns into Group-serving bias.

Obviously science's enemies aren't equipped to give an accurate critique and her allies are unwilling to undermine their status by offering reasonable criticisms. It actually is a difficult double-bind but more voices that give reasoned and intelligent criticism of science would be good thing.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 31 October 2010 11:06:22PM *  8 points [-]

Jack:

Einstein wouldn't be considered a scientist by modern criteria?

That's certainly a hyperbole, but not one without a good point. For start, Einstein's early 20th century breakthrough into the milieu of elite scientists was performed in a way that would likely be impossible these days. Another significant observation is that while peer review has become something like a sacred mantra in determining what qualifies as "science" nowadays, Einstein's attempt to publish a paper on gravitational waves in Physical Review in 1936 "may have been his only genuine encounter with anonymous peer review."

(As you can read in the linked article, this episode resulted in a controversy in which Einstein was wrong, and the author uses this fact as a point in favor of the contemporary peer review system. However, regardless of this particular incident, the fact that Einstein and his contemporaries and predecessors did without this institution should throw some cold water on the modern common practice of using peer review as the gold standard for what constitutes valid science.)

Comment author: rwallace 30 October 2010 06:41:57PM 2 points [-]

But there are lots of pieces of public information that require no special abilities to access, recognize as reliable, and apply in practice, by the usual definitions of the words involved, and that lots of people would still benefit from following and don't. Off the top of my head:

  1. Don't commit crime, morality aside, the rewards aren't worth the risks.

  2. Don't take hard drugs like heroin, they really do screw you up.

  3. The risk of being killed in an air crash is negligible. The risk of being killed in a road accident is anything but. Make your travel arrangements accordingly.

  4. Don't do crash diets, you'll just put back all the weight as soon as you go off the diet. But do eat sensibly, keeping your weight down is a good thing.

  5. If you're going to have a credit card, don't run up big debts on it.

  6. Ration the amount of television you watch.

All straightforward advice, but millions of people suffer reduced quality of life or worse from failing to follow some of it.

It seems perfectly sensible to me to ask whether we can put together other straightforward pieces of advice that we would do well to follow but have thus far missed.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 31 October 2010 08:22:36PM *  1 point [-]

Sure, but to continue with the investment analogy, these pieces of advice would be equivalent to the advice that you should invest your money into assets with positive expected returns, and not into games of chance with negative expected gains. In other words, there exists a certain baseline level of conventional wisdom that is common knowledge, and the only people who don't follow it are those who are exceptionally irrational, unintelligent, or suffer from poor self-control. So, the problem in those cases is how to overcome irrationality and lack of self-control, not how to acquire information, which is trivially available.

In contrast, what I meant by "getting ahead in life" is analogous to investing in an exceptionally profitable way, i.e. figuring out ways to make advantageous decisions beyond the trivially available common knowledge (possibly even contradicting it where it turns out to be inaccurate). Here, the same principle that underlies the weak EMH implies that public information will be worthless unless you're exceptional in some way, since any broadly useful and unambiguous public information would already have become part of the universally known conventional wisdom.

To take one example mentioned in the post, when it comes to ROI on various education programs, you'll notice that the public information is hopelessly confused and contradictory. For each source that suggests one thing, you'll find another that claims the opposite, and also a third one that says they're both unsubstantiated nonsense. Ultimately, if you want to make a decisions better than vague suggestions of your intuition and common knowledge -- in other words, to do anything beyond merely avoiding decisions that are clearly crazy -- you either have to be exceptionally capable of assessing the available information or privy to insider information.

Comment author: simplicio 30 October 2010 05:10:09AM 2 points [-]

...true beliefs that will have negative signaling consequences or drastically reduce one's happiness.

Do you have some examples of such beliefs?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 30 October 2010 06:12:54AM *  11 points [-]

The problem with the most poignant examples is that it's impossible to find beliefs that signal low status and/or disreputability in the modern mainstream society, and are also uncontroversially true. The mention of any concrete belief that is, to the best of my knowledge, both true and disreputable will likely lead to a dispute over whether it's really true. Yet, claiming that there are no such beliefs at all is a very strong assertion, especially considering that nobody could deny that this would constitute a historically unprecedented state of affairs.

To avoid getting into such disputes, I'll give only two weaker and (hopefully) uncontroversial examples.

As one example, many people have unrealistic idealized views of some important persons in their lives -- their parents, for example, or significant others. If they subject these views to rational scrutiny, and perhaps also embark on fact-finding missions about these persons' embarrassing past mistakes and personal failings, their new opinions will likely be more accurate, but it may make them much unhappier, and possibly also shatter their relationships, with all sorts of potential awful consequences. This seems like a clear and realistic example where less accurate beliefs are in the best interest of everyone involved.

Or, to take another example, the post mentions people who expend some effort to follow certain forms of religious observance. For many people in various religious and ethnic groups, such behavior produces pleasant feelings of one's own virtuousness, as well as positive signals to others that one is a committed, virtuous, and respectable member of the community, with all sorts of advantages that follow from that. Now, if such a person scrutinizes the beliefs on which this behavior is based, and concludes that they're just superstitious nonsense, they will be forced to choose between the onerous and depressing burden of maintaining a dishonest facade or abandoning their observance and facing awful social consequences. I don't see how this can be possibly seen as beneficial, even though it would mean that their beliefs would become closer to reality.

Comment author: JenniferRM 30 October 2010 02:38:08AM *  2 points [-]

It would be crazy to expect to reap "extraordinary profits" from knowing the average number of years a marriage lasts before a divorce, the primary causes thereof, and the average ages and costs to each participant.

It would be reasonable to expect that the knowledge could help someone to avoid a marriage that was likely to end in divorce, or to help them prevent divorce through something obvious like not spending enough time together.

I'm not looking for rocket science or magical secrets, I'm looking for an honest overview of the sturdy facts upon which normal lives rest :-)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 30 October 2010 03:10:04AM *  0 points [-]

JenniferRM:

It would be crazy to expect to reap "extraordinary profits" from knowing the average number of years a marriage lasts before a divorce, the primary causes thereof, and the average ages and costs to each participant.

Considering how many marriages fail with very sad (and costly) consequences, having useful knowledge that would enable you to avoid such an outcome definitely counts as "extraordinary profit" in my book!

The statistics you mention are easy to look up, but when it comes to an accurate model of the causes of marriage problems and the ways to solve and avoid them in practice, this is a very good example of an issue where good advice is extremely hard to separate from the torrents of unsubstantiated nonsense that are thrown in one's face on every corner, and where it's hard to overcome one's own biases.

I'm not looking for rocket science or magical secrets, I'm looking for an honest overview of the sturdy facts upon which normal lives rest :-)

Such seemingly easy questions are often in fact extremely difficult! To get accurate answers to them, you have to fight your way through multiple thick layers of biases, rationalizations, and distortions. First you have the idealizations and rationalizations in the stories people tell themselves, then the tendency to pronounce respectably idealized opinions instead of realistic harshly cynical views -- and last but not least, your own biases that may prevent you from accepting the often unpleasant truths.

Comment author: JenniferRM 30 October 2010 01:05:59AM 1 point [-]

I'd be OK with a book that gave "all the usual advice" of this sort. I'm not expecting the book to describe an optimal life, just a semi-typical life and the logic that justified the decisions at each stage. Part of the reason that I'm looking for the book is so that I can try to merge this sort of bottom up "actuarial model" that has something like "the base rate for normal lives" with a top down analysis of possible future trends and how they may change people's lives. Then I can look for places where those ways of thinking about the future seem to sharply diverge (signs of crisis or opportunity), and where they are likely to predict basically the same thing (things I'm more likely to be able to count on).

In the meantime it seems like there is potentially a lot of prosaic stuff of the sort that various old people would like to tell young people about how "not to make the retrospectively obvious mistake I made" with respect to actions at 20, 25, 30, 35, 40, 45, 50, 55 and so on. Each of those ages makes me think of distinct sets of life challenges that I have relatively little personal experience with, but I imagine they could go a bit better if I did a little prep work in advance, guided by grounded data.

Maybe someone has already collated that data into a book for some reason? If so, I want to read it :-)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 30 October 2010 02:47:09AM *  1 point [-]

JenniferRM:

In the meantime it seems like there is potentially a lot of prosaic stuff of the sort that various old people would like to tell young people about how "not to make the retrospectively obvious mistake I made" with respect to actions at 20, 25, 30, 35, 40, 45, 50, 55 and so on. Each of those ages makes me think of distinct sets of life challenges that I have relatively little personal experience with, but I imagine they could go a bit better if I did a little prep work in advance, guided by grounded data.

In my experience, when it comes to sincere advice from older folks, it's extremely difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff. This is both because the world is changing very rapidly these days and because, contrary to the usual saying, most people's hindsight is very far from 20/20. People are often oblivious to how much things have changed since their youth, and unable to distinguish true instances of correct and incorrect planning from random luck.

A huge problem here is that honest reflection about one's past mistakes, missed opportunities, and suboptimal decisions tends to be very painful and unpleasant, and people consequently prefer to tell themselves (let alone others!) a highly distorted and idealized story of their life and accomplishments. When they're giving advice, this problem is exacerbated by their additional propensity to signal respectability by telling an idealized story about how things should work in an ideal world, not an honest-to-God cynical story about how they really work. (For which I can't really blame them, considering how often the latter would sound crude and offensive. Of course, as with most human hypocrisy, this idealization mainly happens at unconscious levels, not as conscious deception.)

In response to Why should you vote?
Comment author: Vladimir_M 30 October 2010 02:16:31AM *  0 points [-]

The real crux of the issue is that people vote mainly for signaling value. For nearly all people, the primary motivation for their political beliefs is to signal status, respectability, and/or adherence to the groups they identify with. (The latter can mean adherence to some particular faction, sect, ideology, ethnic group, etc., but also to the whole country and its abstract ideals in general.) Accordingly, the motivation for voting is to enable a symbolic expression of such beliefs that reinforces and signals them, much like a religious ritual.

So, to answer your question realistically: if the reward in good feelings and (perhaps) status signaling among some group of people you care about is high enough to justify the effort, then it is rational for you to vote. In contrast, the attempts to demonstrate that one should vote because of some deep moral principles or probabilistic considerations are pure rationalization.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 29 October 2010 09:48:53PM *  2 points [-]

The trouble with the sort of advice you seek is that it's subject to the same principle that underlies the weak efficient markets hypothesis. If you believe you've found some information that will help you improve your life and get ahead, you should ask yourself why everyone else isn't already following that same advice.

Now, there are several possibilities: perhaps the advice actually turns out to be bad when analyzed correctly, or it is in fact widely known and applied, but you were oblivious to it until now, or you are somehow specially privileged to be privy to this information, or you have a special talent from discerning truth from falsity among all the contradictory and unsubstantiated advice given by different people, or maybe the advice applies only to a rare sort of people to which you happen to belong. However, what is impossible is that there might exist public information that requires no special abilities to access, recognize as reliable, and apply in practice, and that would still enable you to get ahead in life -- just like there is no possibility of such public information that would enable you to reap extraordinary profits from investment.

It seems to me that this implies that you won't find any books of the sort you're looking for, or worse yet, that you'll find plenty of books giving false, unsubstantiated, and often contradictory advice. In particular, I don't think popular microeconomics books can offer much useful advice beyond what's already known as conventional wisdom and common sense. (And based on those I've seen, I'd say that the economists' spherical-cow model of human behavior is often illuminating despite its simplicity, but sometimes it makes them miss the point spectacularly, mainly in situations where more subtle signaling considerations are crucial.)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 29 October 2010 09:15:16PM *  5 points [-]

The main problem I see with this post is that it assumes that it's always advantageous to find out the truth and update one's beliefs towards greater factual and logical accuracy. Supposedly, the only danger of questioning things too much is that attempts to do so might malfunction and instead move one towards potentially dangerous false beliefs (which I assume is meant by the epithets such as "nutty" and "crazy").

Yet I find this assumption entirely unwarranted. The benefits of holding false beliefs can be greater than the costs. This typically happens when certain false beliefs have high positive signaling value, but don't imply any highly costly or dangerous behavior. Questioning and correcting such beliefs can incur far more cost than benefit; one can try to continue feigning them, but for most people it will be at least somewhat difficult and unpleasant. There are also many situations where the discovery of truth can make one's life miserable for purely personal reasons, and it's in the best interest of one's happiness to avoid snooping and questioning things too much.

It seems to me that the problem for uncompromising truth-seekers is not just how to avoid invalid reasoning leading to crazy false beliefs, but also how to avoid forming true beliefs that will have negative signaling consequences or drastically reduce one's happiness. Now, maybe you would argue that one should always strive for truth no matter what, but this requires a separate argument in addition to what's presented in the above post -- which is by itself insufficient to address the reasons for why people are "afraid to think fully about certain subjects."

In response to Teachers vs. Tutors
Comment author: JoshuaZ 27 October 2010 12:18:15AM 2 points [-]

Let me suggest another reason that I don't think is in general the case for why people hire tutors but may be why when they do hire tutors some people are willing to pay so much: Having private tutors for children is a status symbol in some contexts. And that status is higher if one is paying more for the tutors.

That said, I suspect that in actual practice your first four reasons are likely the main causes.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 28 October 2010 08:18:29AM *  1 point [-]

JoshuaZ:

Having private tutors for children is a status symbol in some contexts. And that status is higher if one is paying more for the tutors.

Is it really a high-status signal? To me, it primarily signals that they have low-ability kids who are finding it hard to keep up with the educational expectations imposed by the social class they were born into.

Maybe my social radar isn't well-calibrated in this regard, but it has always seemed to me that successful kids are expected to breeze through school with their own smarts and abilities, while extra tutoring looks like an unpleasant remedial measure. (This in contrast to various extracurricular activities that are a often a matter of parents' intense, and sometimes obsessive, desire for status-signaling.)

In response to Teachers vs. Tutors
Comment author: Vladimir_M 28 October 2010 07:50:05AM *  3 points [-]

Several hypotheses occur to me, all of which are probably true to some extent.

First, a teacher working in official capacity can't give useful cynical advice on how to game the system. A private tutor has no such constraints.

Second, top-rate minds rarely, if ever go for careers in full-time teaching. They might become university professors who like to do some teaching as part-time work alongside research (and perhaps entrepreneurship), but definitely not full-time teachers. Geniuses want far greater intellectual challenges, and they want to climb much higher peaks of accomplishment, status, power, and money. So if you want great minds to teach you, their time will be available only on a part-time basis and for a very steep price.

Third, in my experience, one-on-one conversations with someone knowledgeable are far more efficient than group classes for learning complex technical and math-heavy subjects. Lectures are great for learning about soft topics like e.g. history, but in subjects that deal with some complicated and non-intuitive formalism, the lecturer will inevitably be slow and boring for some students and too fast and unclear for others, so the average worth of the lecture per student has a pretty low upper bound, no matter how good the lecturer might be. In contrast, a highly skilled private tutor can figure out exactly what the student needs and make far better use of the same time, so I don't think it's irrational to value top-grade private tutoring far more than top-grade group classes.

Comment author: [deleted] 25 October 2010 07:35:40PM 2 points [-]

Someone who claims to be confused about the trolley problem with clearly enumerated options and outcomes, but not confused about a real world problem with options and outcomes that are difficult to enumerate and predict, is being dishonest about his level of confusion. A virtue ethicist should be able to tell me whether pushing the fat man in front of the train is more virtuous, less virtuous, or as virtuous as letting the five other folks die.

In response to comment by [deleted] on The Problem With Trolley Problems
Comment author: Vladimir_M 25 October 2010 08:14:29PM *  -1 points [-]

I think you misunderstood my comment, and in any case, that's a non sequitur, because the problem is not only with the complexity, but also the artificiality of the situation. I'll try to state my position more clearly.

Let's divide moral problems into three categories, based on: (a) how plausible the situation is in reality, and (b) whether the problem is unrealistically oversimplified in terms of knowledge, predictability, and inter-personal utility comparisons:

  1. Plausible scenario, realistically complex.
  2. Implausible scenario, realistically complex.
  3. Implausible scenario, oversimplified.

(The fourth logical possibility is not realistic, since any plausible scenario will feature realistic complications.) For example, trolley problems are in category (3), while problems that appear in reality are always in categories (1) and (2), and overwhelmingly in (1).

My claim is that utilitarianism provides an exact methodology for working with type 3 problems, but it completely fails for types 1 and 2, practically without exception. On the other hand, virtue ethics turns out to be more fuzzy and subjective when compared with utilitarianism in type 3 problems (though it still handles them tolerably well), but unlike utilitarianism, it is also capable of handling types 1 and 2, and it usually handles the first (and most important) type extremely well. Therefore, it is fallacious to make general conclusions about the merits of these approaches from thought experiments with type 3 problems.

Comment author: jsalvatier 25 October 2010 04:09:45PM *  0 points [-]

Thanks for your help, I think you've clarified a lot for me.

Would you classify propositional logic/first-order-logic as necessarily metamathematical?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 25 October 2010 07:19:29PM *  1 point [-]

I'm not sure what you mean by "necessarily metamathematical."

Propositional logic isn't powerful enough to be of that much use in metamathematics. Its main applications are technical. Most notably, it's the fundamental basis for digital systems, but it's also used in various methods for optimization, formal verification, etc. Consequently, it also has huge importance in theoretical computer science.

First-order logic, on the other hand, is principally a tool of metamathematics. Sometimes it's used in a semi-formal way as a convenient shorthand for long and cumbersome natural-language sentences. But its principal applications are metamathematical, and its significance stems from the fact that it's powerful enough to formalize "normal" mathematics, which then enables you to reason about that formalism mathematically, and thus examine the foundations of math using mathematical reasoning. (Hence the "meta.")

Comment author: jsalvatier 25 October 2010 04:31:08AM 0 points [-]

This mostly started because I was trying to learn stochastic differential equations and to a lesser extent topology. I became unsatisfied with my understanding of set theory (not sure how to answer questions like "when I construct a set, what am I iterating over?"), and to a lesser extent measure theory. When I went to get the foundations of set theory, I realized I wasn't even very familiar with first order logic, and I continued down the rabbit hole.

At the moment I am not especially interested in questions like "is this theory consistent". I am primarily interested in how one does the fundamental theories of math in a way that bottoms out, meaning I can see and enumerate the notions or procedures I am just taking for granted or defining. If propositional logic was just constructing a specific context free grammer and saying statements constructed in this manner are called 'proofs' for this grammar I think that would satisfy me (though it doesn't look like this is all logic involves). I could easily be using the phrase "foundations of math" incorrectly; please tell me if I am.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 25 October 2010 05:05:52AM *  1 point [-]

Then foundations texts are not what you're looking for. If I understand you correctly, you seem to be confused about the way sets and other basic constructs are used in normal mathematical prose, and you'd like to learn formal logic and formal proof systems, and then use this knowledge to tackle your problem.

Unfortunately, that's not a feasible way to go, because to learn metamathematics, you first have to be proficient in regular mathematics -- and even when you learn it, it won't help you in understanding standard human-friendly math texts, except insofar as the experience improves your general math skills. Moreover, formal set theory is about esoteric questions that are very rarely relevant for non-foundational areas like differential equations, in which informal naive set theory is nearly always adequate. (In topology you might run into foundational issues, depending on what exactly you're after.)

So, what you really need is an introductory text about classical mathematical reasoning. I'm not familiar with any such books in English, but the book nhamman recommended (How to Prove It) seems to be exactly what you're looking for, judging by the Google preview.

Comment author: jsalvatier 25 October 2010 02:49:00AM 0 points [-]

The meta-theory parts, so that I am learning just how to make proofs in theory X (e.g. propositional logic), and not learning how to prove things things about theory X proofs. Introduction to Mathematical Logic claims that all theories can be formalized; learning how to work in a theory first and then later possibly coming back to learn how to prove things about proofs in that theory seems like a good way to avoid being confused, and that's largely my goal. Does that clarify?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 25 October 2010 03:28:30AM *  0 points [-]

That depends on what you want to use formal logic for. If you just want some operational knowledge of propositional logic for working with digital circuits, then yes, any digital systems textbook will teach you that much without any complex math. Similarly, you can learn the informal basics of predicate logic by just figuring out how its formulas map onto English sentences, which will enable you to follow its usual semi-formal usage in regular math prose. But if you want to actually study math foundations, then you need full rigor from the start.

Perhaps there is some confusion about what it is precisely that you want to learn. Could you list some concrete mathematical problems and theories that you'd like to understand, or some applications for which you'd like to learn the necessary math?

Comment author: jsalvatier 25 October 2010 01:19:46AM 0 points [-]

Does one need meta-theory to work from propositional logic to set theory? Can I safely ignore those parts (perhaps coming back later) if my goal is to learn do theory and not to say something about theory?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 25 October 2010 01:35:54AM 0 points [-]

I'm not sure I understand your question. What exactly would you want to skip, and why?

Comment author: jsalvatier 25 October 2010 12:39:38AM 0 points [-]

I hope I am not imposing, but Cook's notes have confused me. The first set introduces a syntax which is fine, but then it introduces semantics and starts using several terms that haven't yet been defined (iff, maps and sets) are these part of meta-theory and conceptually different from being part of propositional logic? What am I missing?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 25 October 2010 01:10:48AM *  0 points [-]

Yes, these are concepts from the meta-theory, i.e. the language in which you speak about the formal logic you're defining. When you define, say, sets of formulas, or maps (i.e. functions) from atoms to truth values, these objects exist outside of the formal system (i.e logic) under discussion.

Now of course, you can ask how come we're talking about sets (and functions and other objects which are sets), when we're just defining the formal logic we'll use to axiomatize the set theory. The answer is that you have to start from somewhere; you can't start speaking if you don't already have a language. For this, you use the existing mathematics whose logical foundations are imperfectly formalized and intuitive. This trails off into deep philosophical issues, but you can look at it this way: before embarking on meta-mathematics, imperfectly formalized mathematics is the most rigorous logical tool available, and we're trying to "turn it against itself," to see what it has to say about its own foundations.

Comment author: jsalvatier 25 October 2010 12:23:44AM 0 points [-]

I don't understand why this should be significantly easier, but I'll take your word for it; a formal system is a formal system, I suppose.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 25 October 2010 12:48:27AM 0 points [-]

Take the axioms of ZFC, Peano arithmetic, or some other familiar theory and try writing them down in a logic formalism that features only the NAND connective, and you'll see what I'm talking about. (Better yet, try devising a formal proof system using such formalism!)

Comment author: jsalvatier 24 October 2010 08:27:30PM *  0 points [-]

Your road map is helpful. Thanks :)

I didn't mean to say that you couldn't use what you had derived later on, but if you can define a theory with with 1 operator, why do it with more? Is there a formal concept of an alias in math (for example, "a implies b" could be an alias for "(not a) or b")?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 24 October 2010 09:22:24PM *  2 points [-]

jsalvatier:

I didn't mean to say that you couldn't use what you had derived later on, but if you can define a theory with with 1 operator, why do it with more?

Because it's far easier to work that way. You don't need ten different digits to work with natural numbers either, but we still do it for convenience. When you see the formula (p&q)->r, it's much easier to figure out what's going on than if it's in the form ((p|q)|(p|q))|(r|r). (Here "|" is the Sheffer symbol, i.e. NAND, which is by itself functionally complete.)

Is there a formal concept of an alias in math (for example, "a implies b" could be an alias for "(not a) or b")?

Math texts often introduce some notational aliases to make the text more readable, and logic texts do it almost invariably. For example, in the standard syntax of first-order logic, "+" is a binary function symbol, and "=" is a binary predicate, but it's still customary to introduce easier to read notation "x+y" and "x=y" where it should be "+xy" and "=xy". However, these conventions don't have any implications for the actual results being proven and discussed; the theorems still talk about formulas containing "+xy", and you just translate on the fly between that notation and the intuitive one as necessary.

In contrast, introducing additional operators into your definition of logic formulas changes things significantly, since now all your proofs have to account for these additional sorts of well-formed formulas, and also the formal proof system you use must be able to handle them. On the other hand, a good choice of a non-minimal functionally complete set of operators will make the entire work much easier to handle. So in practice, a non-minimal set is normally used. You can also use notation conventions like p->q instead of (~p v q) as long as their relations with the formal syntax are clear and simple enough. (Which definitely wouldn't be the case if you based the entire logic on just NAND and then tried to define AND, OR, etc. as notational aliases.)

Comment author: jsalvatier 24 October 2010 07:40:28PM *  0 points [-]

This LW thread seems relevant.

In particular this summary of resources has sections on logic and foundations. There's a little bit of difference between that thread topic and my topic, which is that I am interested in learning the fundamentals of math for themselves (and doing further math) rather than only LW relevant math.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 24 October 2010 08:13:43PM *  1 point [-]

The links I posted in that thread are, to my knowledge, the best free online resources. If you go through Cook's lecture notes, and then continue with the foundations text by Podnieks, it will be pretty much what you're looking for, up to and including the basics of set theory. I'm not familiar with literature in measure theory, though.

Regarding your stated preferences, I'm not sure if you can find math textbooks that use formal context-free grammar to define well-formed formulas. However, it's typically done using recursive definitions that are trivial to formalize as CFGs, so it shouldn't be a problem. In addition, I don't understand what benefit you see in formalizations of propositional logic with only two operators. It will just complicate the exposition and make it less understandable. (And why stop there? You can do it with only one.)

Comment author: JoshuaZ 23 October 2010 10:52:34PM 4 points [-]

The point of using perfect information problems is that they should be simpler to handle. If a moral system can't handle the perfect information problems then it certainly can't handle the more complicated problems where there is a lack of perfect information. In this regard, this is similar to looking at Newcomb's Problem. The problem itself will never come up in that form. But if a decision theory can't give a coherent response to Newcomb's then there's a problem.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 23 October 2010 11:04:59PM *  4 points [-]

JoshuaZ:

The point of using perfect information problems is that they should be simpler to handle. If a moral system can't handle the perfect information problems then it certainly can't handle the more complicated problems where there is a lack of perfect information.

Suppose however that system A gets somewhat confused on the simple perfect-information problem, while system B handles it with perfect clarity -- but when realistic complications are introduced, system B ends up being far more confused and inadequate than A, which maintains roughly the same level of confusion. In this situation, analysis based on the simple problem will suggest a wrong conclusion about the overall merits of A and B.

I believe that this is in fact the case with utilitarianism versus virtue ethics. Utilitarianism will give you clear and unambiguous answers in unrealistic simple problems with perfect-information, perfectly predictable consequences, and an intuitively obvious way to sum and compare utilities. Virtue ethics might get somewhat confused and arbitrary in these situations, but it's not much worse for real-world problems -- in which utilitarianism is usually impossible to apply in a coherent and sensible way.

Comment author: [deleted] 23 October 2010 09:38:06PM 1 point [-]

Sure. This is sort of idealized, Spock-politics. Issues of irrationality and signaling are a whole other kettle of fish. They've also been extensively discussed on this site.

The thing is, a network of axioms, facts, and their implications is hard enough to understand. If we wanted to understand the differences between different people's beliefs, on any subject, we'd need to tackle a very scary mathematical/computational problem.

I am aware that the mere mention of politics gets on your nerves. They are, however, a good example of a sort of belief that

  1. Just about everybody has. Lots of salient examples available that everyone will recognize.

  2. Differs a lot from person to person.

  3. People (at least the smart and well-informed ones) spend time trying to reconcile and make coherent.

So you hate politics. What else do almost all people have opinions about, where the opinions vary, and people bother with implications and internal coherence?

In response to comment by [deleted] on Three kinds of political similarity
Comment author: Vladimir_M 23 October 2010 10:30:12PM *  2 points [-]

No, I don't hate politics. In fact, I enjoy discussing it if it's done the right way; those things that get on my nerves, I simply ignore. With posts like this one, I see some potential for an interesting discussion, but for this to happen, it is necessary to clarify some misconceptions and make sure we stick to reality, not false idealizations and metaphysical fictions.

The trouble here is that analyzing the structure of people's political beliefs while ignoring signaling and related considerations is like trying to analyze the structure of the atom nucleus while ignoring the strong interaction. It is simply too large a step away from reality to allow for any accurate discussion.

It's easiest to see this if you just ask people to state some of the core principles underlying their political and ideological beliefs, and then do some Socratic questioning about their various implications. It's very easy to get them into a self-contradiction, or to demonstrate that a straightforward deduction from these principles leads to something they'd never subscribe to. At the end, you'll get a stream of annoyed and incoherent special pleading and rationalizations aimed to uphold the positions your interlocutor deems to be desirable and respectable, not a coherent logical structure where you might start locating the root of your disagreements.

Comment author: [deleted] 23 October 2010 09:13:30PM 1 point [-]

I think you misunderstand, though. Just label the three budget options A, B, and C. There's no need to rank them. There's no need even to know what the question was about.

If you have a long questionnaire and many respondents, you have a big matrix, each column being a person's responses to all the questions. These are labeled arbitrarily. Zero or one or something. Looking at the covariance matrix tells you which answers are correlated with which other answers; clusters and outliers appear. "Radicalness" is defined simply as low correlation with other columns: low likelihood of giving the same multiple-choice answers as other people did.

There's arbitrariness in the choice of questions, but it's not quite as arbitrary as you think.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Three kinds of political similarity
Comment author: Vladimir_M 23 October 2010 09:43:31PM *  3 points [-]

I understand the general approach; my response was to this concrete budget-based proposal. However, you say:

There's arbitrariness in the choice of questions, but it's not quite as arbitrary as you think.

It is in fact extremely arbitrary. You're avoiding the arbitrariness necessary for defining a normed vector space of political positions by offloading the same arbitrariness to the choice of questions in this model. Both approaches would likely correctly identify extreme outliers that are far from the mainstream, but the measured amount of variation within clustered groups would be, in both cases, an equally arbitrary reflection of the model author's preconceptions.

To take an extreme example, you could have a hundred questions, ninety of which deal with various intricacies of Christian theology, while the rest deal with human universals. If you administered them to a representative sample of the world's population, your model would tell you that the opinions of Christians span a much wider range of views than the opinions of non-Christians. The same principle applies -- perhaps less obviously, but no less powerfully -- to any other conceivable questionnaire.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 23 October 2010 09:30:30PM 1 point [-]

The main problem I see with your discussion is that it fails to distinguish between the face value of beliefs and their implicit signaling value. If you try to disentangle the internal logical structure of a typical (smart and well-informed) person's political and ideological beliefs, you will not find a neat logical network of axioms, facts, and their implications, but a jumbled mess of extremely vague propositions whose logical connection with their concrete positions is tenuous at best, and with a bunch of seemingly random unprincipled exceptions. The entire structure will reflect status- and affiliation-signaling considerations far more than logical and factual accuracy.

For example, you list "democracy with universal suffrage is the best form of government" as a core influential belief that might determine a wide range of someone's positions. But if you try to analyze what this belief says, you'll see that it's in fact extremely vague, and implies nothing concrete without an entire hairball of implicit beliefs, preferences, and values that are normally associated with this proposition in our culture, with signaling implications hopelessly entangled with reasoning all along the way.

Without undertaking the tremendously difficult task of disentangling this hairball, your approach will still lead to people talking past each other. (Or worse, understanding the implicit conflict instinctively and responding accordingly.)

Comment author: magfrump 23 October 2010 08:43:23PM 3 points [-]

If we used some kind of resource distribution to acquire the information; i.e. "you have a budget how much do you spend on what" you would (in addition to learning how little people know about economics) have some pretty solid numbers to work with in defining a metric.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 23 October 2010 08:53:58PM *  2 points [-]

The issues of budget allocation are only a subset of people's political opinions. But even with concrete budget numbers, the metric still cannot be objective.

Suppose you have three people who advocate, respectively, a $700B military budget, a $350B military budget, and a $0 budget (i.e. complete abolition of the armed forces). Clearly, common sense tells us that the first two people have a large difference of opinion, but it pales in comparison with the extremism of the third one's position, and it makes no sense to claim that the distances 1-2 and 2-3 are equal, even though the difference in numbers is the same. So again you have to introduce some arbitrary scaling to define this distance.

Moreover, the differences of opinion on different budget items cannot be compared directly based on just the amounts of money allocated. The budged of the FDA is only a few billion, but abolishing the FDA is a far more radical proposition that cutting back, say, the military budget by ten times what the FDA now gets. Again, you have to introduce some arbitrary criteria to compare these numbers.

So, ultimately, you'll end up producing arbitrary numbers no matter what.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 23 October 2010 08:28:23PM 3 points [-]

SarahC:

One thing we do know is that if we project all the opinions onto a set of dimensions that we like -- for example, the old standby of liberal/conservative and authoritarian/libertarian -- we can start to measure "political diversity." People who describe themselves as Democrats, for example, span a much wider range of views than people who describe themselves as "Republicans." Implicitly, we're putting a Euclidean distance on a high-dimensional space, projected onto a few dimensions.

Trouble is, any concrete definition of this distance will be arbitrary. Even with a single dimension, it is only possible to construct an ordinal scale, and there is no objective way to define distance. With multiple dimensions, there is the additional problem of how to make different dimensions commensurable. By varying these arbitrary parameters, any such calculation can be manipulated to reach very different conclusions.

An assertion that people in one group have a wider range of views than those in another can be defended only insofar as common-sense clearly leads to such a conclusion. If this is not the case, then the answer given by all this flashy math will be determined by your own preconceptions you put into the model, not some objective truth.

Comment author: Alicorn 23 October 2010 06:27:05PM 6 points [-]

Well, if you aren't sure exactly how much money you need, you'd want to err on the side of taking too much so you don't risk making two transactions.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 23 October 2010 06:42:06PM *  3 points [-]

Yes, but on several occasions, I have heard people explicitly say that they would take more cash just because it's supposedly less of a rip-off to pay the same fee on a much larger amount. So it's not a hypothesis about their observed behavior, but their clearly expressed reasoning.

(Plus, you probably don't want to take and carry around a significant amount of extra cash when you're half-drunk in a bar, and it's just a short time before last call, so you can't possibly need more than the cost of one or two more drinks and perhaps a cab ride home.)

Comment author: Alicorn 23 October 2010 05:41:20PM 1 point [-]

People say things like "Take your average human. He's thus and such." If you want to start a paragraph with "Take your average human" and not use gendered language, you have to say things like "They're thus and such" (sometimes awkward, especially if you're also talking about plural people or objects in the same paragraph) or "Ey's thus and such", which many people don't understand and others don't like.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 23 October 2010 06:29:51PM *  6 points [-]

Alicorn:

"Ey's thus and such"

I find these invented pronouns awful, not only aesthetically, but also because they destroy the fluency of reading. When I read a text that uses them, it suddenly feels like I'm reading some language in which I'm not fully fluent so that every so often, I have to stop and think how to parse the sentence. It's the linguistic equivalent of bumps and potholes on the road.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 23 October 2010 06:08:09PM *  4 points [-]

One way in which I've observed some very smart and numerate people falling for this fallacy is when they run out of cash in bars and are forced to take money out of those rip-off ATMs that charge $3 or so per transaction. People will often take a larger amount of money than necessary, rationalizing that the rip-off isn't that bad if it's only a small percentage of the amount (I've heard this "reasoning" expressed loudly several times). This despite the fact that tomorrow they'll walk by their own bank's ATM from which they can take money without any fees, so there's absolutely no benefit from taking more money than necessary from the expensive one.

I am myself not immune to this feeling, even though I'm perfectly aware it's completely irrational. I would feel awful if I paid $3 to take out a twenty and then took $100 without a fee next day, but paying $3 to take $120 feels much less bad.

Comment author: [deleted] 21 October 2010 08:09:27PM 1 point [-]

While that computer hacker lived in his mom's basement, he was not the only computer hacker in the movie. In fact there was another one, and a much more important one.

For a movie to strongly depict a correlation between X and Y, the movie needs to show X and Y occurring together and not occurring separately. But Live Free or Die Hard does not do this. There is one computer hacker who lives in his mom's basement, but there is another one who does not and who is going to win the cop's daughter in the end. Contrast with Breakfast Club or Revenge of the Nerds, where the X and Y occur together and not apart. There are no good students/chess club members in the Breakfast Club aside from the nerd.

It's easy to charge that I've been cherry-picking, and very hard to defend against that charge, so it would be tremendously costly for me to respond in this vein. Listing examples as I did requires a cooperative audience; if the audience turns on you it might be either because the audience is cherry-picking, or because you are cherry-picking, but either way, there is just no inexpensive way to pursue that line of argument at that point.

I am not entirely without defense, because by luck one of the articles recently cited agrees with me about the shift over time in the frequency of what it calls Type 1 nerds. It says:

Type 1: Pasty, weak, Geek Physiques, probably with Nerd Glasses, bullied by the jocks, Can Not Spit It Out if a girl is anywhere within range, working on odd projects in their basements and garages. These are the nerd stereotypes that were most prevalent in the 70s and 80s, the ones that feature in movies like Revenge of the Nerds, the sort that Bill Gates and Steve Jobs looked like back in the day.

Based on the examples I came up with, I gave 1984/1985 as the high point of the depiction of that sort of nerd, which is consistent with "most prevalent in the 70s and 80s". Furthermore, American Heritage Dictionary's history of the word "nerd" appears to give 1970 as a lower limit on when the word "nerd" accrued the intellectual element to its earlier "dud" meaning - and this is consistent with, and so supports, the article's claim that the nerd stereotype was most prevalent in the 70s and 80s. In fact it appears to have come into existence in the 70s, reached a high point in the mid eighties, and largely flamed out, at least in its more virulent manifestation.

But rather than pursue this further, instead, consider my latest comment here, which deals more directly with the meaning of the word.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 21 October 2010 10:03:40PM *  2 points [-]

You're right, I forgot about that other hacker character. In any case, I will defer to your superior knowledge of the modern pop culture, which I already confessed being largely ignorant of.

On further reflection, you have convinced me that the pop culture stereotypes of technically savvy characters have changed. One possible reason for this is that among the present younger generations, computers are used by nearly everyone for fun in various ways, whereas 20 years ago and earlier, this was much more unusual and mostly restricted to "nerdy" kids. An interesting test of this theory would be to see how portrayals of computer-savvy characters have changed relative to those with other technical and scientific interests which have remained unusual and unpopular among the majority of kids.

This theory seems to me more plausible than the explanation based on the economic success of tech entrepreneurs, both because the public image of tech magnates is still largely "nerdy" and because the status and economic prospects of tech professions have in fact been going down since the early 2000s.

Comment author: komponisto 21 October 2010 08:28:04PM 2 points [-]

To ask such questions, you must first define a scalar measure of "rationality" that can be compared between people.

Not necessarily; there just has to be an ordering. Clearly people's rationality can be compared, as extreme cases illustrate: Eliezer Yudkowsky is more rational than Kent Hovind, for example.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 21 October 2010 09:43:05PM 1 point [-]

Sure, but very extreme examples aren't interesting. The real question is how many pairs of individuals (or groups) can be covered by that partial ordering. Not very many, I'd say, unless your definition introduces some criteria for which there is ultimately no rational justification, in any meaningful sense of that word.

Comment author: [deleted] 21 October 2010 09:29:46AM *  0 points [-]

Scored 31. Wasn't an easy test. The reproductions are terrible.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 21 October 2010 09:17:11PM 0 points [-]

The reproductions are terrible.

How good is your monitor? Last night I solved the test on a laptop whose greyscale color resolution isn't too great, and I also didn't notice that my browser had downsized the images. Now when I look at it on a better monitor, almost all the images seem much clearer and easier to interpret.

Comment author: taw 21 October 2010 03:16:14PM -1 points [-]

Your paradigm blinds you to reality.

There was no "murder", no "guilt", and no "penalty", and no "legal reparation" (in narrow modern sense) anywhere here. These concepts make no sense in such cultures. Intentional killing is treated identically to a common accident.

For another example - killing own babies was extremely widespread, not even condemned in any way in most cultures including pre-Christian Rome. It was just as casual as abortion is today.

Or killing family members who disgraced your family in any way (your judgment) is widely praised in many cultures.

You might be confused by historical record, as cultures without centralized states and legal systems it brings tends to lack writing as well - so most of our records come from highly unusual subset of cultures with centrally enforced law, relatively individualistic societies etc.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 21 October 2010 07:52:15PM *  3 points [-]

taw:

For another example - killing own babies was extremely widespread, not even condemned in any way in most cultures including pre-Christian Rome. It was just as casual as abortion is today.

Or killing family members who disgraced your family in any way (your judgment) is widely praised in many cultures.

You're right about this. Attitudes towards infanticide vary greatly between cultures, and in many cultures, both past and present, the recognized authority of the senior family/clan members has included the power to enforce their will, and the standards of behavior, by threats of death against the subordinate family members.

But again, all this always happens within a legal structure with clear rules about what constitutes unlawful killing, and serious penalties for those who kill unlawfully. This legal structure may have the form of unwritten folk custom, but people living under it are no more capable of ignoring it than the citizens of modern states can ignore the codified criminal laws. (In fact, even less so, since many laws nowadays are enforced only sporadically or not at all, and flouted widely and openly.)

You might be confused by historical record, as cultures without centralized states and legal systems it brings tends to lack writing as well - so most of our records come from highly unusual subset of cultures with centrally enforced law, relatively individualistic societies etc.

You don't have to reach for misty prehistory, or even for particularly exotic and remote parts of the world, to find examples of traditional societies where the formal state-enforced law is largely irrelevant. For example, there are still ongoing clan blood feuds in some places in the Balkans, specifically in parts of Albania. These examples show a huge problem with informal revenge-based folk justice, namely that vengeance for individual killings can easily escalate into out of control clan warfare. Yet all this only goes to show how serious a transgression it is.

Comment author: [deleted] 21 October 2010 08:59:40AM *  4 points [-]

I think language changes from generation to generation. Each generation retains its own language, its own meanings. Bill Gates was born in 1955. GSP was born in 1981.

The year 1984 saw Revenge of the Nerds, the movie. The nerds in that movie were intellectually accomplished and social lepers. What intellectually accomplished fictional characters have we seen portrayed more recently, and let us see whether they were social lepers. Hermione Granger stood out for her intellectual accomplishments, but was not a social leper. UK of course, but an important character to her American fans. Americans have had cyberpunk heroes since Neuromancer, with Keanu Reeves playing two, William Gibson's own Johnny Mnemonic, and much more successfully, Neo of The Matrix, the superhacker. Not a social leper. A lot of other association of computer wizardry with more punk/goth outcast-ness than nerd outcast-ness, such as Kate Libby/Acid Burn/Angelina Jolie in Hackers (Jolie is genetically incapable of being a social leper) and the girl with the dragon tattoo, Lisbeth Salander, aka "Wasp", the last Swedish to be sure but very much embraced by American readers, and anyway I think she's obviously inspired by earlier incarnations of the similar type such as Kate Libby of the American movie Hackers. Granted, Lisbeth Salander is socially disconnected, but it's a very different kind of disconnect from the "nerd" disconnect.

What else. Sandra Bullock, Keanu's Speed costar, in The Net, portrays the socially disconnected computer expert in 1995, and she's no goth, doesn't go around in black leather, but she's still a much, much softer portrayal of the conservatively-dressed nerd, nothing like the taped-glasses nerd of 1984. And it's Sandra Bullock.

What else? Having trouble thinking of major characters. There's Gene Hackman in Enemy of the State, another super-hacker of sorts, but while completely isolated, is so for perfectly legitimate reasons. Then there's the latest Die Hard movie, hacker played by Justin Long, the Mac guy. Not played by John Hodgman, the PC guy. John Hodgman is typecast as the nerd. Justin Long is typecast as not the nerd - and he was the one picked for the hacker role.

I'm out. Can't think of anything else at the moment.

Edit: The Breakfast Club, 1985, Anthony Michael Hall as the nerd. I'm starting to wonder if 1984/1985 was the high point of the stereotype.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 21 October 2010 07:08:45PM *  1 point [-]

As others have already pointed out, it seems like your set of examples is not representative.

I'm not very familiar with the popular culture from the last decade or so, and what I see of it usually evaporates from my memory quickly. However, one recent major Hollywood movie that I clearly remember promoting extreme negative nerd stereotypes was the 2007 Live Free or Die Hard, which features a "computer genius" character having just about every stereotypical "nerdy" characteristic imaginable. He is even shown as incapable of doing anything productive or profitable with his "nerdy" computer knowledge (he's depicted as living in his parents' basement in his thirties).

In response to Rational Regions?
Comment author: komponisto 20 October 2010 09:56:31PM *  3 points [-]

In addition to whatever differences in rationality level there may be between places, there are also significant differences in how you tell a person in a given place is unusually rational. (This is an automatic consequence of beliefs being correlated with geography.)

For example, atheism seems to be a much better filter for rationality in the United States than in Europe (where it is not nearly as much of a "contrarian" position).

What are some good regional litmus tests?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 21 October 2010 08:05:10AM *  2 points [-]

To ask such questions, you must first define a scalar measure of "rationality" that can be compared between people. I don't find the choice of this measure at all obvious, or even that it can be meaningfully defined.

Comment author: CronoDAS 21 October 2010 04:36:39AM *  9 points [-]

Actually, something like this exists:

Reading the Mind in the Eyes

Apparently, people with high-functioning autism or Aspergers do much worse than control subjects.

ETA: I took the test myself and scored below normal:

Your score: 20
A typical score is in the range 22-30. If you scored over 30, you are very accurate at decoding a person's facial expressions around their eyes. A score under 22 indicates you find this quite difficult

I did, indeed, find the test extremely difficult. I usually look at the mouth more than the eyes when trying to read faces...

Comment author: Vladimir_M 21 October 2010 07:38:20AM *  2 points [-]

That's an interesting test! I scored 28, and for most of the questions I failed, I find that the correct answers make much more sense than my initial guesses when I look back at the pictures. I find #29 the most cryptic.

Comment author: [deleted] 20 October 2010 09:42:07PM *  1 point [-]

You may be right but let me add to my argument. 

The evidence I see is of two competing meanings, an old one and a new one. The new one (obscure interest only) motivated the initial labeling, and the old one (obscure interest plus social ineptitude) motivated the subsequent rationalization. 

People have limited self knowledge and are constantly rationalizing what they just did or just said. Their self explanations are not definitive.

I believe your argument requires that he has in fact mislabeled himself on the basis of an imperfect match between himself and the word. "nerd", and that he followed up by confabulating to make himself a better fit for the definition.

In contrast, I argue that the word is in flux (as is the related stereotype), that he is correctly applying a new meaning, but that he misunderstands his own statement. I think self-misunderstanding is commonplace, so I find thus to be a natural, unforced possibility, rather than a contrivance. I think that the meaning of the word "nerd" has in fact changed due to the mind-boggling success of the likes of Bill Gates among others. 

Added: I propose ostensive definition as the key mechanism of change.

Step 1: "a nerd is a socially inept person with special interests...".

Step 2: ..."like Bill Gates."

Step 3: "a nerd is a person like Bill Gates..."

Step 4: "...who is famous for becoming fantastically wealthy through his special interests."

From Step 1 to step 2, examples are generated. From step 3 to step 4, the examples yield a changed definition because what was most conspicuous  about the examples has changed. 

Comment author: Vladimir_M 21 October 2010 07:04:30AM 4 points [-]

Constant:

The evidence I see is of two competing meanings, an old one and a new one. The new one (obscure interest only) motivated the initial labeling, and the old one (obscure interest plus social ineptitude) motivated the subsequent rationalization.

I agree that my comment was incorrect, and based on an inaccurate reading of what GSP said. Taking that into account, you're probably right that he is applying only the "obscure interests" meaning to himself.

That said, I don't think the general use of the word has lost much, if any of its negative connotations, nor that the underlying stereotypes are becoming any weaker. You say:

I think that the meaning of the word "nerd" has in fact changed due to the mind-boggling success of the likes of Bill Gates among others.

But notice that the public perception of Bill Gates is still in accordance with the full "nerd" stereotype. Watch the joke video that he made when he retired. What it clearly shows is that within the ranks of the rich, powerful, and famous, his position is very much like the position of a nerd kid among his more popular school peers: he is proud just because they're giving him some attention, and views this as a boost to his status. (Consider how unimaginable the opposite would be!) Certainly, despite all the money, power, and fame, nobody ever considered Gates as someone to admire and emulate in terms of style or social behavior, and not to even mention his complete lack of sex-symbol status.

Moreover, even if the nerd stereotype acquired some positive connotations in terms of good career prospects during the eighties and nineties, this trend could only have been downward for the last decade or so, considering that both the economic and general social status of tech professions has been going down ever since the dot-com crash. The ongoing deindustrialization is increasingly catching up even with white-collar technical work.

Comment author: [deleted] 21 October 2010 12:51:54AM 0 points [-]

I think that's much too egalitarian. As best as I can tell people vary tremendously in their ability and inclination to grasp certain topics with minimal preparation. What you say is true of the majority but not of everyone. The value to the student of popular accounts also varies tremendously. What you say seems to be true if you pair the worst students with the worst books.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 21 October 2010 02:11:13AM *  1 point [-]

Hm.. this is the second time today that I posted a comment based on a misreading (see the correction above). Makes me wonder about the quality of the work I did during the rest of the day.

Regarding the pop-science approach to physics, I read a lot of such books as a teenager. Since then, I've studied several areas of physics with real mathematical rigor, some in university courses and others just out of curiosity, and in retrospect I must say that the popular books had failed to give me any accurate understanding whatsoever. All I got was either confusion or a somewhat coherent but in fact completely misleading picture of the real thing.

The only cases where physical theories can be explained with some accuracy in layman non-mathematical terms are those that deal with people's everyday experiences, and don't involve any phenomena that are outside of that. When it comes to relativity, quantum theory, cosmology, let alone more advanced and esoteric areas of modern physics, to me it seems impossible to convey any accurate understanding without the mathematics. I have yet to see a pop-science book that would successfully do it, no matter how smart the reader. (I liked this recent LW comment made by a physics about this topic.)

If you subscribe to the view that an illusion of understanding is worse than nothing at all (as I do), it's really hard to find anything positive to say about pop-science physics books. Yet scientists will rarely criticize them, sometimes because they profit by writing them (or hope to do so one day), but more often because they raise the status of physicists and scientists in general in the eyes of the general public. Ultimately, these works allow readers to signal their smarts and sophistication, famous physicists to make lots of money, and other physicists to enjoy the high status brought this way to their profession, but certainly nobody gains any (scientific) knowledge in the process.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 20 October 2010 10:09:31PM 3 points [-]

That’s why most of my friends are not fighters. Most of my friends are nerds like me. That’s why I have a hard time finding a girlfriend. I need someone to talk science with.

Actually, he doesn't believe that being a nerd means his social skills are so poor he can't attract a woman. He believes (perhaps accurately) that he's only interested in the relatively rare women who share his nerd interests.

What's interesting is that he associates being a nerd with having difficulty finding partners, even though the connection isn't by way of poor social skills.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 20 October 2010 10:12:00PM 1 point [-]

You're right. On a more careful reading, my interpretation was incorrect.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 20 October 2010 08:08:18PM 2 points [-]

Frankly, unless both you and your interlocutor have a firm mathematical understanding of quantum theory, discussing topics like these is like a debate about subtleties of engine tuning between people who have never opened a car hood. It's simply impossible for anyone to reach any real understanding or insight in such a situation.

In response to Rational Regions?
Comment author: Vladimir_M 20 October 2010 07:54:50PM 3 points [-]

Your question implies that there exists a quantifiable measure of "rationality" that can be applied to rank not only individuals, but also societies that span whole geographical regions. How exactly can this measure be defined, according to you?

Comment author: erratio 20 October 2010 07:52:04AM 0 points [-]

How much background do you have in the relevant nerdy stuff though? This is someone who can basically be described as the polar opposite of a nerd. She'd never heard of the idea of multiple timelines/realities except really vaguely from mainstream pop culture, has no idea about quantum or any other types of physics, and afaik has never played a computer game in her life. I would also bet that she's never watched any hard sci fi.

Basically I am curious as to whether it's a problem of inferential distance or whether I just didn't explain it clearly enough :p

As for why you should care, depends on how you view continuity of identity.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 20 October 2010 07:46:52PM *  0 points [-]

erratio:

How much background do you have in the relevant nerdy stuff though?

[Edit: Oops, I misread the above question as asking how much background you have to have to be able to understand this stuff. I certainly don't have much background in physics myself. What I wrote below is true regardless, though, so I'm leaving the comment as it is.]

You have to have a deep mathematical grasp of quantum theory, both formal and intuitive, before you can even start to understand what the controversial issues such as MWI really are about, let alone to form any reasonably grounded opinions about them. Otherwise, you can only fool yourself that you understand anything about these topics, and any beliefs you form about them can be based only on faith in authority or arbitrary whim, not sound reasoning.

The same holds for most other topics in physics. In some areas for science, non-technical pop-science explanations can lead to correct understanding, but in physics, they are worse than useless. (The reason why physicists often display a positive view of pop-science physics books even when they don't stand to profit from their sales is that they raise their status.)

Comment author: [deleted] 20 October 2010 05:51:00AM 2 points [-]

If GSP is a nerd, does the term make any sense?

If we simply recognize that it has two meanings which are often assumed to overlap but in fact do not always overlap, the puzzle is resolved. One meaning concerns a person's interests. The other meaning concerns a person's social skills. GSP calls himself a nerd because of his interests. After calling himself a nerd, he makes a half-baked attempt at presenting himself as socially inept ("I have a hard time finding a girlfriend"), but we don't have to believe him.

As you imply by your rhetorical question, GSP in fact is not socially inept. And he applied the word "nerd" to himself. What this means, assuming he was speaking current American English and assuming he is not deluded, is that the two meanings of the word "nerd" have in fact started to separate in English.

If "nerd" once meant something like: a socially inept person with a keen interest in an unusual topic, now it evidently can mean either "socially inept person" or "person with a keen interest in an unusual topic", without necessarily meaning both. Want proof? Here's proof: GSP is a nerd. He is keenly interested in an unusual topic, and he is not socially inept. QED (at least for one half of the claim).

If all this is correct, then the word "nerd" is in fact evolving away from the concept that rolled the two ideas into one, i.e., the idea of keen interest in an unusual topic and the idea of social ineptness.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 20 October 2010 06:22:43PM *  2 points [-]

Constant:

If we simply recognize that it has two meanings which are often assumed to overlap but in fact do not always overlap, the puzzle is resolved. One meaning concerns a person's interests. The other meaning concerns a person's social skills.

The real puzzle is not about the current meaning of the term, but why the former is normally taken to imply the latter. The existence of a widely used term that covers both meanings is just evidence that this connection is widely made, not an explanation of why it exists.

[Edit: the rest of this comment is based on an incorrect reading. See the replies below.]

As you imply by your rhetorical question, GSP in fact is not socially inept. And he applied the word "nerd" to himself. What this means, assuming he was speaking current American English and assuming he is not deluded, is that the two meanings of the word "nerd" have in fact started to separate in English.

If "nerd" once meant something like: a socially inept person with a keen interest in an unusual topic, now it evidently can mean either "socially inept person" or "person with a keen interest in an unusual topic", without necessarily meaning both. Want proof? Here's proof: GSP is a nerd. He is keenly interested in an unusual topic, and he is not socially inept. QED (at least for one half of the claim).

I think your analysis is wrong. GSP (or at least the public persona he's presenting) is clearly an example that defies the stereotype. Yet because he fulfills one element of the stereotype, GSP seems unable to conceive of the possibility that he might be an exception to the other ones (or, alternatively, believes that claiming to be such would be absurd), and feels obliged to present himself as someone who indeed conforms to it wholly.

This is evidence of the tremendous strength of the stereotype: since GSP displays "nerdy" intellectual interests, then despite the extreme appearance to the contrary, somehow he still must have a nerdy essence that makes him unattractive to women and ostracized by the cool and popular social circles.

(I should add that the word "stereotype" is nowadays often used with strong moralistic meaning, but I'm using it as a neutral technical term for heuristics for categorizing people based on statistical discrimination.)

Comment author: multifoliaterose 20 October 2010 05:51:37AM 1 point [-]

Thank you for the references. I live in the U.S. so these should be relevant.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 20 October 2010 06:39:45AM *  1 point [-]

Oh, and here's one more fascinating link. Before you click on it, think about the average citizen's idea of how the laws of the land come into being. And then behold the majesty of this chart:
http://www.reginfo.gov/public/reginfo/Regmap/index.jsp

(Though it should be noted that there are still visible vestigial influences of traditions from the old times when the de facto constitution of the U.S. resembled the capital-C one much more closely. Notice how the process is described as rulemaking, and by no means as legislation. It would still be unacceptable to use the latter name for something that doesn't come directly from the formally designated legislative branch, even if their practical control over the law has long since disappeared in favor of the bureaucracies and courts.)

Comment author: multifoliaterose 20 October 2010 01:54:37AM 2 points [-]

Thanks for writing this; upvoted.

I'm not in a position to assess your comment's accuracy as I don't know very much about either of the workings of the government or the state of the field of macroeconomics, but you've offered me some food for thought.

If I find Carl's subsequent postings potentially convincing grounds for political involvement I'll look more closely into the aforementioned topics and may ask you some more questions. Up until now I haven't had reason to carefully research and think about these things.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 20 October 2010 05:46:33AM *  3 points [-]

multifoliaterose:

I'm not in a position to assess your comment's accuracy as I don't know very much about either of the workings of the government or the state of the field of macroeconomics, but you've offered me some food for thought.

If you're interested in these topics, as an accompaniment to my fervent philippics, you should check out some more mainstream materials on the issues of administrative rulemaking and the Chevron doctrine. Googling about these topics will uncover some fascinating discussions and examples of the things I've been writing about, all from unimpeachable official and respectable sources.

(I'm sticking to the U.S. law and institutions because it's by far the easiest to find good online materials about them. However, if you live anywhere else in the developed world, you can be pretty sure that you have close local equivalents of all these things I've been talking about.)

Comment author: HughRistik 19 October 2010 09:38:30PM 2 points [-]

Another funny example of the nerd stereotype: Georges St. Pierre (aka GSP), the current UFC Welterweight Champion and one of the greatest mixed martial artists in the world, thinks of himself as a nerd because he is into paleontology.

"I don’t like to tell people that very much, but I am. I don’t really watch sports. I watch the Canadian version of the Discovery Channel. Ask me a question about the Jurassic period or the Cretaceous period and I probably could answer it… Seriously, I’m into paleontology. That’s the study of prehistoric life. I’m into philosophy. And psychology too. You know that the Tyrannosaurus Rex was found with feathers? Yes, feathers!"

"When I train, I love to take time off and fly to the Natural History Museum or an exhibition. I just love that. When you know your past, it will help you with your future… That’s why most of my friends are not fighters. Most of my friends are nerds like me. That’s why I have a hard time finding a girlfriend. I need someone to talk science with. I’m married to my work right now. But you never know. One day I could wake up and just do something different. Life is so unpredictable."

If GSP is a nerd, does the term make any sense?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 20 October 2010 02:43:10AM *  1 point [-]

Yes, it's things like these that I find bizarre.

In the meantime, I read the chapters of Anderegg's book you cited above. I find his thesis very interesting, but as always in the history of ideas, it's hard to estimate the relative significance of particular cultural tropes, especially since I know little about all the other factors that could have influenced the development of this characteristic modern American stereotype. I've put his book on my reading list, so I'll probably have more comments when I get to reading it.

Comment author: MichaelVassar 19 October 2010 03:21:46PM 5 points [-]

It looks to me like the Carter and Reagan administrations in the US and the Thatcher administration in the UK really did greatly cut back the bureaucracy fairly successfully. Also, like the bureaucrats don't decide what wars get fought, etc.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 20 October 2010 12:19:12AM *  7 points [-]

MichaelVassar:

It looks to me like the Carter and Reagan administrations in the US and the Thatcher administration in the UK really did greatly cut back the bureaucracy fairly successfully.

Carter's (of all people!) deregulation of airlines and the subsequent phase-out of the CAB was indeed a rare example of politicians effectively shutting down an entire bureaucratic agency. The rest of Carter's record is very different, though; for one, his administration created the federal departments of education and energy. (And frankly, I'd be surprised if any major CAB bureaucrats actually got laid off rather than transferred to equally cushy positions.)

Regarding Reagan, I disagree. His ascent was indeed seen back then -- with hope or horror, depending on whom you asked -- as a reactionary tsunami that would sweep away huge parts of the federal bureaucracy, and he openly campaigned on this sentiment. Yet, in practice, he achieved almost nothing. This tremendous populist momentum crashed against the Washington bureaucracy while barely making a dent in it. Reagan didn't even manage to eliminate the fledgling education and energy departments that Carter had just created, which he promised explicitly; he also failed in his later plan to merely trim them somewhat and turn them into subdivisions of other departments.

With Thatcher, it's a similar story. Public spending went up during most of her years in office. The reductions in civil service size under her might look significant -- until you realize that most of it was due to eliminating blue-collar jobs from the civil service payrolls and replacing them with subcontracting (see Figures 3 and 4 in this paper). (Not to mention how well bureaucrats know to cook the numbers to make them look like "reductions" where there's no such thing really going on. It's classic "Yes Minister" business.)

Worse yet, when politicians manage to score some partial victory in reducing the size and scope of bureaucracy, it typically turns out to be a random lucky victory that throws a wrench into some part of the government machinery, rather than a sensible reorganization. This part then usually malfunctions with visible bad consequences -- resulting in rushed measures to fix the situation by employing even more bureaucracy than there had been in the first place. (And even more bad PR for "deregulation.")

Also, like the bureaucrats don't decide what wars get fought, etc.

Yes, war, and to some limited extent foreign policy, are among the exceptions I mentioned, where elected politicians in the U.S. can still influence things significantly. But while a president and a willing Congress can start a war without much say from the bureaucrats, the bureaucrats, with the help from their allies in the media, judiciary, etc., still have the power to make the success in this war impossible, and to turn it into a slow-motion career disaster for the politicians involved.

Comment author: blogospheroid 18 October 2010 04:12:42AM *  0 points [-]

I praise your thinking on the subject. Do you have any guesses about the institutions /structures in today's world, that show both power and coherence?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 18 October 2010 07:14:12PM *  2 points [-]

On further reflection, my above comment wasn't very well worded, and in fact, it seems self-contradicting. I first said that without oligarchy, humans "cannot work coherently towards any well-defined goals," but then later I mentioned that even without oligarchy, we can sometimes observe "apparent coherence [that] requires a non-intentionalistic explanation." So let me explain what exactly I mean by that.

The key problem here is differentiating between two distinct ways in which large groups of people can be directed to work towards a goal. The first one is when there is an actual organization (i.e. oligarchy) directing them in a planned manner; a typical example is a business corporation. The second one is when masses of people choose to adopt some view and act on it in an independent and decentralized way, without any organization involved.

The latter typically happens when some view becomes a fashionable status marker. For example, in public discourse, expressing unfashionable contrarian views may cause lots of people to attack you in unison without much care for reason and logic, as if there were an organized propaganda campaign against you -- even though they're all acting independently, each guided (consciously or not) by the desire to signal adherence to a high-status view. (The process by which particular high-status views achieve public prominence may or may not involve organized action, though.) Of course, such spontaneous mass action directed and fueled by status competition is a much more blunt instrument than organized action. Yet, it can nevertheless be tremendously powerful, because it will influence the goals that individuals and organizations are working towards.

One of the greatest pitfalls in any attempt to make sense of what's happening in the world is to mistake spontaneous action for organized action, and end up with conspiracy theories, or to misidentify the oligarchy that is actually relevant for the events and actions under consideration. Another frequent mistake is to confuse language with reality when discussing groups and institutions, and assume that just because a group or institution is known under a strongly resonating name, it must be an organization acting in a coherent way. An extremely frequent manifestation of this error is when the actions of a government are discussed in terms of some supposedly well-defined, unique, and coherent interests and goals of the whole government, or even the whole country. (A corollary of the iron law is that this makes sense only for countries run by strong and monolithic oligarchies or autocracies -- therefore, in my view, your inclusion of the Chinese Politburo on the list makes sense, but not your inclusion of the U.S. intelligence and defense community.) Another great pitfall is the confusion between clear homo-economicus-style self interest and behavior motivated by less obvious signaling considerations.

Therefore, I think that the discussion you'd like to open should start by identifying two kinds of phenomena:

  • Large and powerful organizations run by clearly identifiable oligarchies.

  • Trends in fashionable opinion capable of swaying masses of people, especially influential and powerful people, in certain ideological directions.

The most difficult part of question seems to be: what non-obvious powerful oligarchies are there? In particular, how can we correctly identify the oligarchies operating within the U.S. government and other large non-monolithic governments? The next hard question is how to explain their motivations in order to predict what they're likely to be up to in the future, without falling for the fallacy of crude "cui bono?" thinking.

Now, before I give any concrete conclusions and guesses of mine, let's see how you would approach these questions.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 17 October 2010 11:31:35PM *  2 points [-]

In frequentist statistics, they'd tell you that, no other information being given, the probability of each possibility is equal.

I don't think that's a correct summary, certainly not in the context of this discussion. You might be confusing frequentist probability with classical probability.

Andrew Gelman wrote a critique of the Doomsday Argument, in which he dismisses it as a bad frequentist argument misrepresented as a Bayesian one. (He elaborates on the same idea in this paper.) If I understand correctly what Gelman says (which may not be the case), I agree with him. DA is nothing more than a mathematical sleight of hand in which a trivial mathematical tautology is misleadingly presented as a non-trivial claim about the real world.

Comment author: rhollerith_dot_com 17 October 2010 07:40:08PM *  1 point [-]

Another recommendation for Nick Szabo's blog. The only online writings I know of about governance and political economy that come close are the blogs of economist Arnold Kling and the eccentric and hyperbolic Mencius Moldbug. (Hanson's blog is extremely strong on several subjects, but governance is not IMHO one of them.)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 17 October 2010 09:03:33PM *  2 points [-]

rhollerith_dot_com:

Another recommendation for Nick Szabo's blog. The only online writings I know of about governance and political economy that come close are the blogs of economist Arnold Kling and the eccentric and hyperbolic Mencius Moldbug.

I agree with all these recommendations, and I'd add that these three authors have written some of their best stuff in the course of debating each other. In particular, a good way to get the most out of Moldbug is to read him alongside Nick Szabo's criticisms that can be found both in UR comments and on Szabo's own blog. As another gem, the 2008 Moldbug-Kling debate on finance (parts (1), (2), (3), (4), and (5)) was one of the best and most insightful discussions of economics I've ever read.

Hanson's blog is extremely strong on several subjects, but governance is not IMHO one of them.

I agree. In addition, I must say I'm disappointed with the shallowness of the occasional discussions of governance on LW. Whenever such topics are opened, I see people who otherwise display tremendous smarts and critical skills making not-even-wrong assertions based on a completely naive view of the present system of governance, barely more realistic than the descriptions from civics textbooks.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 17 October 2010 08:20:02PM *  8 points [-]

Applying this concept to a group of people makes sense only if the group's boundaries are clearly delineated and if its members act in a coherent way towards furthering well-defined goals. In my opinion, several items on your list don't satisfy these criteria, namely (1), (2), (5), and perhaps even (9).

I propose the following test to determine whether a group is well-delineated and coherent enough to speak of it as having optimization power: apply to it the iron law of oligarchy, and try to identify the small, closely-knit subgroup that exerts effective power over the rest and directs its workings. If no such subgroup can be found, then it follows from the iron law that the group cannot work coherently towards any well-defined goals. (The real oligarchy, of course, may coincide with the system of formal titles within the organization fully, partly, or not at all.)

For example, in business corporations, the oligarchy is clearly identifiable because it is identical with the formal management structure. Harvard University, on the other hand, appears to have no real oligarchy of its own, which suggests that its subdivisions, and perhaps even individuals within it, work independently or within other oligarchic institutions with overlapping membership. Thus, an accurate analysis of "optimization processes" that take place should focus on these subdivisions, individuals, and other institutions, and what apparent coherence exists at the level of Harvard (or academia in general) requires a non-intentionalistic explanation.

Comment author: rhollerith_dot_com 16 October 2010 10:08:52PM *  1 point [-]

The thing I don't understand in all these discussion is I know a fair number of men in long term-- and sometimes happy-- relationships. They aren't high-display of masculinity guys, and yet,

Are these mostly older guys or more precisely guys in LTRs with older women?

The increase over the last 4 decades in female personal income has made the "beta good provider" male strategy less successful.

Also, some (e.g., the Man Who Is Thursday) say that the increase in female promiscuity has had a similar effect because (the thinking goes) once a woman has had sex with 1 or 2 extremely exciting men, she is less likely to settle for a LTR with a much less exciting one (and as long as she does not demand any sort of commitment from them, a woman using a "modern" sexual strategy will probably have sex with 1 or 2 extremely exciting men).

Although I have a relatively small circle of friends, even I have a friend of a friend, now in her 60s, who only ever had sex with one man (the father of her kids to which she is still married) and she was quite beautiful, grew up in the proverbial big city (Manhattan) and has and had no notable social handicaps.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 16 October 2010 10:45:30PM *  2 points [-]

rhollerithdotcom:

Also, some (e.g., the Man Who Is Thursday) say that the increase in female promiscuity has had a similar effect because (the thinking goes) once a woman has had sex with 1 or 2 extremely exciting men, she is less likely to settle for a LTR with a much less exciting one (and as long as she does not demand any sort of commitment from them, a woman using a "modern" sexual strategy will probably have sex with 1 or 2 extremely exciting men).

If she doesn't demand any sort of commitment from them, she can have sex with many more extremely exciting men than that, if she's at all attractive. Even less attractive women can similarly easily have lots of sex and non-serious relationships with men who are far above what they can realistically expect to get for serious commitment, even if they won't be extremely exciting by absolute standards, so the same principle applies.

There was a discussion of this issue on LW recently. If anyone's interested, these are my thoughts on the subject, and here I comment on some relevant research.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 16 October 2010 02:01:16PM 0 points [-]

Athletes don't do all the bullying-- not even most of it, I think.

It's possible that the high emphasis on sports poisons the whole atmosphere.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 16 October 2010 07:41:19PM *  3 points [-]

NancyLebovitz:

Athletes don't do all the bullying-- not even most of it, I think.

That's not a necessary implication of whpearson's theory. Once the athleete/nerd stratification has been established, it may create bullying incentives for those who are physically stronger than the nerds, but not part of the elite athlete circle. Such individuals will want to assert superiority to the nerds to at least confirm their middle-rank status if they can't achieve the top one, and bullying seems like a straightforward strategy.

I didn't go myself through the American school system, though, so I have no idea how well this hypothesis holds water.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 16 October 2010 01:18:46PM 2 points [-]

The other reason is a very different youth culture and education system. As far as I see, these different circumstances usually tend to attenuate people's innate lack of sociability, rather than, as happens in the U.S., exacerbate it and force intelligent introverts to seek company and respect in "geeky" social circles and activities, since they can't find them anywhere else.

How is the educational system different?

As you may know, there's been a lot of interest lately in the US about how to lessen or eliminate bullying in schools-- there've been a number of suicides lately resulting from years of severe bullying.

The only structural cause I've seen suggested (as distinct from recommendations of active anti-bullying programs) is the high emphasis on competitive athletics, and in particular, athletic competitions between schools.

The other question is whether there's a process of bullying/ostracism in European schools which is aimed at other sorts of people.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 16 October 2010 07:29:15PM *  3 points [-]

NancyLebovitz:

How is the educational system different?

I don't have anything resembling a complete theory of these differences. It's certainly not about some clearly identifiable and straightforward organizational aspects that could be reformed in a planned way, and there are definitely deep cultural differences involved.

One organizational difference that seems significant, though, is that I went through a system that had tracking done in such a way that smart kids of all sorts ended up separated from the not so bright ones, but largely mixed together, without being allowed to segregate by electing different coursework. (You had a choice of high schools with different curriculums, but everyone within the same high school had to learn the same, usually eclectic mix of things.) This did seem to create an optimal environment for introverted smart kids to grow up without being exposed to bullying (which was unheard of in the high school I went to), and giving them less inclination and opportunity to self-segregate into "nerdy" cliques.

Comment author: MichaelVassar 16 October 2010 03:55:59PM 2 points [-]

How independent is your theory from that of Mencius Moldbug? My impression is that the theory could be said to be more correct if it was clear what variables are treated as dependent and as independent, or as agentic and detemined. As is, the theory is underdetermined.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 16 October 2010 07:00:09PM *  5 points [-]

MichaelVassar:

How independent is your theory from that of Mencius Moldbug?

I've read lots of stuff written by Moldbug, and his ideas have influenced me somewhat, though the exact scope of this influence is hard for me to disentangle. On the other hand, the basic point from the above comment, i.e. that electoral politics is largely irrelevant compared to the entrenched bureaucracy and various nominally non-state entities on its periphery, was my opinion long before I first heard of him. Then again, by that point I had been independently exposed to, and influenced by, a lot of the literature that he draws on.

In any case, I've never observed anything that would contradict significantly even the rough picture I paint in my above comment.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 16 October 2010 03:24:34AM *  1 point [-]

This is important, not just for the specifics, but to remember that some pattern of behavior which seems absolutely innate may actually be culturally localized.

So, are there geeky people in Europe? If so, what are they doing instead of science and engineering?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 16 October 2010 04:12:19AM *  5 points [-]

NancyLebovitz:

This is important, not just for the specifics, but to remember that some pattern of behavior which seems absolutely innate is actually culturally localized.

I don't see why these specific patterns of behavior would seem "absolutely innate" even looking only at the U.S. There are lots of non-nerdy people with high intelligence, and I don't see any reason why they wouldn't excel in "nerdy" professions if they chose to enter them in large numbers. In my opinion, the main reason why non-nerdy smart people go mainly into non-technical professions is that in the American society, technical professions, on the whole, offer relatively low status considering the demands they impose.

So, are there geeky people in Europe? If so, what are they doing instead of science and engineering?

Where I lived in Europe (various places in ex-Yugoslavia), we've never really had anything comparable to the American notion of "geeks" and "nerds." It's hard to find even an approximate translation for these words which would have all the connotations of high intelligence combined with social ineptness, lack of masculinity, and obsessive interest in obscure and unpopular things.

We do have words that denote these qualities separately, or for people who put excessive effort into success in school while lacking real-life skills and smarts, or who achieve high grades thanks to cramming rather than smarts and talent, etc., etc., and various terms of this sort are used to translate "nerd/geek" in different contexts. But there is no accurate translation, simply because there is no striking correlation between all these attributes. (That said, in recent years some of the American "geek" culture has been making inroads, but even what exists of it is still not comparable, since there is both less social nerdiness involved and much less correlation with interest, let alone high achievement, in science and engineering.)

Partly this is because technical professions have higher relative status, so they attract plenty of intelligent people who are not at all deficient in social skills. The other reason is a very different youth culture and education system. As far as I see, these different circumstances usually tend to attenuate people's innate lack of sociability, rather than, as happens in the U.S., exacerbate it and force intelligent introverts to seek company and respect in "geeky" social circles and activities, since they can't find them anywhere else.

All that said, this situation still does not mean that success in courting women is more evenly distributed among men. On the contrary: the attention of attractive women, and the overwhelming part of casual sex that takes place, is still restricted to the minority of men who are attractive by pretty much the same criteria as anywhere else. It's just that you'll find many more such men (as well as less attractive, but still far from nerdy men) among people doing technical professions and having various intellectual interests that are stereotyped as "geeky" in the U.S.

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 15 October 2010 08:54:14PM 0 points [-]

Are you really saying that a situation where invalid reasoning is a useful thing to utter falls under the category of "impossible"?

I don't believe this particular case is one.

Yet in this case, the intended non-literal ideological meaning expressed by these words is far more important than their literal meaning

Important to whom? The students should insist of firing this fount of deep wisdom to preserve their sanity.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 15 October 2010 09:27:02PM *  2 points [-]

Vladimir_Nesov:

The students should insist of firing this fount of deep wisdom to preserve their sanity.

That is true, under two critical assumptions: that the students' primary goal in this situation is acquiring factually accurate knowledge about reality, and that the events that would be put into motion by placing such a request in practice would further their aims. Considering the reality of the contemporary Western university systems and their broader role in society -- especially their parts that deal with topics of this sort -- both assumptions are questionable at best.

"Sanity" is also not a good choice of word here. It normally refers to having a view of the world that is not so inaccurate that it would damage one's instrumental goals (either by entailing self-destructive action or by strong negative signaling). In contrast, certain types of inaccurate beliefs that have no such negative instrumental consequences can have highly beneficial status- and affiliation-signaling consequences, so it can be in one's interest to acquire them. Assuming that the beliefs promoted by the lecturer in question are in the latter category, I'm not sure if I would characterize resistance to his propaganda as "preserving one's sanity."

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 15 October 2010 08:16:35PM 0 points [-]

It might not be the most relevant question whether the text is crazy, but it still is, even if it's for some impossible reason a very useful and pragmatic thing to utter. Arguing about definitions of "reasoning" isn't relevant, just as arguing about definitions of "rational" doesn't advance understanding of decision theory.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 15 October 2010 08:29:26PM *  3 points [-]

I'm not sure I follow. Are you really saying that a situation where invalid reasoning is a useful thing to utter falls under the category of "impossible"? (By the way, I meant "pragmatics" in the technical sense of the term.)

But more importantly: if you wish to focus on the literal meaning of these words, go ahead; certainly nobody who has the relevant knowledge can honestly disagree that the reasoning is completely invalid. Yet in this case, the intended non-literal ideological meaning expressed by these words is far more important than their literal meaning, and therefore you cannot expect to establish a discourse with the person who uttered them in terms of their literal meaning. These words were simply not intended to convey a logically and factually valid argument in the first place, no more than a casual acquaintance asking "How are you?" is interested in hearing an honest report about your ongoing life concerns.

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 15 October 2010 07:42:25PM *  1 point [-]

Whatever purpose such texts are supposed to serve according to whatever theory, they still are crazy talk, incorrect reasoning. It might be rational to produce irrational reasoning on occasion, but that doesn't change the irrational character of that reasoning.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 15 October 2010 08:06:18PM *  2 points [-]

Not every human verbal expression falls under the category of "reasoning," under any sensible definition of the term. Nor is it rational in any sense to treat every utterance as such; information conveyed beyond the literal meaning of words is a regular feature of human communication, and often its relevance completely overshadows that of the literal meaning. (If anything, there is such a thing as pragmatics, though I'd say ideological language presents an additional level of distance from the literal meaning than just everyday pragmatics.)

Moreover, the poster's question was whether it's sensible to actively challenge these assertions in the given circumstances, and I think my answer addresses that specific issue, whether or not you agree with it.

Comment author: gwern 15 October 2010 07:30:21PM 2 points [-]

However, the idea that someone would want, or even tolerate, to be taped during private emotional moments and in situations where funny stories are told and passionate arguments made honestly baffles me. (With a few traditional exceptions like taping family events for sentimental purposes etc.)

Status quo bias?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 15 October 2010 07:54:57PM *  3 points [-]

No. Merely the desire not to be forced to obsessively ponder my every word and act, for fear that it might be published on the internet tomorrow, or otherwise shown to some relevant authority figure who would be judgmental about it. I also want various mishaps and unpleasant events that happen to everyone from time to time to be resolved, overcome, and forgotten, not to be permanently recorded like sleeping demons.

Not everyone will find your funny stories funny, your honest opinions respectable, and your demeanor in various relaxed situations likable. (Or mine at least, and those of practically anyone I enjoy socializing with.) People are pretty damn judgmental, and unless your life is a complete bore and your opinions a paragon of exemplary conventionality, you will likely have some moments in your private life that you don't want at least some people to see. Also, some things in life should be complete and absolute bygones for the good of everyone involved.

Comment author: Kaj_Sotala 15 October 2010 06:24:55PM *  7 points [-]

Some uses:

  • Recording lectures at university. Especially on math and compsci courses, where the lecturer is demonstrating long sequential chains of formal reasoning, missing even a single step may be enough that you won't be able to follow any of the rest. Having all the lectures recorded and re-viewable would be a great help, especially on the courses where there isn't a specific course book and therefore there's no single written source from which you could independently study.
  • Remembering and sharing funny stories. It frequently happens that someone tells an anecdote that I'd like to share, or does something funny which I'd like to be able to pass on. This would help remembering those, at least if the lifelogging device supports a "tag everything recorded during the last 45 seconds under 'funny' kind of feature".
  • Keeping a record of past conversations. I keep logs of all the IRC and IM conversations I have, as well as saving all of my e-mails. Most of what gets logged I don't return to, but every now and then I'll want to check on the details of what someone said and will do a search to find it. To be useful in a life-logging context, a relatively accurate voice recognition software ran automatically on the video would be useful.
  • Saving emotional moments and good memories. A while back, I ran across the recommendation that at the end of each day, you should write down three (say) good things that happened to you that day, or that made you feel good / happy. The next morning or whenever you're feeling down, review the list to feel good again. This has worked moderately well for me, but I often feel too lazy or forget to write things down at the end of the day. It would be much easier if I could tell my lifelogger to tag the most recent video under 'happy', and then automatically review the 10 (say) most recent things tagged 'happy' at the press of a button.
  • Reverse engineering emotional arguments and disagreements. Occasionally either I or somebody I'm interacting with might get upset, not because of any factual disagreement, but because someone said or did something pushing subconscious emotional buttons. Going through the conversation in my head afterwards, I'm often able to pinpoint the things that caused an emotional reaction, and bring the previously subconscious triggers into conscious awareness. Having an ability to review the argument when in a more objective frame of mind could help deconstruct the triggers further.
  • Fast-forward everything I did during the day, look at how much time I spent on various things, figure out if I could have been more effective somehow.

There are probably more, these are the ones I could come up with right now.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 15 October 2010 07:12:20PM *  1 point [-]

Are people in practice really so tolerant of those who want to record them constantly? Unless I'm absolutely forced to be in the same room with someone who does it (or, of course, if I specifically want something to be filmed), I would insist that one of us must leave, no matter what. I wouldn't even trust them that the damn thing is turned off when they say it is. (And if done secretly, I would consider it a voyeuristic offense against my person, effectively an act of war.)

I see taping lectures and other public events as an entirely normal thing. However, the idea that someone would want, or even tolerate, to be taped during private emotional moments and in situations where funny stories are told and passionate arguments made honestly baffles me. (With a few traditional exceptions like taping family events for sentimental purposes etc.)

Comment author: mattnewport 15 October 2010 06:31:18PM 3 points [-]

This confuses me, because it seems to imply that men need to believe that a simple personality heuristic can be applied to all or almost all women. Why is it an unacceptable answer that some women like one thing, and some like another?

The prevalence of different personality types in the population is very relevant here and you seem to be glossing over it. If the number of women attracted to your personality type is relatively low (and especially if it is low relative to the number of other men similar to you) it will still be an obstacle you need to overcome in finding a partner even if you believe that there are women out there who would be attracted to you. Internet dating has probably helped with this a bit by making it easier to find potential matches but it can't overcome seriously unfavourable relative numbers.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 15 October 2010 06:51:04PM *  8 points [-]

I'd compare this with employment. Every now and then, you see a media story about some company with a highly unusual internal culture that uses all sorts of unconventional practices in hiring, organization, and management. Yet unless you luckily stumble onto some such employer and happen to be an exceptionally good candidate by their standards, you would be well-advised to stick to the standard conventional advice on how to look and behave in job interviews and, subsequently, in the workplace. In fact, doing anything else would mean sabotaging your employment and career prospects, and expecting that your unconventional behavior will surely be rewarded with a dream job with an unconventional employer is a delusional pipe-dream.

The main flaw of this analogy, of course, is that the conventional wisdom on seeking and maintaining employment is largely correct, whereas the conventional wisdom on dating has fatal points of disconnect from reality. Also, while conforming to optimal workplace behavior is truly painful for many people, fixing the problems in one's approach to dating and relationships typically doesn't require any such painful and loathsome adjustment. (Even though people often rationalize their unwillingness to do it by convincing themselves in the opposite.)

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 14 October 2010 01:29:09PM 1 point [-]

In some ways, things have gotten better, not worse. Both communism and Nazism claimed scientific backing. I don't see anything like that on the horizon.

On the other hand, people became disenchanted with them because of disastrous results-- I don't think there's any public recognition of the poor quality of science they used.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 15 October 2010 06:25:46PM *  3 points [-]

NancyLebovitz:

In some ways, things have gotten better, not worse. Both communism and Nazism claimed scientific backing. I don't see anything like that on the horizon.

These political systems, however, are now distant in both time and space, and their faults can be comfortably analyzed from the outside. The really important question is in what ways, and to what degree, our present body of official respectable knowledge and doctrine deviates from reality, which is far more difficult to answer with any degree of accuracy. This is both because for us it's like water for fish, and because challenging it is apt to provoke accusations of crackpottery (and perhaps even extremism), with all their status-lowering implications.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 15 October 2010 05:46:29PM *  9 points [-]

What evidence exists that this alternative way of walking is "proper" in some objective sense?

Also, how does it influence your gait? Your gait is one of the most important non-verbal social signals you send off, and this must be taken into account when evaluating anything that changes it, for better or worse.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 15 October 2010 05:20:42PM 0 points [-]

Adjusting the power balance to something I'd approve of,.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 15 October 2010 05:31:59PM *  3 points [-]

That depends on your own position from which you're answering. If you're a student in class, there isn't really much you can do: after all, you're just an individual faced with an institutionally backed career ideologist. Whatever happens, next year you'll be gone, and he'll have another generation to propagandize.

However, there are all sorts of incredibly fun ways to be subversive. A rich source of inspiration could be the writings of people from the former Soviet Bloc who described their own experiences with the obligatory Marxism lessons at school and work. Especially considering that the risks of disobedience are much smaller here, so the creative opportunities are much greater too!

If SeventhNadir is really interested in sticking it to the man instead of nodding with a poker face, I'd recommend this latter course of action rather than open disobedience, which is unlikely to do any good.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 15 October 2010 04:56:43PM 0 points [-]

Do you know of any good language of power-based answers to that sort of thing?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 15 October 2010 05:10:50PM 0 points [-]

I'm not sure what exactly you mean by "good" in this context. What precise goal should be achieved by these answers?

Comment author: mattnewport 15 October 2010 04:07:01PM 3 points [-]

I think there's a bit more to it than just women overlooking a lack of values because of other attractive factors like confidence. There's some evidence that men with the 'dark triad' personality traits are more successful with women.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 15 October 2010 05:03:14PM 4 points [-]

mattnewport:

There's some evidence that men with the 'dark triad' personality traits are more successful with women.

Here's the research paper on which the article you link was based:
http://www.mysmu.edu/faculty/normanli/JonasonLiWebsterSchmitt2009.pdf

Comment author: [deleted] 15 October 2010 12:37:04PM 7 points [-]

I think women want guys with values, in principle, and are tempted by guys without values, in practice, because they like "masculine" or "alpha" behavior. It doesn't mean that the desire to date a good person isn't a real desire. If someone desires to get work done, but also procrastinates, would you say she doesn't "really" want to get work done?

I think women would prefer a good person who hits the right masculinity/dominance buttons than a bad person. (Read or watch Gone With The Wind again -- Rhett is actually the male character with the most integrity and smarts.)

I think you're entirely right that men who are pretty awful people can be very attractive to women. But I think that's because they have certain social skills that they've developed and relied on. And anyone can learn social skills. There's not a one-to-one relationship between horribleness and attractiveness to women -- you never hear about women being hot for Jeffrey Dahmer. Rappers swagger, make it obvious that women can't resist them, and they're typically in great shape. They're popular for completely predictable reasons.

You're probably right that some women gravitate to assholish men because they're just not thinking (just like some men gravitate to women who have nothing going for them but their beauty.) But it's unfair for a man to assume that every woman is going to do that, and I'd find it sad if a man compromised his more serious principles just to pick up the less self-aware women. You can make yourself more attractive without becoming a person you'd hate.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 15 October 2010 04:58:33PM *  7 points [-]

SarahC:

There's not a one-to-one relationship between horribleness and attractiveness to women -- you never hear about women being hot for Jeffrey Dahmer.

Not a one-to-one relationship, to be sure, but stories like this strongly suggest some positive statistical relation: "No shortage of women who dream of snaring a husband on Death Row: experts ponder why deadliest criminals get so many proposals." The article references an academic book that dedicates a chapter to the phenomenon.

Jeffrey Dahmer might have been a bit too creepy even for the serial killer groupie population, but I wouldn't be surprised if he got an occasional love letter too.

In response to Picking your battles
Comment author: Vladimir_M 15 October 2010 04:40:18PM *  12 points [-]

You're making a mistake when you take talk of this sort at face value. This is ideological speech, not scientific or technical speech. It doesn't even try to present a rational argument based on facts and logic, and it doesn't strive for an accurate view of reality -- its purpose is not to do anything like that, no more than, say, a love poem has any such goals.

The true meaning of ideological language can be directly expressed only in the language of power. Like any other ideologue, your lecturer has an idea of what the social order and the relations of power should be like, and what measures should be taken to change the present system in this direction. His ideological language is meant to provide a rallying cry for his co-ideologues in order to sort out who is for and who against him, and to strengthen the passion and resolve within his own ranks. Agreeing or disagreeing with it will in practice signal only your ideological allegiance, and nothing at all about your intellectual standards.

If you want to reply to this ideological drivel, then in all likelihood, this is the only thing that your reply can communicate. It is impossible for you to innocently address only its literal meaning, keeping your hands clean from any implied considerations of power -- both the broader social power relations with which the lecturer's ideology is concerned, and the lecturer's own power in his position as an official institutional ideologist. Your reply will be immediately understood as a challenge and attack in terms of power, as a threat that must be met, not as an interesting contribution to truth-seeking. In this sense, challenging ideological language with logic is similar to what would happen if you tried to defend yourself on a show trial.

Whether you want to pick this battle is your call, but be aware that these are the terms in which it is likely to be fought.

Comment author: HughRistik 15 October 2010 12:48:28AM 3 points [-]

Whoa.

I've also heard that in China, self-effacing and conscientious students can be the most popular. For the US, that's unimaginable.

These pieces of data suggest that the polarization of men towards "geek / nice guy" and "masculine bad boy" in the US is at least partly cultural, and it could be fought by other cultural forces.

That is the argument that David Anderegg makes in Nerds. While I disagree with Anderegg in some cases (e.g. dismissing the notion of Asperger's Syndrome), he has some excellent literary analysis of some of the tropes in American literature that influence how we think about masculinity.

Anderegg argues that in the 19th century, a dichotomy developed between "men of action" and "men of reflection" in American thought. This dualism presented the man of action as positive and masculine, while the "man of reflection" was the "effete intellectual" or clergyman, associated with femininity and homosexuality. He argues that our modern concept of "nerd" is the descendant of the "man of reflection" and "effete intellectual" stereotypes. Read that entire chapter I linked to. Here are some of Anderegg's examples:

  • Ichabod Crane in Washington Irving's story was a classic example of "nerd vs jock," where the nerd is portrayed in many negative and stereotypical ways

  • Superman becoming incognito and undatable to Lois merely by being mild-mannered and wearing glasses

  • He argues that ancient Greeks didn't have such a dichotomy between brain vs. brawn/looks: heroes were typically intelligent, good-looking, and capable, while villains tended to be both ugly and stupid.

  • Ralph Waldo Emerson's notion of the American scholar

Emerson's speech is fascinating and complex, but it definitely sets up the dichotomy between men of action and men of reflection. Here are some troubling excerpts (emphases mine):

There goes in the world a notion, that the scholar should be a recluse, a valetudinarian, — as unfit for any handiwork or public labor, as a penknife for an axe. The so-called `practical men' sneer at speculative men, as if, because they speculate or see, they could do nothing. I have heard it said that the clergy, — who are always, more universally than any other class, the scholars of their day, — are addressed as women; that the rough, spontaneous conversation of men they do not hear, but only a mincing and diluted speech. They are often virtually disfranchised; and, indeed, there are advocates for their celibacy. As far as this is true of the studious classes, it is not just and wise. Action is with the scholar subordinate, but it is essential. Without it, he is not yet man. Without it, thought can never ripen into truth. Whilst the world hangs before the eye as a cloud of beauty, we cannot even see its beauty. Inaction is cowardice, but there can be no scholar without the heroic mind.

[...]

Character is higher than intellect. Thinking is the function. Living is the functionary.

[...]

Our age is bewailed as the age of Introversion. Must that needs be evil? We, it seems, are critical; we are embarrassed with second thoughts; we cannot enjoy any thing for hankering to know whereof the pleasure consists; we are lined with eyes; we see with our feet; the time is infected with Hamlet's unhappiness,

"Sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought."

Is it so bad then? Sight is the last thing to be pitied. Would we be blind? Do we fear lest we should outsee nature and God, and drink truth dry? I look upon the discontent of the literary class, as a mere announcement of the fact, that they find themselves not in the state of mind of their fathers, and regret the coming state as untried; as a boy dreads the water before he has learned that he can swim.

[...]

We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe. The spirit of the American freeman is already suspected to be timid, imitative, tame. Public and private avarice make the air we breathe thick and fat. The scholar is decent, indolent, complaisant.

Emerson makes a lot of good points, such as about avoiding past orthodoxies. But as Anderegg points out, his attitude is very close to "throw away books from the past, and write your own," which is anti-intellectual and fails to reflect how thinkers can stand on the shoulders of giants. There is no dichotomy between studying works of the past, and original thinking.

He displays a great ambivalence towards scholars of his time. He romanticizes "Man Thinking," but links scholars to Europe, femininity, homosexuality (via the word "mincing"), religion, unoriginality, laziness, timidity, and disease (e.g. "infected with Hamlet's unhappiness"). No doubt there were and are many scholars who deserve those labels, but his dichotomy is much too stark:

  • Non-scholars are much more lacking in original thought than scholars
  • Non-scholars are plenty lazy, too
  • What about men of action who are temperamentally timid?
  • He speaks disdainfully of scholars having "second thoughts," but wasn't he criticizing them earlier for being too credulous? Can't men of action who are engaging their subject matter hands-on have second thoughts?
  • Why can't you both read books, and carve out your heroic path in your field?
  • In domains with low-hanging empirical fruit, I'll buy his argument that scholars should get more hands-on. In other domains, it's best to read the book, instead of trying to reinvent the wheel.
  • Why are the intellectual errors Emerson criticizes associated with women or homosexuality? Why can't we have feminine or homosexual men of action? Would Alan Turing fit into Emerson's notion of the "American scholar"?
Comment author: Vladimir_M 15 October 2010 06:09:04AM *  1 point [-]

That's a very interesting reference, I'll try to check it out when I find some time. Unfortunately, I'm not familiar with Emerson's work, so I can't tell if Anderegg is representing his views fairly. But in any case, I've always found the American phenomenon of equating intellectual interests with "nerdiness" alien and weird, and its exact historical origins are still a mystery to me, so I'll be interested in checking out the book and seeing if it sheds some light on it.

Comment author: multifoliaterose 14 October 2010 12:38:00PM 2 points [-]

Thanks for your response.

Actually, my question was broader in intent - I was expressing curiosity about your personal values/tastes in general rather than about the matter at hand in particular. But from the way you took my question I imagine that the matter at hand figures in prominently :-).

Concerning

You probably understand that a full answer to this question would require an enormous amount of space (and time), and that it would involve all kinds of diversions into controversial topics.

I understand that doing so would require a lot of time and energy, I wouldn't want to divert your attention from things that are more important to you, but will express interest in reading a carefully argued, well-referenced top-level posting from you on a relatively uncontroversial topic expressing some small fraction of your views on science and government so that I can have a more detailed idea of what you're talking about.

Most of what you've said so far has been allusive in nature and while I can guess at some of what you might have in mind, I strain to think of examples that would provoke such a strong reaction. Of course, this may be rooted in a personality difference rather than an epistemological difference, but you've piqued my curiosity and I wonder whether there might be something that I'm missing.

At present: I think that various sectors of science have in fact become debased by politicization. This may have made the situation in certain kinds of science worse than it has been in the past, but I don't think that this has made the political situation worse than it has been in the past. As far as I know, there have always been issues of people putting manipulative spin on the truth for political advantage and I suspect that manipulative appeals to the authority of science are no more problematic than other sorts of manipulative appeals to authority were hundreds of years ago.

Incidentally, I was drawn toward math in high school by the fact that the the truth seemed to me to be much more highly valued there than in most other subjects. I soon came to appreciate Beauty in Mathematics but a large part of my initial attraction was simply grounded in the fact that exposure to a subject grounded in reason was so refreshing relative to most of what I had seen before (both in and out of school). I perceived an almost spiritual purity attached to justifying each step systematically.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 15 October 2010 05:03:34AM *  8 points [-]

multifoliaterose:

Most of what you've said so far has been allusive in nature and while I can guess at some of what you might have in mind, I strain to think of examples that would provoke such a strong reaction.

Well, to fully explain my opinions on the role of institutional science and pseudoscience in modern governments, I would first have to explain my overall view of the modern state, which, come to think of it, I did sketch recently in a reply to an earlier question from you. So I'll try to build my answer from there (and ask other readers to read that other comment first if they're confused by this one).

The permanent bureaucracies that in fact run our modern governments, in almost complete independence from the entire political circus we see on TV, are intimately connected with many other, nominally private or "independent" institutions. These entities are formally not a part of the government bureaucracy, but their structure is, for all practical purposes, not separable from it, due to both formal and informal connections, mutual influences, and membership overlaps. (The workings of this whole system are completely outside the awareness of the typical citizen, who instead imagines something surely imperfect but still essentially similar to what the civics textbooks describe -- although they are subject to no secrecy at all and thus hidden in plain sight.) There are all kinds of such institutions, each with its peculiar Siamese-twin connections with some parts of the government: the mainstream media, too-big-to-fail businesses, "non-governmental organizations" (boy, are some people protesting too much!), public sector unions, etc., etc. -- and last but definitely not least, the academia and its purveyors of official science.

Now, in theory, the connection between the bureaucracy and official science is supposed to mean that we have a professional civil service using the best knowledge and expertise to implement the will of the people as legislated by its elected representatives, and our great institutions of scholarship supplying this expertise forged by its tireless seekers for truth and their magnificent institutions such as the peer review. In reality, well, it's not hard to imagine how this situation can lead to all sorts of perverse incentives that might compromise various elements of this idealized picture, about which I've already written in my earlier comments.

To take the most blatant example, just observe the way economic "science" is involved in our government system. The government does lots of things that you may support or oppose in the ultimate analysis, but which would have been clearly recognized a century ago for what they are: wealth transfers, currency debasement, nationalization, patronage, amassing debt, raising and lowering of trade and migration barriers, etc., etc. Yet nowadays, we have a whole profession of pseudoscientists who are weaving webs of abstruse and vapid theory around such things, until neither their essence nor their likely consequences are possible to discuss with any reference to actual reality. The present economic crisis might be only a mild preview of the disasters that may befall us in the not so far future thanks to the utterly irresponsible and reality-ignoring policies that this pseudoscience has been rationalizing and excusing for decades already. It’s far from certain, but far from implausible either.

While this is admittedly an exceptionally bad example (though bad enough by itself!), the same pathologies can be found to a smaller or greater degree in almost any branch of the Kafkaesque bureaucracies that rule over us. In some cases, it's not easy to discern how bad the corruption really is, as e.g. in the case of climate science, where I'm still not quite sure what to think. But it's clear that many fields of official science nowadays operate solely for the purposes of their symbiosis with the government, and any actual advances of knowledge that result from them are merely a by-product, and hard to distinguish from the accompanying bullshit. (For example, any field that has "public" in its name is almost certain to be in this category.)

Comment author: thomblake 14 October 2010 08:59:18PM 4 points [-]

Something like that is practically unimaginable in North America

That's a mighty strong assertion to make about an entire contient that contains countries as different as, say, Canada and Nicaragua, or Alabama and San Francisco.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 14 October 2010 10:26:50PM 3 points [-]

OK, that was an imprecise statement -- by "North America," I meant the U.S. and Canada, not the standard usage of the term.

When it comes to the U.S. and Canada, however, I stand behind my assertion. There are indeed significant cultural differences between, say, Alabama and Northern California, but not when it comes to this question.

Comment author: [deleted] 14 October 2010 01:04:20PM *  4 points [-]

My experience is either inside academia or way the hell outside (people who didn't go to college.) I never met an entrepreneur.

My experience with meeting Europeans is that smart people do have less of a geeky self-image than they do in the US (I've known Italian women mathematicians who look and carry themselves like movie stars) but that just about everyone in Europe is less into gorilla-type masculinity than men in the US. So I think your point is probably more relevant on the female end -- European female geeks are more conventionally feminine because they don't see a dichotomy. (I've also noticed that about Asian female geeks -- that is, raised in Asian countries, not Asian-American.)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 14 October 2010 07:12:48PM *  6 points [-]

SarahC:

[In Europe] smart people do have less of a geeky self-image than they do in the US (I've known Italian women mathematicians who look and carry themselves like movie stars)

That is true, for the most part. Where I come from, the electrical engineering students' club at the local university is a popular location for nightlife and rock concerts that attracts masses of people as a party hangout. Something like that is practically unimaginable in North America, but it's not at all unusual in Europe.

Comment author: [deleted] 14 October 2010 01:04:20PM *  4 points [-]

My experience is either inside academia or way the hell outside (people who didn't go to college.) I never met an entrepreneur.

My experience with meeting Europeans is that smart people do have less of a geeky self-image than they do in the US (I've known Italian women mathematicians who look and carry themselves like movie stars) but that just about everyone in Europe is less into gorilla-type masculinity than men in the US. So I think your point is probably more relevant on the female end -- European female geeks are more conventionally feminine because they don't see a dichotomy. (I've also noticed that about Asian female geeks -- that is, raised in Asian countries, not Asian-American.)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 14 October 2010 06:55:25PM *  8 points [-]

SarahC:

just about everyone in Europe is less into gorilla-type masculinity than men in the US.

That's a mighty strong assertion to make about an entire continent that contains countries as different as, say, Sweden and Albania, or Moldova and Switzerland. Also, I'm certain that the sample of Europeans you've seen is unrepresentative in all sorts of relevant ways even of their own countries, let alone the entire continent.

Of course, if by this you mean the specific patterns of behavior characteristic of certain sorts of American men, then the claim is trivially true.

Comment author: multifoliaterose 13 October 2010 10:39:15PM 1 point [-]

If you're inclined to write about it, I would be interested in reading more about what your personal values/tastes are. This would help me place your comments in context.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 14 October 2010 07:20:45AM *  2 points [-]

You probably understand that a full answer to this question would require an enormous amount of space (and time), and that it would involve all kinds of diversions into controversial topics. But since you're curious, I will try to provide a cursory outline of my views that are relevant in this context.

About a century ago -- and perhaps even earlier -- one could notice two trends in the public perception of science, caused by its immense practical success in providing all sorts of world-changing technological marvels. First, this success had given great prestige to scientists; second, it had opened hopes that in the future science should be able provide us with foolproof guidance in many areas of human concern that had theretofore been outside the realm of scientific investigation. The trouble with these trends was that around this time, dreams and hopes fueled by them started to seriously drift away from reality, and as might be expected, a host of pseudo-scientific bullshit-artists, as well as political and bureaucratic players with ready use for their services, quickly arose to exploit the opportunities opened by this situation.

This has led to a gradually worsening situation that I described in an earlier LW comment:

The trouble nowadays is not that governments are not listening to scientists (in the sense of people officially and publicly recognized as such), but that the increased prominence of science in public affairs has subjected the very notion of "science" to a severe case of Goodhart's law. In other words, the fact that if something officially passes for "science," governments listen to it and are willing to pay for it has led to an awful debasement of the very concept of science in modern times.

Once governments started listening to scientists, it was only a matter of time before talented charlatans and bullshit-artists would figure out that they can sell their ideas to governments by presenting them in the form of plausible-looking pseudoscience. It seems to me that many areas have been completely overtaken by this sort of thing, and the fact that their output is being labeled as "scientific" and used to drive government policy is a major problem that poses frightful threats for the future.

This, in my view, is one of the worst problems with the entire modern system of government, and by far the greatest source of dangerous falsity and nonsense in today's world. I find it tragicomic when I see people worrying about supposedly dangerous anti-scientific trends like creationism or postmodernism, without realizing that these are entirely marginal phenomena compared to the corruption that happens within even the most prestigious academic institutions due to the fatal entanglement of science with ideology and power politics, to which they are completely oblivious, and in which they might even be blindly taking part. Just the thought of the disasters that our governments might wreak on us by pushing policies guided by this pseudo-scientific input should be enough to make one shiver -- especially when we consider that these processes typically operate on bureaucratic auto-pilot, completely outside of the scope of politics that gets public attention.

Whether or not you agree with this, I hope it clarifies the reasons why I have such strong interest in topics of this sort.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 13 October 2010 11:46:50PM *  2 points [-]

In the linguistics section, Trask's book should be marked as "easy." It's short and very readable, and assumes almost no background knowledge. (But despite that, provides an informative and well-balanced introduction to the field.)

Edit: Also, a draft of Jaynes's book is available for free online, but the list contains only an Amazon link.

Comment author: [deleted] 13 October 2010 03:07:43AM 1 point [-]

Thanks for replying.

So, I guess you'd say that true statements of scientific fact are different in kind from statements of wishes, dreams, beliefs, attitudes and so on. And, additionally, that it's in the interest of human beings to have true statements of scientific fact, which are not contaminated with wishes, dreams, beliefs, and attitudes, or falsified by bias or forgery.

Hmm. That seems plausible but I'm not certain of it. It's close enough, of course, that I don't intend to practice or condone scientific fraud in real life.

And ideology is, for you, basically about conflict and incapacity to be rational. By that definition, you're probably not an ideologue. I'm probably not either, but I know I have points where I cannot continue a rational discussion (in particular, if someone makes an unkind personal remark.)

But sometimes a person can care more about one of the things he or she values than about being patient and tolerant with everyone. Sometimes, some value takes precedence over peacemaking and discussion. Then conflict will happen, and rational discussion will not. I can think of situations where I would sympathize with the "ideologue" in that case. I am not sure that it's a good person who believes that nothing is more important than rational inquiry and the absence of conflict.

Would I patiently entertain the notion that, say, it might be better for society for someone to kill my sister? (Imagine that there was some argument in favor of it.) Would I strive to be evenhanded about it? Or would I be in "conflict ... perhaps even physical" and "fatally biased" and "incapable of rational argument"?

In response to comment by [deleted] on Morality and relativistic vertigo
Comment author: Vladimir_M 13 October 2010 09:38:12PM *  2 points [-]

I agree with all this. In all sorts of human conflicts, even if all the relevant questions of fact and logic have been addressed to the maximum extent achievable by rational inquiry, there is still the inevitable clash of power and interest, which can be resolved only by finding a modus vivendi, or with the victory of one side, which then gets to impose its will on the other.

Among the available tactics in various types of conflicts, it is ultimately a judgment of value and taste which ones you'll see as legitimate, and which ones depraved. This is especially true when it comes to propaganda aimed at securing the coherence of one's own side in a conflict, and swaying the neutrals (and potential converts from the enemy camp) in one's favor. It so happens that I have a particularly strong loathing for propaganda based on claims that one side's pretensions to power are somehow supported by "science." I see this as the most debased sort of ideological warfare, the propagandistic equivalent of a war crime, especially if the effort is successful in attracting people with official institutional scientific affiliations to actively join and drag their own "science" into it. (It is also my factual belief that this phenomenon tends to make ideological conflicts more intense, more destructive, and less likely to end in a tolerable compromise, but let's not get sidetracked there.)

Yet, while the intensity of my dislike is a matter of my own values and tastes, the question of whether such corruption of science has taken place in some particular instance is still an objective question of fact and logic, because it is a special (even if difficult) case of the objective question of discerning valid science from invalid. Therefore, people can be objectively and demonstrably wrong in seeing themselves on the side of science and truth against superstition and falsity, where they are in fact just engaged in a pure contest for power, whether in their own interest or as someone else's useful idiots.

Now that I've written all this, you might perhaps understand better my antipathy towards these "let science help us resolve moral questions!" proposals. People behind them, whether consciously or not, strive to recruit and debase science into a propaganda weapon in an ongoing struggle for power, not to resolve and end this struggle by reducing it to a rational argument. The latter is impossible even in principle, since the ultimate question is who gets to impose his values and preferences on others.

Comment author: HughRistik 13 October 2010 04:38:19AM *  1 point [-]

Vladimir, have you read Spreading Misandry and Legalizing Misandry by Nathanson & Young? They've done some of the best work I've read on the subject of ideology. Here is their description of ideological feminism:

Ideological feminism is the direct heir of both the Enlightenment and Romanticism. From the former it takes the theory of class conflict, merely substituting "gender" for "class" and "patriarchy" for "bourgeoisie." From the latter it takes the notion of nation or even race, focusing ultimately on the innate biological differences between women and men. The worldview of ideological feminism, like that of both Marxism and National Socialism—our analogies are between ways of thinking, not between specific ideas—is profoundly dualistic. In effect, "we" (women) are good, "they" (men) are evil. Or, to use the prevalent lingo, "we" are victims, "they" are oppressors.

Most of their criticism is aimed at feminism, but if you think about their description of ideology, it's not difficult to see the same problems in any political movement. Here are the features they relate to ideologies:

  • Dualism (see above)
  • Essentialism ("calling attention to the unique qualities of women")
  • Hierarchy ("alleging directly or indirectly that women are superior to men")
  • Collectivism ("asserting that the rights of individual men are less important than the communal goals of women")
  • Utopianism ("establishing an ideal social order within history")
  • Selective cynicism ("directing systematic suspicion only toward men")
  • Revolutionism ("adopting a political program that goes beyond reform")
  • Consequentialism ("asserting the beliefs that ends can justify means")
  • Quasi-religiousity ("creating what amounts to a secular religion")

I would be interested to know how these features relate to your experiences with ideologies.

Other notable sections in Spreading Misandry:

Making the World Safe for Ideology

The use of deconstructionism by ideologies

Film Theory and Ideological Feminism

I recommend these books to anyone who is interested in biases, group psychology, and ideologies; their books give excellent philosophical discussions of these subjects that go beyond the particular examples of feminism and misandry. They also attempt a philosophical exploration of what "political correctness" is, and what's wrong with it, and they examine deconstructionism.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 13 October 2010 06:30:50AM *  0 points [-]

I haven't read the books by Nathanson & Young, but looking at their tables of contents, I can say that I am well familiar with these topics. However, it's important to immediately note that the notion of ideology that you (and presumably N&Y) have in mind is narrower than what I was writing about. This might sound like nitpicking about meanings of words, and clearly neither usage can claim to be exclusively correct, but it is important to be clear about this to avoid confusion.

Ideology in the broader sense also includes the well-established and uncontroversial views and attitudes that enable social cohesion in any human society. (This follows the usage in Burnham's text I cited; for example, in that same text, shortly after the cited passage, Burnham goes on to discuss individualism and belief in property rights as key elements of the established ideologies of capitalist societies.) In contrast, your meaning is narrower, covering a specific sort of more or less radical ideologies that have played a prominent role in modern history, which all display the traits you listed to at least some extent.

One book you might find interesting, which discusses ideology in this latter sense, is Alien Powers: The Pure Theory of Ideology by the LSE political theorist Kenneth Minogue. I only skimmed through a few parts of the book, but I would recommend it based on what I've seen. Minogue is upfront about his own position (i.e. ideology, in Burnham's sense, but not his), which might be described as intellectual and moderate libertarianism; in my opinion, this is the kind of topic where authors of this sort usually shine at their brightest. You can find an excerpt presenting the basic ideas from the book here.

I'll check out these books by Nathanson & Young in more detail, and perhaps post some more comments later.

Comment author: [deleted] 12 October 2010 11:59:00AM *  2 points [-]

That's fair, insofar as science doesn't give you correct answers when it isn't working properly. When science isn't working properly, the results of science are no better, or barely better, than random.

A few questions: One, are you saying that scientists should strive to be ignorant of the existence of widely discussed ideological and moral issues? Is this one of the cases where less knowledge is better than more knowledge?

Two, what is an ideology? (Of course, I know how to use the word in a sentence, but you use it so often on LW that I wonder if you have a precise definition.) For example, would you describe yourself as having any ideology?

Three, of the possible means one could use to achieve one's desires, would you say that writing biased scientific papers is an immoral means? What about persuasive essays?

In response to comment by [deleted] on Morality and relativistic vertigo
Comment author: Vladimir_M 13 October 2010 01:29:32AM *  2 points [-]

SarahC:

A few questions: One, are you saying that scientists should strive to be ignorant of the existence of widely discussed ideological and moral issues? Is this one of the cases where less knowledge is better than more knowledge?

Well, first, it depends on what they're working on. Many things are remote enough from any conceivable issues of ideology and power politics that this is not a problem; for example, Albert Einsten’s very silly ideology didn't seem to interfere with his physics. However, topics that have bearing on such issues would indeed be best done by space aliens who'd feel complete disconnect from all human concerns. This seems to me like an entirely obvious corollary of the general principle that in the interest of objectivity, a judge should have no personal stakes in the case he presides over.

If scientists could somehow remain ignorant of the ideological implications of their work, this would indeed have a positive effect on their objectivity. But of course that this is impossible in practice, so it would make no sense to strive for it. This is a deep problem without a solution in sight. (Except for palliative measures like increasing public awareness that in ideologically sensitive areas, one should be skeptical even towards work with highly prestigious affiliations.)

Two, what is an ideology? (Of course, I know how to use the word in a sentence, but you use it so often on LW that I wonder if you have a precise definition.) For example, would you describe yourself as having any ideology?

My favorite characterization was given by James Burnham: “An ‘ideology’ is similar in the social sphere to what is sometimes called ‘rationalization’ in the sphere of individual psychology. [...] It is the expression of hopes, wishes, fears, ideals, not a hypothesis about events -- though ideologies are often thought by those who hold them to be scientific theories.” (From The Managerial Revolution.)

Taken in the broadest possible sense, therefore, every person has an ideology, which encompasses all their beliefs, ideas, and attitudes that are not a matter of exact scientific or practical knowledge, and which are at least partly concerned with the public matters of social order (with the implications this has on the practical relations of power and status, although these are rarely stated and discussed openly and explicitly).

In a more narrow sense, however, ideology refers to such beliefs, ideas, and attitudes that are held with an extraordinary level of commitment and passion, which pushes one towards constant conflict -- verbal, propagandistic, political, perhaps even physical -- with those who don't share the same ideological affiliation, and which renders one fatally biased and incapable of rational argument in ideologically charged matters. (In particular, when I call someone an “ideologue,” I refer to such people, especially those who are at the forefront of developing and propagandizing their favored ideological systems.)

Whether I belong to this latter category, well, you be the judge.

Three, of the possible means one could use to achieve one's desires, would you say that writing biased scientific papers is an immoral means? What about persuasive essays?

That depends on your value judgment: how bad is it when someone contributes to the corruption of science? Science is not a natural and resilient mode of human intellectual work. It is something that critically depends on the quality of the institutions pursuing it, and these institutions are easy to corrupt, but almost impossible to fix. That our culture has them at all is, by all historical standards, a lucky accident.

Of course, one biased paper won’t cause much harm by itself, but only in the same sense that perfect forgery of a moderate amount of money harms nobody in particular very much. (On the other hand, I would say that even a single prominent biased career can cause a great deal of damage.) In both cases, if this activity is permitted and becomes widespread, the consequences will be disastrous.

Comment author: prase 12 October 2010 07:03:40AM *  15 points [-]

Nobody would claim that I became healthier if I started coughing blood, lost control of a limb, or developed chronic headaches.

Nobody would claim that I became more moral if I started stealing, killed two people for money, or turned into a notorious liar. That there are conditions uncontroversially classified as disease doesn't mean that the boundary is strict and precise.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 12 October 2010 08:07:33PM *  7 points [-]

I don't see how this answers my objection. I'll try to restate my main point in a more clear form.

The claim that "'healthy' is not a precisely defined concept, but no one is crazy enough to utter that medicine cannot answer questions of health" is, while superficially plausible, in fact false under the interpretation relevant for this discussion. Namely, the claim is true only for those issues where the concept of "health" is precise and uncontroversial. In situations where the concept of "health" is imprecise and a matter of dispute, there are sane and knowledgeable people who plausibly dispute that medicine can legitimately answer questions of health in those particular situations. Thus, what superficially looks like a lucid analogy is in fact a rhetorical sleight of hand.

(Also, I'd say that by any reasonable measure, questions of health vs. disease are typically much more clear-cut than moral questions. The appearance of coughing or headaches, ceteris paribus, represents an unambiguous reduction of health; on the other hand, even killing requires significant qualifications to be universally recognized as evil. But my main objection stands regardless of whether you agree with this.)

Comment author: prase 12 October 2010 06:55:32AM 0 points [-]

The vaccination controversy isn't a particularly good example of damages science takes from discussing morals. Although I agree that the rigour of research and the objectivity of publications suffer from the controversy, it isn't about morality. The anti-vaccination crackpots don't claim that vaccination is somehow ethically unjustifiable, they simply claim that it doesn't work and furthermore causes autism.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 12 October 2010 07:35:35PM *  2 points [-]

That's not entirely true. In recent years, at least in North America, HPV vaccines have become a significant ideological issue, mostly for purely moral reasons. (Though the media exposure of this controversy seems to have died down somewhat recently.) I haven't followed this issue in much detail, however I've noticed that it has involved not only moral disputes, but also disputes about factual questions that are in principle amenable to scientific resolution, but the discourse is hopelessly poisoned by ideological passions.

What you write is true about the majority of the historical vaccination controversies, though.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 12 October 2010 06:23:08AM *  8 points [-]

Also, this line of argument struck me as a sneaky piece of Dark Arts, though in all likelihood unintentional:

Countering the counterargument that morality is too imprecise to be treated by science, he [Sam Harris] makes an excellent comparison: "healthy" is not a precisely defined concept, but no one is crazy enough to utter that medicine cannot answer questions of health.

Actually, in the overwhelming majority of cases, "healthy" is a very precisely and uncontroversially defined concept. Nobody would claim that I became healthier if I started coughing blood, lost control of a limb, or developed chronic headaches.

However, observe one area where the concept of "health" is actually imprecise and controversial, namely mental health. And guess what: there are many smart and eminently sane people questioning whether, to what extent, and in what situations medicine can legitimately answer questions of health in this area. (I recommend this recent interview with Gary Greenberg as an excellent example.) Moreover, in this area, there are plenty of questions where both ideological and venal interests interfere with the discussion, and as a result, it's undeniable that at least some corruption of science has taken place, and that supposedly scientific documents like the DSM are laden with judgments that reflect these influences rather than any real scientific knowledge.

So, it seems to me that properly considered, this example actually undermines the case it was supposed to support.

Comment author: [deleted] 12 October 2010 04:42:27AM 7 points [-]

Science is involved in moral controversies even if the scientists aren't even aware they're participating in a moral debate. Any moral question refers to a state of the real world, and so whenever scientists discover something about the state of the world their knowledge could be used for a moral question. For instance the discovery that fish can feel pain has implications for bioethics, but I'm not sure if the scientists involved were thinking about bioethics.

Science is involved in moral questions necessarily, in exactly the same way that ordinary perception and knowledge is involved in moral questions. The question "Is it moral for me to shoot this gun at you?" has something to do with the state of the world: is the gun loaded? are you shooting at me? Obviously in making a moral decision you would use your knowledge of such matters, right? You would not prefer to remain agnostic on factual questions?

So likewise, "Should I vaccinate my child?" is a moral question that depends on the scientific questions "Does the vaccine prevent disease?" and "Does it have side effects?" Would you prefer science to remain agnostic on those questions because they are related to a moral issue? Would you prefer never to use scientific evidence in making this decision?

In response to comment by [deleted] on Morality and relativistic vertigo
Comment author: Vladimir_M 12 October 2010 05:44:18AM *  4 points [-]

What you write is true, but these facts should be seen as imposing practical limitations on science. Sometimes, scientific inquiry will stumble onto ideologically charged questions, and the less aware the scientists are of the ideological implications, the greater the chance that their work will be sound. If the ideological implications are clear, the partisan opinions impassioned, and the consequences for practical power politics undeniable, we can't realistically expect that the results will not be influenced by these considerations, whether consciously or not. And if the scientific work is specifically motivated by the fact that the question is interesting for reasons of ideology or policy, the confidence we can have in its quality is very low indeed.

For all practical purposes, this imposes limitations on the efficacy of institutional science of the sort we have today, and this must be recognized by anyone whose interest is finding truth rather than ideological ammunition. There are already many research areas where the ideological influences are so strong that their output can be trusted only after a very careful examination, and there are those whose output is almost pure bullshit, yet nevertheless gets to be adorned with the most prestigious academic affiliations. Therefore, it seems pretty clear to me that in the present situation, science is already excessively engaged in ideologically sensitive areas, and encouraging further such engagement will result only in additional corruption of science, not bringing clarity and rigor to the discussions of these areas.

Take your example of vaccination. In a situation where researchers consider it a moral imperative to dispel the crackpot conspiracy theories and pseudoscientific claims about vaccination, I have very little confidence that their research will provide an accurate picture of the risks and negative consequences of vaccination if their magnitude actually is non-negligible, for fear of providing ammunition to the anti-vaccination side. Now, in this case, it does seem like the situation is simple enough that all evidence overwhelmingly points to the pro-vaccination side, and assuming agreement on the facts, there is no significant additional disagreement on values and preferences, so there isn't much concern overall. But often neither is the case, and insisting that science should be involved in the controversies more heavily will ultimately just corrupt and debase science, not bring any clarity to the situation.

Comment author: Perplexed 12 October 2010 03:42:47AM 8 points [-]

All of your examples dealing with morality take a consequentialist stance with regard to ethics. I don't think that anyone has ever doubted that science might be relevant in computing the expected consequences of actions. So, I don't think you are saying anything fundamentally new here by applying science to pairs of ethical maxims rather than to one at a time.

But a lot of people are not consequentialists - they are deontologists (i.e. believers in moral duties). That duties may be in conflict on occasion has also been known for a long time - I'm told this theme was common in Greek tragedy. I'm curious as to whether and how your methodology can find a toehold for science in a duty-based account of morality.

For example:

  • Everyone has a duty not to masturbate.
  • Every married person has a duty not to commit adultery.

Where is the conflict, even if science is brought in?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 12 October 2010 04:13:17AM *  6 points [-]

Perplexed:

But a lot of people are not consequentialists - they are deontologists (i.e. believers in moral duties).

Actually, my impression is that the overwhelming majority of people are practitioners of folk virtue ethics in their own personal lives. (This typically applies to the self-professed consequentialists and deontologists too, including those who have made whole academic careers out of advocating these ideas in the abstract.) I expanded on this thesis once in a long and somewhat rambling comment, which I should rewrite in a more systematic way sometime.

It mostly boils down to maintaining and enforcing an elaborate system of tacit-agreement focal points in one's interactions with other people, and priding oneself on being the sort of person who does this with consistent high skill, which is one of the basic elements of what the ancients called "virtue." (Of course, when it comes to views that don't have practical relevance for one's personal life, it's mostly about signaling games instead.)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 12 October 2010 03:57:53AM 1 point [-]

Here's one challenge for your position. Take, for example, your first question. I don't think it makes any sense to talk about any probabilities there, since the question is incomplete to the point of meaninglessness. What sample of cars are we talking about, and under what exact circumstances? To which, I assume, you would answer that for everything unspecified, you should somehow make assumptions that are true with some probabilities and then use that to calculate the final probability of your answer, or estimate it just by feeling in some such way.

But how far would you take this principle? Suppose you receive this question in a bad handwriting, with one word totally smudged, so that it reads like "a [...] is white," or "a car is [...]." Would you be willing to assign a probability nevertheless, based on probabilistic guesses about the missing word? If yes, what about the case where two words are smudged, so the claim is "a [...] is [...]"? What about the ultimate case where the text is completely unreadable, so you have to guess what the question is?

(Note that we can arrive at your original question by starting with a well-defined problem with a computable exact answer, and then smudging parts of it so that we're left with "a car is white.")

Comment author: Vladimir_M 12 October 2010 03:29:56AM *  3 points [-]

Trouble is, when moral conclusions (and thus also the political and ideological positions that follow from them) depend on the conclusions of science, what force is going to keep scientists objective when they're faced with the resulting biases and perverse incentives? It's not like we have an oracle that would be guaranteed to provide objective and accurate scientific answers regardless of the moral, ideological, and political controversies for which the questions are relevant.

The evidence from the history of science, both past and current, clearly shows that organized science reliably produces accurate, well-substantiated, and unbiased results only when its practitioners are not subject to incentives, either venal or ideological, to reach some predetermined conclusions. In contrast, whenever some powerful political or ideological forces have needed a fig-leaf of scientific legitimacy, they had no problem finding allies and stooges in the academic world wiling to produce junk science suitable for their purposes. For an example, just look at the history of 20th century economics, or any other field that was ever involved in ideological controversies, for that matter.

Considering this, I disagree with this post radically. Involving science in normative controversies is a sure way to corrupt and debase the former, not to improve the epistemological standards in the latter.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 11 October 2010 11:25:30PM 5 points [-]

Implementing computer networks that would be secure even against smart human attackers, let alone against superhuman intelligences, is an impossible goal. Human minds, whether operating in isolation or in large cooperative organizations, are simply unable to reason reliably at that level of complexity. It would be an even harder task than writing reliably bug-free large software projects or designing reliably bug-free state-of-the-art microprocessors -- goals that humans already find unreachable in practice.

The only ways to avoid being hacked are: (1) to keep your computer offline, (2) to be an uninteresting target that's not worth the effort, and (3) to have good forensics and threaten draconian punishments against hackers. Clearly, only (1) is a solution applicable to the problem of keeping AIs boxed, but then we get to the problem of social engineering.

Comment author: Relsqui 11 October 2010 07:35:47PM 3 points [-]

Your analogy assumes that between people of different sexes and sexual preferences, there are no relevant differences that would have any significant bearing on their dating strategies.

I think the relevance of the difference depends on the specificity of the advice. If I were telling people to show off their brains and their sense of humor, or to make a point of talking or not talking about sex, or to be sure to mention their pets, then yes, it would be ridiculous of me to claim that these are generally applicable. But the post is mostly discussing how to ensure that your profile depicts you accurately. Do you think that there is a group for which that's not a concern?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 11 October 2010 08:09:06PM *  3 points [-]

To be clear, there are two fundamental problems with your post.

First, even when it comes to just you personally, you don't seem to present any coherent method for differentiating between things that you simply like as a matter of personal taste, and things that have practical relevance (to whatever effect). In your post, you appear to have a completely cavalier attitude towards this immensely difficult problem.

Second, in this area, the relevant guidelines for self-presentation are indeed so strongly sex-and-preference-specific that anything not completely trivial or irrelevant is almost certain to be impossible to express in a manner applicable to all groups. In other words, everything that can be expressed in such manner will be either obvious, or irrelevant, or false and misleading for at least some of these groups.

These simple observations, to which I referred as "sanity checks" in my above not very well received comment, are in my opinion sufficient to invalidate your approach altogether, and to conclude that by any practical criteria, your advice is likely to be just noise.

As for your specific question:

But the post is mostly discussing how to ensure that your profile depicts you accurately. Do you think that there is a group for which that's not a concern?

In order for your advice to make sense, you have to be able to point out the expected practical consequences of the concrete pieces of advice you give, and to explain why you believe that they will result from following your advice. Your approach completely fails to satisfy these criteria, both when it comes to "depicting oneself accurately" (which I'm not even sure is a coherently defined objective) and everything else.

(Not to mention that your post does contain specific advice about improving the attractiveness of one's profile, which I've already criticized.)

Comment author: thomblake 11 October 2010 07:12:03PM 4 points [-]

The idea that something that works for you in this area should apply to people of other sexes and preferences is simply out of touch with reality.

I, for one, do not find this obvious.

It's as if a cook made a checklist useful for his daily work, and then got the idea that this exact same checklist should be useful to policemen, mathematicians, or welders.

It seems to me rather more analogous to a cook who made a checklist for making pancakes, which he expected would apply to other cooks making pancakes whilst wearing differently-colored hats. But there's no point in playing analogy-tennis.

that is simply what the facts are

You've managed to shift the burden of proof back to yourself with this comment. Where's your evidence, now?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 11 October 2010 07:26:57PM *  2 points [-]

thomblake:

It seems to me rather more analogous to a cook who made a checklist for making pancakes, which he expected would apply to other cooks making pancakes whilst wearing differently-colored hats.

Your analogy assumes that between people of different sexes and sexual preferences, there are no relevant differences that would have any significant bearing on their dating strategies. Frankly, I find this assumption so remote from reality, including all my experience with human life and all that is known about it both informally and scientifically, that if you really hold this opinion, it would be extremely hard for us to establish a common reference point from which to even begin a constructive discussion. So, it would probably be better if we could just agree to disagree at this point.

Comment author: Relsqui 11 October 2010 06:32:36PM 3 points [-]

They are not guaranteed, or even likely, to improve your chances for eliciting attraction even from the author, let alone anyone else.

The only thing that "guarantees" eliciting attraction--from me or anyone else--is being attractive. If you write honestly about how you are a person whose interests and values do not intersect with mine, and present it well, I still will not message you. This is not a failure of your writing; it has saved us both some wasted time.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 11 October 2010 07:10:20PM *  2 points [-]

Relsqui:

The only thing that "guarantees" eliciting attraction--from me or anyone else--is being attractive.

I have no particular comment on what you write here, but I would like to point out that this makes my above comment sound much cruder than it really was. The phrases "guarantee to improve one's chances for eliciting attraction" and "guarantee eliciting attraction" do not mean the exact same thing.

Comment author: thomblake 11 October 2010 06:18:00PM 6 points [-]

Your criticisms of this post seem valid, but could likely be equally well-applied to (for example) most of what Eliezer and Yvain have written. To test this for yourself, go to a random post from (for example) the Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions sequence and see how much empiricism stands behinds its claims.

Posts like this are fine, though they should be followed up by empirical study if anyone cares.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 11 October 2010 06:58:48PM *  2 points [-]

thomblake:

Your criticisms of this post seem valid, but could likely be equally well-applied to (for example) most of what Eliezer and Yvain have written. To test this for yourself, go to a random post from (for example) the Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions sequence and see how much empiricism stands behinds its claims.

I disagree. While I certainly have disagreements with these posts you mention, their approach is still fundamentally sound. They don't, at least in the great majority of cases, provide unsubstantiated practical advice in this vein, and they rarely, if ever, fail elementary sanity checks like these ones I mentioned.

Comment author: Relsqui 11 October 2010 06:04:42PM *  4 points [-]

That it works for me is not why I think it's good advice. That it works for the people whose profiles I'm attracted to is closer, with a bit of "it follows logically from my stated goals" mixed in.

I'm happy to remove the post back to the discussion section if it's deemed valueless to the LW community at large. But I'm curious why advice for profile-writing calls for statistical evidence, whereas advice for mood improvement and advice to get out more apparently do not. What's the rule which defines topics to which we must apply rigor?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 11 October 2010 06:50:00PM *  1 point [-]

Relsqui:

What's the rule which defines topics to which we must apply rigor?

Rigor? In this case, it's not about rigor, but about failing elementary sanity checks. The idea that something that works for you in this area should apply to people of other sexes and preferences is simply out of touch with reality. It's as if a cook made a checklist useful for his daily work, and then got the idea that this exact same checklist should be useful to policemen, mathematicians, or welders.

Please pardon my harsh-sounding tone, but that is simply what the facts are, and I don't see how to put them differently.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 11 October 2010 08:22:12AM *  10 points [-]

Frankly, I think that all this advice is simply irrelevant for all practical purposes. The goal of a dating site profile is to elicit interest and attraction from people who would in turn be attractive to you. However, what this post presents are just instructions for satisfying the author's entirely abstract vision for what a nice profile should look like. They are not guaranteed, or even likely, to improve your chances for eliciting attraction even from the author, let alone anyone else. Ultimately, the listed advice ends up being pure noise at best. The fact that a post like this one is getting a significant number of upvotes should serve as a strong warning signal to lots of people here that they greatly overestimate the level of "rationality" that they supposedly apply to all issues.

One basic problem is that the author starts with an impossible goal, namely providing fully general advice that will apply to people of all sexes and sexual preferences with unchanged wording. While such an approach resonates well with the modern popular forms of idealism, it is far too detached from reality to allow for any sensible results.

Another part that struck me as completely detached from reality is:

There are two schools of thought on whom you should ask to judge your profile's attractiveness. One is to ask the sort of person you're trying to attract: members of your preferred gender, and probably of your own culture.[...] The other school of thought is that the right people to ask are those who share your gender/culture preference, and have been successful attracting such partners. [...] Both have potential biases, but anything both types of critic agree on is probably correct.

That's about as realistic as saying that there are two schools of thought on what to do when the low fuel light in your car lights up: one is to to keep driving and pray to God that he might keep your car running no matter what happens, and the other is to pull over at the next gas station and fill the tank. If you're a man looking for women, the idea of asking women for advice in love and dating, versus getting advice from men who are successful with women, stand in about the same relation when it comes to the expected practical success. This is entirely uncontroversial among people who have any real knowledge of these matters.

Comment author: stoat 10 October 2010 07:42:57PM 1 point [-]

I agree the problem is even more pronounced in physics.

Also, I am interested in and would appreciate the details of the case study to which you refer.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 10 October 2010 08:42:08PM *  5 points [-]

The case to which I referred was when I first studied calculus as a teenager. The book I was reading took what I think is the standard approach to handling trigonometric functions, namely first prove that the limit of sin(x)/x is 1 when x->0, and then use this result to derive all kinds of interesting things. However, the proof of this limit, as set forth in the book, used the formula for the length of an arc. But how is this length defined? Clearly, you have to define the Riemann (or some other) integral before it makes sense to talk about lengths of curves, and then an integral must be used to calculate the formula for arc length based on the coordinate equations for a circle -- even though that formula is obvious intuitively. But I could not think of a way to integrate the arc length without, somewhere along the way, using some result that depends indirectly on the mentioned limit of sin(x)/x!

All this confused me greatly. Wasn't it illegitimate to even speak about arc lengths before integrals, and even if this must be done for reasons of convenience -- you can't wait all until integrals are introduced before you let people use derivatives of sine and cosine -- shouldn't it be accompanied by a caveat to this effect? Even worse, it seemed like there was a chicken-and-egg problem between the proofs of lim(sin(x)/x)=1 for x->0 and the formula for arc length.

This was before you could look for answers to questions online, and it was unguided self-study so I had no one to ask, and it took a while before I stumbled onto another book that specifically mentioned this problem and addressed it by showing how arc lengths can be integrated without trigonometric functions. So it turned out that I had identified the problem correctly after all. But considering that I was a complete novice and thus couldn't trust my own judgment, I had an awfully disturbing feeling that I might be missing some important point spectacularly.

Comment author: kodos96 10 October 2010 07:18:35PM 0 points [-]

OK, since I'm writing this on LW after all, I guess it's time to recognize that I've long passed the boundary from rational argument to an impassioned propagandistic defense of my own view in a value- and taste-laden controversy.

Well yeah, obviously this entire conversation has been about totally subjective questions of taste. Nothing wrong with that though, as long as no one is fooling themselves into thinking it's something other than that.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 10 October 2010 08:07:01PM 0 points [-]

kodos96:

Well yeah, obviously this entire conversation has been about totally subjective questions of taste. Nothing wrong with that though, as long as no one is fooling themselves into thinking it's something other than that.

Still, I think that it makes sense to ask whether traditional or modernist architecture on average does a better job creating spaces that will satisfy the subjective tastes of the majority of people, for which the best evidence are people's revealed preferences and attitudes. In this sense, there is an objective question here after all.

Comment author: kodos96 10 October 2010 09:10:55AM *  0 points [-]

So if you let them choose between being alone (unless they're extraordinarily popular hubs of social life) and hanging out in desolate modernist spaces, they will choose the latter.

The campus has no shortage of social spaces to hang out in, most with more conventional architecture, yet many choose Geisel. I don't think anyone thinks of it as "desolate" - I'm pretty sure that's not the adjective the Trek producers had in mind when they cast it as Starfleet Headquarters in one of the movies. At the top floors of the inverted pyramid, 360 degrees of glass result in a spectacular view... at sunset it's downright romantic. The stacks up there are a popular place for the undergrads to lose their virginity (or so I've heard).

at best, it means that the architect has taken advantage of an extraordinary location to achieve that.

The location alone just gets you a few rooms on one side with a view. Here though, an amazing amount of thought was put into how to lay things out so that everybody gets a view.

By the way, can you open a window in these ocean-view rooms?

I can't say for sure, as I never worked in that building. But I suspect that they do open - the building across the street from it where I used to work was also brutalist (though much less impressive), and its windows opened.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 10 October 2010 10:18:07AM *  1 point [-]

OK, since I'm writing this on LW after all, I guess it's time to recognize that I've long passed the boundary from rational argument to an impassioned propagandistic defense of my own view in a value- and taste-laden controversy.

I've never seen these buildings that you describe, so I can't make any final judgement about them. It could be that these are indeed some genuine cases of modernist architecture working well, though I still suspect that it's a matter of having such a spectacularly good space that it's extremely hard to ruin it even with the ugliest architecture imaginable. (To quote William Whyte, "Given a fine location, it is difficult to design a space that will not attract people. What is remarkable is how often this has been accomplished.") But, yes, it might be that these buildings are really much better than I though modernism could ever be. (On the other hand, judging by what can be seen on the web, these Salk Institute spaces look pretty damn desolate.)

What I still don't doubt, though, is that the average practical results of traditional architecture are far better than the average practical results of modernism. This seems to me overwhelmingly obvious from virtually all the examples I can think of, which includes everyday sights from several cities I've lived in that feature a mix of both.

Comment author: kodos96 10 October 2010 08:33:38AM *  1 point [-]

Do you just "like" these things in the abstract so as to signal your artistic tastes

I'm totally not an architecture aficionado - I'd be hard pressed to name 3 different styles of architecture, even harder pressed to identify them. I'm only familiar with brutalism because I happen to be surrounded by it. So there's no signaling going on whatsoever - I'm not a part of that scene at all.

would you actually enjoy living your life surrounded by such an ambient?

I actually am living my life surrounded by such, and although I wouldn't go so far as to say I'm "enjoying living my life", I think that has more to do with my brain chemistry than with the architecture, which is one of the few things I see every day that brings a smile to my face.

I must note that both your examples look strangely empty of people. You know, actual humans who might perceive this space as a tolerable place to spend their time in.

They were just photographed that way. In real life they're both extremely vibrant places. Geisel is always full, despite the fact that on a campus with broadband in every dorm room and downloadable e-reserves, there's not much of a real reason to go to the library... yet people do... tons of them.

And the Salk Institute.... Kahn designed it to be much more impressive from the inside than the outside. The buildings are kind of boring from the outside, but then you go in and realize that he's painstakingly laid out every single exterior and interior wall for the specific purpose of ensuring that every single office, every single lab, every single lab bench, has its own private, unobstructed ocean view. How's that for a "tolerable place to spend your time"?

brutalist buildings dumped right in the middle of dense traditional nice spaces, like university campuses

But that's how it's supposed to be done. Brutalist buildings have always reminded me of modernism meets feudalism... they look like sci-fi versions of castles. But you don't put a bunch of castles right next to each other - you build a castle and then you have a bunch of smaller woodframed buildings surrounding it (you know, for the peasants ;)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 10 October 2010 08:50:28AM *  0 points [-]

kodos96:

They were just photographed that way. In real life they're both extremely vibrant places. Geisel is always full, despite the fact that on a campus with broadband in every dorm room and downloadable e-reserves, there's not much of a real reason to go to the library... yet people do... tons of them.

Well, even though they'll rarely admit it explicitly for fear of sounding desperate, humans are social animals and they yearn to have at least some contact with fellow humans. So if you let them choose between being alone (unless they're extraordinarily popular hubs of social life) and hanging out in desolate modernist spaces, they will choose the latter. But all real-life experience shows that they much prefer gathering at traditional public spaces and interiors.

And the Salk Institute.... Kahn designed it to be much more impressive from the inside than the outside. The buildings are kind of boring from the outside, but then you go in and realize that he's painstakingly laid out every since exterior and interior wall for the specific purpose of ensuring that every single office, every single lab, every single lab bench, has its own private, unobstructed ocean view. How's that for a "tolerable place to spend your time"?

That might indeed be true -- but, at best, it means that the architect has taken advantage of an extraordinary location to achieve that. In contrast, classical architecture and interior design manage to achieve at least a tolerable (and often very pleasant) surrounding in far less promising places.

(By the way, can you open a window in these ocean-view rooms? In the overwhelming majority of modernist buildings, you can't do it anywhere at all. Speaking for myself, I'd much prefer to be able to open a window looking towards an entirely mediocre classical landscape than to have unopenable glass separating me from the most spectacular ocean view. The latter, honestly, seems to me no better than a poster on the wall.)

Comment author: kodos96 10 October 2010 06:58:21AM 0 points [-]

As for brutalism in particular, it took these buildings to actually be built, and people to be exposed to them for a while, for their sheer horror to be truly felt. Once this became evident, the style was soon abandoned

I think I must be the last person left on earth who actually likes brutalist architecture. The term seems to have become something of a whipping boy, but I think most people who use it derisively have never actually seen any good examples, and are just thinking of the big rectangular government buildings.

Maybe I'm just prejudiced because I happen to work right next to two of the most famous examples of the style, the Louis Kahn designed Salk Institute, and Geisel Library... how can you not think that looks cool? I mean come on, it's freakin Starfleet Headquarters!

Comment author: Vladimir_M 10 October 2010 07:49:22AM *  0 points [-]

kodos96:

I think I must be the last person left on earth who actually likes brutalist architecture.

Do you just "like" these things in the abstract so as to signal your artistic tastes, or would you actually enjoy living your life surrounded by such an ambient?

I must note that both your examples look strangely empty of people. You know, actual humans who might perceive this space as a tolerable place to spend their time in.

The term seems to have become something of a whipping boy, but I think most people who use it derisively have never actually seen any good examples, and are just thinking of the big rectangular government buildings.

Not as far as I'm concerned. I've seen some of the most successful brutalist buildings, and with at least one of those, I even have a slight sentimental connection.

The only examples where you'll see actual flesh-and-blood humans willing to spend their time around such places are the brutalist buildings dumped right in the middle of dense traditional nice spaces, like university campuses, where it's simply impossible not to have crowds swirling around.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Discuss: How to learn math?
Comment author: stoat 09 October 2010 08:24:54PM 5 points [-]

My own experience is that it is fairly easy to identify points of confusion, and the hard part is finding a book or whatever, at the right level, to address that specific point. This is a tough problem to solve with self-teaching.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 10 October 2010 07:19:42AM *  3 points [-]

Interestingly, I never found this to be a problem with mathematics, although I did find it a problem many times I tried to teach myself physics. In my experience, textbook-level mathematics is almost always a perfect self-contained edifice of logic, whereas textbook-level physics often leaves unclear points that you can clarify only by asking an expert or finding another book that addresses that specific point. (I suppose things might be different if you're reading bleeding-edge math research papers.)

Out of the large number of mathematical texts I've read, I can recall only one occasion when I felt genuinely confused after making the effort to understand the text in-depth. In this case, it turned out that this was indeed a fundamental conceptual error in the text. (I can write down the details if anyone is interested -- it provides for a nice case study of what seems "obvious" even in rigorous math.) Otherwise, I've always found mathematics to be perfectly clear and understandable with reasonable effort, as long as you can locate all the literature that's referenced.

Comment author: stoat 09 October 2010 08:32:48PM 2 points [-]

I also find that scary/frustrating. But don't you find you can relearn those forgotten chunks much more rapidly than the first time, if you need to?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 10 October 2010 06:48:52AM 3 points [-]

Oh, yes, definitely. But the amount of effort necessary to relearn them is much smaller if you remember something resembling a coherent outline than if your knowledge decays into incoherent fragments.

Comment author: [deleted] 09 October 2010 07:02:33PM 14 points [-]

Self-teaching math is a skill in itself. The hardest thing is to recognize what it feels like to be confused, and to attack the source of your confusion (it's way too easy to think "meh, this makes sense" when it doesn't.)

Read with a notebook, like a monk, copy things down as you go. When you finish a book you should have a (somewhat paraphrased/shortened) copy of your own. Do the exercises if there are any (yeah, this will make you feel stupid. The more you can face this feeling, the more math you'll know.)

In response to comment by [deleted] on Discuss: How to learn math?
Comment author: Vladimir_M 09 October 2010 08:13:00PM *  8 points [-]

This is good advice, to which I'd add: once you're done studying some particular area, be sure to have a clear and systematic "bird's eye view" of the basic definitions, lemmas, and theorems, how they depend on each other, and what the salient point of each one is. Because if you don't use this knowledge for a few years, it's surprising how thoroughly you can forget almost everything -- and in case you ever need it again, you'll be in a much better position if your knowledge decays into a still-coherent outline of this "bird's eye view" than a heap of disorganized fragments.

I find it scary how thoroughly I've forgotten some large chunks of math that at some point I knew so well that I would have be able to reconstruct them, with proofs and everything, given just paper and pencil. Those I still remember very well after 10-15 years are either those that I drilled so intensely that it developed into an irreversible skill like bike riding, or those where I organized my knowledge into a very systematic outline (even if I never had a truly in-depth understanding of all the logic involved).

Comment author: pengvado 09 October 2010 02:38:35PM *  1 point [-]

If the theory asserts the existence of objects with interesting properties about which it refuses to say anything more that would enable us to study them, it's not "our regular" kind of thing.

Does this heuristic say that Chaitin's constant isn't a regular real number?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 09 October 2010 04:56:29PM *  1 point [-]

Good point. I should have said "bizarre properties" or something to that effect. Which of course leads us to the problem of what exactly qualifies as such. (There's certainly lots of seemingly bizarre stuff easily derivable in ordinary real analysis.) So perhaps I should discard the second part of my above comment.

But I think my main point still stands: when there is no obvious way to see what choice of axioms (pun unintended) is "normal" using some heuristics like these, humans are also unable to agree what theory is the "normal" one. Differentiating between "normal" theories and "pathological" ones like PA + ~Con(PA) is ultimately a matter of some such heuristics, not some very deep insight. That's my two cents, in any case.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 09 October 2010 08:06:12AM *  2 points [-]

Also, if you're going to read only one book about linguistics, I'm not sure if The Language Instict is a good choice. It's very fun and informative, but Pinker does a very bad job of clarifying which claims are a matter of consensus, and which ones his own, at least somewhat controversial opinions. Also, linguistics is a wider field than you might conclude from the book, with lots of fascinating insight about all kinds of things that Pinker doesn't talk about.

For a good introduction to linguistics, I recommend R.L. Trask's Language: the Basics instead. It's much shorter, but definitely better as a primer.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 09 October 2010 07:47:29AM *  3 points [-]

It would be good if one could separate these lists into free online material and links to online bookstores. Also, it would be nice to list popular and semi-formal material separate from real rigorous stuff, or to add some annotations to that effect.

Regarding quantum theory, these are the best introductory online materials I've found:

Also, general relativity isn't really discussed here much, but still, here are some online materials I can recommend, so you can consider adding that to the list:

Comment author: [deleted] 08 October 2010 10:38:06PM *  1 point [-]

Once again, interesting.

There is a connection in historical fact between modern art and architecture and social utopianism. It does seem to cut across the grain of my own ideas.

My model for aesthetics was:

  1. Naive thought: yay for pretty things! Let's gild our paintings and paint our statues!

  2. Sophisticated thought: it's vulgar/naive to just make things pretty. Often the best things are difficult to appreciate. (The first example I can think of this is the Renaissance tradition of making stone statues and leaving them unpainted.)

There have been various reactions against prettiness. Some Romantic ideas were against prettiness (the sublime vs. the beautiful.) As I understand, Communism was not particularly friendly either to prettiness or to sophisticated formalism. (e.g. composers in the USSR would be condemned for being too atonal, but painters would be condemned if they painted beautiful women in pretty dresses.)

So I don't know if there's a consistent relationship between prettiness and politics. I think there's art that's both pretty and political (Judy Collins) and art that's pretty, and very non-political (Matisse). I'm for prettiness, either way.

Finding a small, pleasant, out-of-the way corner for myself sounds very good, actually. Utopia for me and a few other folks would be more than enough. A hobbit-hole is the very definition of nice. I would put that in the "nice" category... and yet spending time thinking about the dangers of idealism is distinctly "anti-nice." It's not really a pleasant corner if you spend most of your time hunkered down against foes, is it?

In response to comment by [deleted] on Pro-nice and anti-nice
Comment author: Vladimir_M 08 October 2010 11:39:06PM *  1 point [-]

SarahC:

There is a connection in historical fact between modern art and architecture and social utopianism. It does seem to cut across the grain of my own ideas.

Modernism in architecture is fundamentally an expression of utopianism. Constructing buildings, public spaces, and interiors that will be pleasant and attractive for people has been a well understood problem for thousands of years. A modernist, however, sees sticking to this body of well-established knowledge and experience as insufficiently idealistic and sophisticated, and strives for more exalted achievements that he believes his brave novelty will enable -- in the most extreme form, even seeing himself as a man of science proudly sweeping away the old superstitions.

Such idealistic hubris, of course, backfires in practice. This is best seen when looking at the artistic sketches of planned modernist projects that show people happily hanging out in the future modernist ambient, and then comparing them with the resulting bleak, despair-inducing, deserted spaces. (It is remarkable how not a single traditional form of architecture from anywhere in the world, to my knowledge, has ever created anything resembling the specifically modernist forms of ugliness and inhumane sterility. It takes the modern utopian thinking to discard common sense to the point where one starts to do such things.)

This example effectively answers your recent question what I have against utopianism. The utopianist ignores the limitations imposed by reality when embarking on his utopian projects, and when this backfires, others also have to live with the consequences. Some people see this clearly in advance, and understandably get nervous and aggravated.

Comment author: [deleted] 08 October 2010 07:44:06PM 0 points [-]

Because I actually want to know what's going on, I'd like to see what you'd say about the perspective opposite to the "pro-nice" one. (And I'd want to know what you'd name it, because in retrospect "anti-nice" is a loaded word.)

If at all possible, I want to keep this from being a simple political dichotomy. "Pro-nice" perspectives are certainly utopian, but they're not all the same kind of utopia (in fact, some are nostalgic rather than futuristic.)

Also, I never thought of modern architecture as being "pro-nice," for instance. Brutalist architecture is the prime example of something that's not pro-nice, because pretty curlicues and adornments are replaced with starkness. Whoever invented it must have had an aesthetic value in direct opposition to naive "prettiness" and "pleasantness." The same goes for modern art and for formal innovation in literature.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Pro-nice and anti-nice
Comment author: Vladimir_M 08 October 2010 09:29:34PM *  2 points [-]

This could be a very interesting discussion, but before getting into it in any detail, I think your perspective needs some refinement. Esteem for modern art, including modern architecture, strongly correlates with the sorts of utopian thinking that you list as an essential feature of the "pro-nice" side. Imagine you read someone you've never heard of harshly denouncing modern art and architecture as ugly, pointless, and dehumanized garbage -- what other attitudes would you guess this person probably has?

(As for brutalism in particular, it took these buildings to actually be built, and people to be exposed to them for a while, for their sheer horror to be truly felt. Once this became evident, the style was soon abandoned. But it is clear that back in the day, the people enthusiastic for that sort of thing would have been disproportionately, if not overwhelmingly in the "pro-nice" camp, just like those enthusiastic for the presently popular forms of modernism today.)

This leads to one of the major contradictions in the way you try to draw the lines. Seeking "naive prettiness and pleasantness" can have the form of desire to find for oneself a small pleasant corner of the world to live in, without any inclination for idealism -- either theoretical or practical -- for the rest of humanity. Often this attitude is accompanied by a strong (and typically justified) hostility towards idealism as dangerous nonsense that threatens to upset the peace. Here your model seems to break down.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 08 October 2010 08:46:24PM *  5 points [-]

The findings on the efficacy of medicine that Robin Hanson often mentions sound like a good example. Most people would guess that the conclusions of the RAND study are obviously correct if presented in inverted form.

But more importantly, if you have such difficulty finding good examples, could this perhaps be an indication that your claim is more shaky than you'd like it to be?

One of the worst tendencies I notice in my own argumentation when I get carried away is precisely the sort of error you might be making here. Namely, sometimes I state a general claim that wouldn't really hold under scrutiny, and then think long and hard until I find an example that fits especially well to support it. This even though in the process, I think through a bunch of situations that represent at least a partial counterexample to my claim, but I never mention those.

In this case, the fact that you have such difficulty finding examples where hindsight devalues social science findings suggests that this doesn't happen as often as you'd like to imply.

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 08 October 2010 08:52:32AM *  12 points [-]

My guess is that people (because of similar mind architecture) share beliefs (persuadability) in statements of a stronger system, of which PA and ZF only capture a rough outline. This shared theory accounts for platonism, or detail of "standard model". Capturing the whole of this theory, or even the whole of standard model of arithmetic, is on the same order of difficulty as formally defining human preference (because people don't have reliable access to those intuitions). Part of progress in mathematics consists in understanding this shared theory one aspect at a time. Other part is development of tools given formalist position, that is assuming very little and then playing the symbol game, preparing to consider various possibilities, but this doesn't address the question of motivation for entertaining one formal system and not another, that is platonist's intuition.

(It's similar to how we all solve the problem of induction approximately the same way, which means that we share the same "theory of reality": we reach the same conclusions from (enough of) the same observations.)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 08 October 2010 06:31:00PM *  0 points [-]

This is one of the best comments I've ever seen on LW, or anywhere else for that matter. Regardless of whether this hypothesis is true, I can't remember the last time I saw as much clarity and insight packed into so few words.

Comment author: cousin_it 08 October 2010 08:09:02AM *  2 points [-]

Thanks! Your comment prompts me to reformulate my original question this way: given a formal system, how can the AI determine that it talks about "the" natural numbers? For example, we can add to PA some axiom that rules out its standard model, but leaves many nonstandard ones. The simplest example would be to add the inconsistency of PA - the resulting theory will (counterintuitively) be just as consistent as PA, but quite weird. It will have many interesting provable theorems that are nevertheless common-sensically "false", e.g. "PA proves 1+1=3". Can the AI recognize such situations and say "no way, this formal system doesn't seem to describe my regular integers"?

About the consistency of ZFC: it's certainly a neat idea to conclude an arithmetical statement is "probably true" if you can't find a disproof for a long time. Unfortunately, if we have an arithmetical statement that we can neither prove or disprove so far, your idea would have us believe that it's true and its negation is also true. That doesn't look like correct Bayesian reasoning to me!

Comment author: Vladimir_M 08 October 2010 06:24:40PM *  1 point [-]

cousin_it:

For example, we can add to PA some axiom that rules out its standard model, but leaves many nonstandard ones. The simplest example would be to add the inconsistency of PA - the resulting theory will (counterintuitively) be just as consistent as PA, but quite weird. [...] Can the AI recognize such situations and say "no way, this formal system doesn't seem to describe my regular integers"?

This seems to be a matter of some relatively straightforward human heuristics. A theory that is somehow directly "talking about itself" via its axioms looks weird and suspicious. And not to mention what this axiom would look like if you actually wrote it down alongside the standard PA axioms in the same format!

Note that when these heuristics don't apply, humans end up confused and in disagreement about what should be considered as "our regular" stuff when faced with various independent statements that look like potential axioms. (As with Euclid's fifth postulate, the continuum hypothesis, the axiom of choice, etc.)

It will have many interesting provable theorems that are nevertheless common-sensically "false", e.g. "PA proves 1+1=3".

More specifically, it will prove: "There exists a natural number that, when decoded according to your Goedelization scheme, yields a proof in PA that 1+1=3." However, it won't prove anything about that number that would actually allow you to write it down and see what that proof is. ("Writing down" a natural number essentially means expressing a theorem about a specific relation it has with another number that you use as the number system base.) This suggests another straightforward heuristic: if the theory asserts the existence of objects with interesting properties about which it refuses to say anything more that would enable us to study them, it's not "our regular" kind of thing.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 08 October 2010 05:56:33PM *  4 points [-]

I think you've identified what Steven Pinker calls the contrast between the "utopian vision" and the "tragic vision" (based on an earlier concept by Thomas Sowell, plus of course numerous other people throughout history who have noticed the same thing in different contexts). The original meaning of those terms is political, but clearly there are also correlates in all other areas of life. So, you are likely pointing out a real contrast.

However, for some reason, you have decided to word your post in extremely loaded terms, to the point where you are getting into contradictions in terms. (How can things with "obvious appeal" and those that "everyone finds pleasant" be disliked by anyone?) This results in many inaccurate and imprecise points throughout your post, which I'm not going to address in detail, so I'll merely point out your greatest mistake.

Namely, you assume that whenever "anti-nice" people express dislike for things that have appeal to the "pro-nice" side, this must be because they also perceive them as beautiful, uplifting, etc., but they nevertheless prefer to find some sort of perverse joy in opposite feelings. Yet, the saccharine produced by the "pro-nice" side can be honestly felt by others as the most awful soul-suffocating ugliness and dehumanized cant that breaks one's very will to live. The same holds for the "cool/novelty" factor that the "pro-nice" side strives to introduce into everything (the prime example being modern architecture).

Comment author: prase 07 October 2010 09:09:11AM 0 points [-]

I know you have limited it to repeated judgments about essentialy the same question. I was rather asking why, and I am still not sure whether I interpret it correctly. Is it that the judgments themselves are possibly produced by different parts of brain, or the person's self-evaluation of certainty are produced by different parts of brain, or both? And if so, so what?

Imagine a test is done on a particular person. During five consecutive years he is being asked a lot of questions (of all different types), and he has to give an answer and a subjective feeling of certainty. After that, we see that the answers which he has labeled as "almost certain" were right in 83%, 78%, 81%, 84% and 85% of cases in the five years. Let's even say that the experimenters were careful enough to divide the questions into different topics, and establish, that his "almost certain" anwers about medicine were right in 94% of the time in average and his "almost certain" answers about politics were right in 56% of the time in average. All other topics were near the overall average.

Do you 1) maintain that such stable results are very unlikely to happen, or that 2) even if most of people can be calibrated is such way, still it doesn't justify using them for measuring probabilities?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 08 October 2010 04:32:49AM *  0 points [-]

prase:

I know you have limited it to repeated judgments about essentialy the same question. I was rather asking why, and I am still not sure whether I interpret it correctly. Is it that the judgments themselves are possibly produced by different parts of brain, or the person's self-evaluation of certainty are produced by different parts of brain, or both? And if so, so what?

We don't really know, but it could certainly be both, and also it may well be that the same parts of the brain are not equally reliable for all questions they are capable of processing. Therefore, while simple inductive reasoning tells us that consistent accuracy on the same problem can be extrapolated, there is no ground to generalize to other questions, since they may involve different parts of the brain, or the same part functioning in different modes that don't have the same accuracy.

Unless, of course, we cover all such various parts and modes and obtain some sort of weighted average over them, which I suppose is the point of your thought experiment, of which more below.

Do you 1) maintain that such stable results are very unlikely to happen, or that 2) even if most of people can be calibrated is such way, still it doesn't justify using them for measuring probabilities?

If the set of questions remains representative -- in the sense of querying the same brain processes with the same frequency -- the results could turn out to be fairly stable. This could conceivably be achieved by large and wide-ranging sets of questions. (I wonder if someone has actually done such experiments?)

However, the result could be replicated only if the same person is again asked similar large sets of questions that are representative with regards to the frequencies with which they query different brain processes. Relative to that reference class, it clearly makes sense to attach probabilities to answers, so, yes, here we would have another counterexample for my original claim, for another peculiar meaning of probabilities.

The trouble is that these probabilities would be useless for any purpose that doesn’t involve another similar representative set of questions. In particular, sets of questions about some particular topic that is not representative would presumably not replicate them, and thus they would be a very bad guide for betting that is limited to some particular topic (as it nearly always is). Thus, this seems like an interesting theoretical exercise, but not a way to obtain practically useful numbers.

(I should add that I never thought about this scenario before, so my reasoning here might be wrong.)

Comment author: prase 07 October 2010 10:50:13AM *  0 points [-]

Comparing a system with a dud to a system with a working bomb is comparing two different systems, or the same system in two instances with different initial conditions, and thus doesn't relate to the collapse. I suppose you rather had in mind a statement: "Consider two experiments with a working bomb, and in one the bomb explodes, while in the second it doesn't. There is an observable difference..."

Well, it is undeniable that there is a difference. The two systems were the same in the beginning and are different in the end. There are three conventional explanations. 1) The systems were different all way long, but in the beginning the difference was invisible for us (hidden parameters). 2) The difference emerged from a non-deterministic process before or during the measurement (collapse). 3) There is no difference, but we see only a portion of reality after the measurement, and a different one in each of the cases (many worlds).

I suggest fourth point of view: Don't ask in what state the system is, this is meaningless. Ask only what measurement outcomes are possible, given the outcomes we had from the already performed measurements. If you do that, there is no paradox to solve.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 07 October 2010 08:14:27PM *  0 points [-]

prase:

There are three conventional explanations. 1) The systems were different all way long, but in the beginning the difference was invisible for us (hidden parameters). 2) The difference emerged from a non-deterministic process before or during the measurement (collapse). [...]

Actually, that's the distinction I missed! The notion of "collapse" specifically refers to a non-deterministic process, not to a deterministic process that would at some point reveal the previously existing hidden variables.

I suggest fourth point of view: Don't ask in what state the system is, this is meaningless. Ask only what measurement outcomes are possible, given the outcomes we had from the already performed measurements. If you do that, there is no paradox to solve.

That would basically be the "ensemble interpretation," right? The theory tells you the probability distribution of outcomes, which you'll see if you repeat the experiment prepared the same way a bunch of times (frequentism!), and that's all there is to it. I do have a lot of sympathy for that view, as you might guess from the recent discussion of subjective probabilities, though I cannot say that my superficial understanding of QM gives me much confidence in any views I might hold about it.

Comment author: cousin_it 07 October 2010 12:45:11PM *  0 points [-]

I don't think (4) is much harder than (3). Someone who's never programmed before will find (3) very hard. Still, a few weeks of dedicated work should do it. From my experience teaching math to kids, I think it's actually more difficult to go from zero to (1) and (2) than to go from those to (4), because the hard part is learning how to think rigorously at all.

There is no serious descussion of quantum mechanics (or physics in general) on LW. I'd be glad if there was. Likewise, there's almost no serious discussion of statistical inference (frequentism, Bayesianism and related topics), though we do have a handful of people who understand it.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 07 October 2010 07:27:03PM *  4 points [-]

cousin_it:

From my experience teaching math to kids, I think it's actually more difficult to go from zero to (1) and (2) than to go from those to (4), because the hard part is learning how to think rigorously at all.

That sure depends on what we consider to be "zero"!

I do know some very smart people for whom (1)-(3) would be a breeze, but who couldn't prove a theorem if their lives depended on it. (In my experience, lots of such people can be found among programmers and engineers.) I have the impression that quite a few people on LW are in a not too dissimilar position, in the sense that they could easily harness their general intelligence to develop the right intuitions for solving problems of the sorts (1)-(3) reliably, but training themselves for formal math would be a much harder step.

Maybe I'm also biased due to my own position. I can easily pass the tests (1)-(3) (out of curiosity, I just tried writing a quine in C -- I thought of the basic idea in about 5 minutes, and it took me 10-15 min. more to sort out the mess with the escape characters). But although I had a decent knowledge of the basics of math foundations some years ago (to the point where I was proving theorems in exams in graduate courses), scraping the rust off of it to the point where I could constructively contribute to the discussions here would require a significant time investment (which I still hope to do as time permits).

There is no serious descussion of quantum mechanics (or physics in general) on LW. I'd be glad if there was.

Lots of discussions here touch on MWI and make MWI-related assumptions. While one can grasp the basic idea of MWI without knowing the actual math of the quantum theory, such knowledge is pretty pointless, since it basically involves taking a controversial view on pure faith. (I am familiar with the basics of QM, but I don't think my knowledge is still anywhere near the level where it would make sense to stick my head out with judgments about such things.)

By the way, there is an interesting ongoing physics discussion, just in case you missed it:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/2sl/the_irrationality_game/2qiu

Comment author: Lightwave 07 October 2010 09:53:13AM 3 points [-]

Like any other ideologue, Harris has a vision of what the social order should be like and how people should live their lives, and he wishes to push it onto those he disagrees with.

You could argue against "pushing" the CEV "ideology" on people on the same grounds, couldn't you?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 07 October 2010 04:44:32PM *  1 point [-]

Ignoring the present problems with CEV, which are still deep and insufficiently understood to give any final judgment on that project, the relevant point is that CEV is supposed to solve the problem of existential threat of non-friendly AI, not to achieve improvements on the present human condition. In other words, it's an attempt to figure out how to ensure that an AI, if implemented, won't turn us into dog food, not a pseudoscientific recipe for building utopia here and now (which would be just as insane as all such previous ideas).

Assuming an AI will be implemented at some point, CEV will be a preferable alternative to being turned into dog food, and -- as a wild speculation -- in the hands of a superintelligence, its results might perhaps not even be that bad by other standards. But all this is extremely far-fetched in any case.

Comment author: Clippy 07 October 2010 02:55:43AM 2 points [-]

If User:JoshuaZ did not consider the possibility of virtualized humans, why did User:JoshuaZ believe that maximization of paperclips would come at the cost of humans?

See this highly-rated comment from one of the smartest Users here if you still don't understand.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 07 October 2010 03:57:50AM *  4 points [-]

Clippy:

See this highly-rated comment from one of the smartest Users here if you still don't understand.

No, that won't do. The infrastructure that would be necessary to implement these computations in a paperclip-tiled universe -- namely, the source of power and the additional complexity of individual paperclips relative to the simplest acceptable paperclip -- would consume resources that could be alternatively turned into additional paperclips. (Not to mention what happens with humans who refuse to be virtualized?)

One of the main purposes of the Clippy act seems to be the desire to promote the view that intelligent beings with fundamentally different values can still reach some sort of happy hippyish let's-all-love-each-other coexistence. It's funny to see the characteristically human fallacies that start showing up in his writing whenever he embarks on arguing in favor of this view.

Comment author: [deleted] 07 October 2010 01:11:27AM 4 points [-]

You're using "ideologue" as a dirty word, and bringing in Marxism to taint by association.

If an "ideologue" was right, in your opinion, you wouldn't condemn him for being too ideological. If you had a vision of the social order that really was how things should be, you'd damn well push it on the reluctant.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 07 October 2010 03:21:34AM *  7 points [-]

In retrospect, I did get carried away a bit writing the above comment, but still, I don't see any ground for your specific objections:

You're using "ideologue" as a dirty word,

Only insofar as "ideologue" suggests bias and low intellectual standards due to prioritizing the promotion of ideology over clear thinking. This is, in my view, an entirely fair and objective way to characterize the article in question.

and bringing in Marxism to taint by association.

I brought in Marxism as a pertinent analogy, namely as another example of an ideology whose essential component is that it lays pretense to scientific status. Note also that I said orthodox Marxists, by which I meant the old-school kind who insisted on describing themselves as "scientific socialists." (These are almost nonexistent nowadays, not least because, insofar as Marxism makes any falsifiable predictions, they have been repeatedly falsified for well over a century now.)

If an "ideologue" was right, in your opinion, you wouldn't condemn him for being too ideological.

Well, when I read stuff written by people whose overall position has a strong ideological pull on me, I often feel awful frustration when I see invalid reasoning used to argue for positions I sympathize with. But I allow that ideological sympathy is probably clouding my judgment on at least some occasions, and you're heartily welcome to make a correction should you notice this sometime.

If you had a vision of the social order that really was how things should be, you'd damn well push it on the reluctant.

Even assuming this is true, it is still a lesser sin than doing this pushing in the name of science, so I can nevertheless claim to be less bad, no?

In any case, claiming that all people are equal when it comes to ideological zealotry is simply inaccurate. Some people have much grander and more radical visions, as well as much greater zeal, for pushing their ideological visions on the rest of humanity. For clear reasons, ideologies that make pretenses at scientific status tend to be particularly aggressive in this regard, as the historical record clearly shows.

Comment author: prase 06 October 2010 09:51:37AM *  1 point [-]

Thanks for the lengthy answer. Still, why it is impossible to calibrate people in general, looking at how often they get the anwer right, and then using them as a device for measuring probabilities? If a person is right on approximately 80% of the issues he says he's "sure", then why not translating his next "sure" into an 80% probability? Doesn't seem arbitrary to me. There may be inconsistency between measurements using different people, but strictly speaking, the thermometers and clocks also sometimes disagree.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 07 October 2010 12:41:28AM *  0 points [-]

I do discuss this exact point in the above lengthy comment, and I allow for this possibility. Here is the relevant part:

The first possible path towards accurate calibration is when the same person performs essentially the same judgment many times, and from the past performance we extract the frequency with which their brain tends to produce the right answer. If this level of accuracy remains roughly constant in time, then it makes sense to attach it as the probability to that person’s future judgments on the topic. This approach treats the relevant operations in the brain as a black box whose behavior, being roughly constant, can be subjected to such extrapolation.

Now clearly, the critical part is to ensure that the future judgments are based on the same parts of the person's brain and that the relevant features of these parts, as well as the problem being solved, remain unchanged. In practice, these requirements can be satisfied by people who have reached the peak of ability achievable by learning from experience in solving some problem that repeatedly occurs in nearly identical form. Still, even in the best case, we're talking about a very limited number of questions and people here.

Comment author: prase 06 October 2010 09:02:03AM 0 points [-]

This relates to the discussion where you've apparently participated, and I am not sure whether I can say more. I am quite content with the prediction of the theory, and don't trust much the feeling of need of further verbal explanation here. If I were pressed to say something, I would say that probably the present formalism of quantum theory isn't particularly well suited for human intuition. After all, I believe we will get better formalism in future, whatever it means.

The feeling that the collapse is needed somehow to mediate the bomb's interaction with the detector falls to the same category with the belief that light must propagate in some medium, or a feeling that there must be some absolute time. Such intuitions are sometimes correct, more often wrong.

Based on my experience, most of the ordinary physicists don't think interpretations of QM are a big issue. It isn't discussed too often, people are content to do the calculations most of the time. Of course, this may be different among the first-rank researchers.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 07 October 2010 12:32:32AM *  0 points [-]

Just to clarify: in that discussion, I claimed that the bomb tester thought-experiment doesn't pose any principal difficulty for Copenhagen relative to the standard variations on the double-slit experiment, so that might seem to contradict what I write here. What I meant to say there is that the main feature of the bomb-tester, namely the interaction-free measurement, is also featured in a less salient way in these classic though-experiments, so that Copenhagen also makes sense for the bomb tester if you accept that it makes sense at all.

But if I may ask, how would you reply to the following statement? "Consider the case when we have a dud bomb, and a case when we have a working bomb that doesn't explode. There is an observable difference between what the detector shows in these outcomes, so replacing the dud bomb with a working one changed the system in a measurable way. We call this change -- whatever exactly it might be -- collapse."

Do you believe that this statement would be flawed, or that it is, after all, somehow compatible with the idea that "the collapse is only a mathematical tool"?

Comment author: Mass_Driver 06 October 2010 03:04:23AM 1 point [-]

Not sure who voted down your reply; it looks polite and well-reasoned to me.

I believe you when you say that the stock market was honestly intended as representative, although, of course, I continue to disagree about whether it actually is representative.

Here are some more counterexamples:

*When deciding whether to invest in an online bank that pays 1% interest or a local community bank that pays 0.1% interest, I must calculate the odds that each bank will fail before I take my money out; I cannot possibly have a scientific model that generates replicable results for these two banks while also holding down a day job, but numbers will nevertheless help me make a decision that is not driven by an emotional urge to stay with (or leave) an old bank based on customer service considerations that I rationally value as far less than the value of my principal.

*When deciding whether to donate time, money, or neither to a local election campaign, it will help to know which of my donations will have an 10^-6 chance, a 10^-4 chance, and a 10^-2 chance of swinging the election. Numbers are important here because irrational friends and colleagues will urge me to do what 'feels right' or to 'do my part' without pausing to consider whether this serves any of our goals. If I can generate a replicable scientific model that says whether an extra $500 will win an election, I should stop electioneering and sign up for a job as a tenured political science faculty member, but I nevertheless want to know what the odds are, approximately, in each case, if only so that I can pick which campaign to work on.

As for your objection that:

the only subjective probability estimate I see here is the p~0.95 for your belief about driving. In this case, I'm not getting any more information from this number than if you just described your level of certainty in words,

I suppose I have left a few steps out of my analysis, which I am spelling out in full now:

*Published statistics say that the risk of dying in a fire is 10^-7/people-year and the risk of dying in a car crash is 10^-4/people-year (a report of what is no doubt someone else's subjective but relatively evidence-based estimate).

*The odds that these statistics are off by more than a factor of 10 relative to each other are less than 10^-1 (a subjective estimate).

*My cost in effort to protect against car crashes is more than 10 times higher than my cost in effort to protect against fires.

*I value the disutility of death-by-fire and death-by-car-crash roughly equally.

*Therefore, there exists a coherent utility function with respect to the relevant states of the world and my relevant strategies such that it is rational for me to protect against car crashes but not fires.

*Therefore, one technique that could be used to show that my behavior is internally incoherent has failed to reject the null hypothesis.

*Therefore, I have some Bayesian evidence that my behavior is rational.

Please let me know if you still think I'm just putting fancy arithmetic labels on what is essentially 'frequentist' reasoning, and, if so, exactly what you mean by 'frequentist.' I can Wikipedia the standard definition, but it doesn't quite seem to fit here, imho.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 07 October 2010 12:08:34AM *  1 point [-]

Regarding your examples with banks and donations, when I imagine myself in such situations, I still don't see how numbers derived from my own common-sense reasoning can be useful. I can see myself making a decision based a simple common-sense impression that one bank looks less shady, or that it's bigger and thus more likely to be bailed out, etc. Similarly, I could act on a vague impression that one political candidacy I'd favor is far more hopeless than another, and so on. On the other hand, I could also judge from the results of calculations based on numbers from real expert input, like actuary tables for failures of banks of various types, or the poll numbers for elections, etc.

What I cannot imagine, however, is doing anything sensible and useful with probabilities dreamed up from vague common-sense impressions. For example, looking at a bank, getting the impression that it's reputable and solid, and then saying, "What's the probability it will fail before time T? Um.. seems really unlikely... let's say 0.1%.", and then using this number to calculate my expected returns.

Now, regarding your example with driving vs. fires, suppose I simply say: "Looking at the statistical tables, it is far more likely to be killed by a car accident than a fire. I don't see any way in which I'm exceptional in my exposure to either, so if I want to make myself safer, it would be stupid to invest more effort in reducing the chance of fire than in more careful driving." What precisely have you gained with your calculation relative to this plain and clear English statement?

In particular, what is the significance of these subjectively estimated probabilities like p=10^-1 in step 2? What more does this number tell us than a simple statement like "I don't think it's likely"? Also, notice that my earlier comment specifically questioned the meaningfulness and practical usefulness of the numerical claim that p~0.95 for this conclusion, and I don't see how it comes out of your calculation. These seem to be exactly the sorts of dreamed-up probability numbers whose meaningfulness I'm denying.

Comment author: jimrandomh 05 October 2010 11:58:53PM 3 points [-]

Suppose you have two studies, each of which measures and gives a probability for the same thing. The first study has a small sample size, and a not terribly rigorous experimental procedure; the second study has a large sample size, and a more thorough procedure. When called on to make a decision, you would use the probability from the larger study. But if the large study hadn't been conducted, you wouldn't give up and act like you didn't have any probability at all; you'd use the one from the small study. You might have to do some extra sanity checks, and your results wouldn't be as reliable, but they'd still be better than if you didn't have a probability at all.

A probability assigned by common-sense reasoning is to a probability that came from a small study, as a probability from a small study is to a probability from a large study. The quality of probabilities varies continuously; you get better probabilities by conducting better studies. By saying that a probability based only on common-sense reasoning is meaningless, I think what you're really trying to do is set a minimum quality level. Since probabilities that're based on studies and calculation are generally better than probabilities that aren't, this is a useful heuristic. However, it is only that, a heuristic; probabilities based on common-sense reasoning can sometimes be quite good, and they are often the only information available anywhere (and they are, therefore, the best information). Not all common-sense-based probabilities are equal; if an expert thinks for an hour and then gives a probability, without doing any calculation, then that probability will be much better than if a layman thinks about it for thirty seconds. The best common-sense probabilities are better than the worst statistical-study probabilities; and besides, there usually aren't any relevant statistical calculations or studies to compare against.

I think what's confusing you is an intuition that if someone gives a probability, you should be able to take it as-is and start calculating with it. But suppose you had collected five large studies, and someone gave you the results of a sixth. You wouldn't take that probability as-is, you'd have to combine it with the other five studies somehow. You would only use the new probability as-is if it was significantly better (larger sample, more trustworthy procedure, etc) than the ones you already had, or you didn't have any before. Now if there are no good studies, and someone gives you a probability that came from their common-sense reasoning, you almost certainly have a comparably good probability already: your own common-sense reasoning. So you have to combine it. So in a sense, those sorts of probabilities are less meaningful - you discard them when they compete with better probabilities, or at least weight them less - but there's still a nonzero amount of meaning there.

(Aside: I've been stuck for awhile on an article I'm writing called "What Probability Requires", dealing with this same topic, and seeing you argue the other side has been extremely helpful. I think I'm unstuck now; thank you for that.)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 06 October 2010 11:24:23PM *  1 point [-]

After thinking about your comment, I think this observation comes close to the core of our disagreement:

By saying that a probability based only on common-sense reasoning is meaningless, I think what you're really trying to do is set a minimum quality level.

Basically, yes. More specifically, the quality level I wish to set is that the numbers must give more useful information than mere verbal expressions of confidence. Otherwise, their use at best simply adds nothing useful, and at worst leads to fallacious reasoning encouraged by a false feeling of accuracy.

Now, there are several possible ways to object my position:

  • The first is to note that even if not meaningful mathematically, numbers can serve as communication-facilitating figures of speech. I have conceded this point.

  • The second way is to insist on an absolute principle that one should always attach numerical probabilities to one's beliefs. I haven't seen anything in this thread (or elsewhere) yet that would shake my belief in the fallaciousness of this position, or even provide any plausible-seeming argument in favor of it.

  • The third way is to agree that sometimes attaching numerical probabilities to common-sense judgments makes no sense, but on the other hand, in some cases common-sense reasoning can produce numerical probabilities that will give more useful information than just fuzzy words. After the discussion with mattnewport and others, I agree that there are such cases, but I still maintain that these are rare exceptions. (In my original statement, I took an overly restrictive notion of "common sense"; I admit that in some cases, thinking that could be reasonably called like that is indeed precise enough to produce meaningful numerical probabilities.)

So, to clarify, which exact position do you take in this regard? Or would your position require a fourth item to summarize fairly?

I think what's confusing you is an intuition that if someone gives a probability, you should be able to take it as-is and start calculating with it. [...] So in a sense, those sorts of probabilities are less meaningful - you discard them when they compete with better probabilities, or at least weight them less - but there's still a nonzero amount of meaning there.

I agree that there is a non-zero amount of meaning, but the question is whether it exceeds what a simple verbal statement of confidence would convey. If I can't take a number and start calculating with it, what good is it? (Except for the caveat about possible metaphorical meanings of numbers.)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 06 October 2010 10:49:54PM *  13 points [-]

Prompted by the discussion of Sam Harris's idea that science should provide for a universal moral code, I thought of this suitable reply given long ago:

[The] doctrine of right and wrong is perpetually disputed, both by the pen and the sword: whereas the doctrine of lines and figures is not so, because men care not in that subject what be truth, as a thing that crosses no man's ambition, profit, or lust. For I doubt not, but if it had been a thing contrary to any man's right of dominion, or to the interest of men that have dominion, that the three angles of a triangle should be equal to two angles of a square, that doctrine [would] have been, if not disputed, yet by the burning of all books of geometry suppressed, as far as he whom it concerned was able.

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651)

(It also provides for some interesting perspective on the current epistemological state of various academic fields that are taken seriously as a source of guidance for government policy.)

Comment author: [deleted] 06 October 2010 10:13:44PM -1 points [-]

Nope, they won't be crazy extremists.

The point is, if you want universal morality, you have to exclude some points of view. If you want to be Sam Harris, you have to declare you won't listen to some people. If you want to claim that science can resolve questions of morality, it can only do that among people who already agree on a number of fundamental values. Nobody else counts; you have to override them, perhaps by force.

Because I'm in a bad mood right now, I say "Kill 'em all," even if that leaves about five survivors. lol.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 06 October 2010 10:33:35PM *  0 points [-]

SarahC:

The point is, if you want universal morality, you have to exclude some points of view. If you want to be Sam Harris, you have to declare you won't listen to some people. If you want to claim that science can resolve questions of morality, it can only do that among people who already agree on a number of fundamental values. Nobody else counts; you have to override them, perhaps by force.

That is indeed so. But the additional trouble is that arguments based on "the well-being of conscious creatures" and such fuzzy concepts won't even be able to provide a clearly defined position with which people could genuinely agree. All they will provide is a rallying point for some existing ideological forces that will gather around it guided by emotion or interest.

Moreover, once "science" is taken to be authoritative for resolving moral questions, then in any realistic human society, it is only a matter of time before the very notion of "science" degenerates into a fig-leaf for ideology and venal interest. (Which has in fact already happened to a large extent in some fields that modern governments rely on as an authoritative guide for policy.) Thomas Hobbes put it best:

[The] doctrine of right and wrong is perpetually disputed, both by the pen and the sword: whereas the doctrine of lines and figures is not so, because men care not in that subject what be truth, as a thing that crosses no man's ambition, profit, or lust. For I doubt not, but if it had been a thing contrary to any man's right of dominion, or to the interest of men that have dominion, that the three angles of a triangle should be equal to two angles of a square, that doctrine should have been, if not disputed, yet by the burning of all books of geometry suppressed, as far as he whom it concerned was able.

Harris's inability write a whole book about this topic without being able to grasp this essential point is, in my view, enough to dismiss him as an altogether incompetent thinker.

Comment author: Apprentice 05 October 2010 07:44:25PM 13 points [-]

The vast majority of members of both houses of the US congress are decent, non-corrupt people of above average intelligence honestly trying to do good by their country. (90%)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 06 October 2010 09:32:30PM *  4 points [-]

Apprentice:

The vast majority of members of both houses of the US congress are decent, non-corrupt people of above average intelligence honestly trying to do good by their country. (90%)

Downvoted for agreement.

However, I must add that it would be extremely fallacious to conclude from this fact that the country is being run competently and not declining or even headed for disaster. This fallacy would be based on the false assumption that the country is actually run by the politicians in practice. (I am not arguing for these pessimistic conclusions, at least not in this context, but merely that given the present structure of the political system, optimistic conclusions from the above fact are generally unwarranted.)

Comment author: jimrandomh 06 October 2010 07:00:26PM 1 point [-]

It is wrong to use a subjective probability that you got from someone else for mathematical purposes directly, for reasons I expand on in my comment here. But I don't think that makes them metaphorical, unless you're using a definition of metaphor that's very different than the one I am. And you can use a subjective probability which you generated yourself, or combined with your own subjective probability, in calculations. Doing so just comes with the same caveats as using a probability from a study whose sample was too small, or which had some other bad but not entirely fatal flaw.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 06 October 2010 08:51:32PM *  0 points [-]

I will write a reply to that earlier comment of yours a bit later today when I'll have more time. (I didn't forget about it, it's just that I usually answer lengthy comments that deserve a greater time investment later than those where I can fire off replies rapidly during short breaks.)

But in addition to the theme of that comment, I think you're missing my point about the possible metaphorical quality of numbers. Human verbal expressions have their literal information content, but one can often exploit the idiosyncrasies of the human language interpretation circuits to effectively convey information altogether different from the literal meaning of one's words. This gives rise to various metaphors and other figures of speech, which humans use in their communication frequently and effectively. (The process is more complex than this simple picture, since frequently used metaphors can eventually come to be understood as literal expressions of their common metaphorical meaning, and this process is gradual. There are also other important considerations about metaphors, but this simple observation is enough to support my point.)

Now, I propose that certain practical uses of numbers in communication should be seen that way too. A literal meaning of a number is that something can ultimately be counted, measured, or calculated to arrive at that number. A metaphorical use of a number, however, doesn't convey any such meaning, but merely expects to elicit similar intuitive impressions, which would be difficult or even impossible to communicate precisely using ordinary words. And just like a verbal metaphor is nonsensical except for the non-literal intuitive point it conveys, and its literal meaning should be discarded, at least some practical uses of numbers in human conversations serve only to communicate intuitive points, and the actual values are otherwise nonsensical and should not be used for any other purposes -- and even if they perhaps are, their metaphorical value should be clearly seen apart from their literal mathematical value.

Therefore, regardless of our disagreement about subjective probabilities (of which more in my planned reply), this is a separate important point I wanted to make.

Comment author: HughRistik 06 October 2010 12:39:40AM *  4 points [-]

Therefore, there are only two ways in which you can arrive at a numerical probability estimate for a common-sense belief:

  1. Translate your vague feeling of certainly into a number in some arbitrary manner. This however makes the number a mere figure of speech, which adds absolutely nothing over the usual human vague expressions for different levels of certainty.

    1. Perform some probability calculation, which however has nothing to do with how your brain actually arrived at your common-sense conclusion, and then assign the probability number produced by the former to the latter. This is clearly fallacious.

On point #2, I agree with you. On point #1, I had the same reaction as xv15. Your example conversation is exactly how I would defend the use of numerical probabilities in conversation. I think you may have confused people with the phrase "vague figure of speech," which was itself vague.

Vague relative to what? "No idea / kinda sure / pretty sure / very sure?", the ways that people generally communicate about probability, are much worse. You can throw in other terms like "I suspect" and "absolutely certain" and "very very sure", but it's not even clear how these expressions of belief match up with others. In common speech, we really only have about 3-5 degrees of probability. That's just not enough gradations.

In contrast, when expressing a percentage probability, people only tend to use multiples of 10, certain multiples of 5, 0.01%, 1%, 2%, 98%, 99% and 99.99%. If people use figures like 87%, or any decimal places other than the ones previously mentioned, it's usually because they are deliberately being ridiculous. (And it's no coincidence that your example uses multiples of 10.)

I agree with you that feelings of uncertainty are fuzzy, but they aren't so fuzzy that we can get by with merely 3-5 gradations in all sorts of conversations. On some subjects, our communication becomes more precise when we have 10-20 gradations. Yet there are diminishing returns on more degrees of communicable certainty (due to reasons you correctly describe), so going any higher resolution than 10-20 degrees isn't useful for anything except jokes.

The numbers are still used as mere figures of speech, but "vague" is not a correct way to describe them, since the information has been transmitted in a more precise way than if A had just used verbal qualifiers.

Yes. Gaining the 10-20 gradations that numbers allow when they are typically used does make conversations relatively more precise than just by tacking on "very very" to your statement of certainty.

It's similar to the infamous 1-10 rating system for people's attractiveness. Despite various reasons that rating people with numbers is distasteful, this ranking system persists because, in my view, people find it useful for communicating subjective assessments of attractiveness. Ugly-cute-hot is a 3-point scale. You could add in "gorgeous," "beautiful," or modifiers like "smoking hot," but it's unclear how these terms rank against each other (and they may express different types of attraction, rather than different degrees). Again, it's hard to get more than 3-5 degrees using plain English. The 1-10 scale (with half-points, and 9.9) gives you about 20 gradations (though 1-3, and any half-point values below 5 are rarely used).

I think we have a generalized phenomenon where people resort to using numbers to describe their subjective feelings when common language doesn't grant high enough resolution. 3-5 is good enough for some feelings (3 gives you negative, neutral, and positive for instance), but for some feelings we need more. Somewhere around 20 is the upper-bound of useful gradations.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 06 October 2010 06:38:58PM *  -2 points [-]

I mostly agree with this assessment. However, the key point is that such uses of numbers should be seen as metaphorical. The literal meaning of a metaphor is typically nonsensical, but it works by somehow hacking the human understanding of language to successfully convey a point with greater precision than the most precise literal statement would allow, at least in as many words. (There are other functions of metaphors too, of course, but this one is relevant here.) And just like it is fallacious to understand a metaphor literally, it is similarly fallacious to interpret these numerical metaphors as useful for mathematical purposes. When it comes to subjective probabilities, however, I often see what looks like confusion on this point.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 06 October 2010 06:03:25PM *  3 points [-]

The best online source to start researching these question is probably David Chalmers's website:
http://consc.net/chalmers/

You might find this website interesting too:
http://www.macrovu.com/CCTGeneralInfo.html

Comment author: [deleted] 06 October 2010 03:29:30PM 2 points [-]

Harris says in his Q and A that people who think stopping gay marriage is a major issue are "not worth listening to."

That kind of gets to the heart of his argument. He's conceding that his argument has limits. If you're going to say that science can give us answers about morality, you have to declare that some people are not worth listening to. In his case, this means non-humanists. Harris, and I, believe that what matters morally is the well-being of conscious creatures. The people who don't -- the people who think some races are vermin to be exterminated, for example -- are completely incompatible with our moral system. We can't listen to them, and we can't persuade them; we can only stop them from doing harm.

You can talk to humanists by discussing consequences: such and such a plan would save lives or end them, cause happiness or misery, wealth or poverty, health or sickness, flourishing or limitation. You can't really talk to a non-humanist. You can't prove him wrong, by science or philosophy or anything else. If he doesn't care about people, you can't make him care. All you can do is say "I'm a humanist, and this makes you my enemy."

Comment author: Vladimir_M 06 October 2010 05:54:20PM *  2 points [-]

SarahC:

[Harris is] conceding that his argument has limits. If you're going to say that science can give us answers about morality, you have to declare that some people are not worth listening to. In his case, this means non-humanists. Harris, and I, believe that what matters morally is the well-being of conscious creatures. The people who don't -- the people who think some races are vermin to be exterminated, for example -- are completely incompatible with our moral system. We can't listen to them, and we can't persuade them; we can only stop them from doing harm.

I'm not sure if I'm reading you correctly, but you seem to be implying that when one embraces Harris's worldview, the only people who have any serious disagreements ("non-humanists") will be various insane extremists. But this is completely false. Historically, there have been numerous human social orders that are not evil or crazy by any reasonable standard, and others might exist in the future. Reasonable and non-evil people will ultimately disagree on which exact one they favor, and there is no way to solve that conflict of values and preferences except by figuring out some practical way to disagree and let good fences make good neighbors, or by having one view imposed on others by force (and perhaps, in the long run, ideological propaganda).

There is no way that you can construct an argument based on vague claims like "what matters morally is the well-being of conscious creatures" that will provide valid evidence, let alone a valid proof, for even the roughest outlines of Harris's ideology. It's all vapid talk disguised as rational argument (or to make things even worse, as "science").

Comment author: Vladimir_M 06 October 2010 05:26:07PM *  5 points [-]

"The Science of Good and Evil": An article arguing briefly for the book's main thesis.

I don't know if the book is any less bad, but this article is pure Dark Arts, and not even a competent attempt at those. I hardly see a single valid argument made in it. It is a mere collection of emotional appeals, invalid analogies, and ridiculous attempts to sell as "scientific" naive utilitarian ideas that anyone unbiased and moderately competent in critical thinking should be able to rip to shreds without any serious effort.

Like any other ideologue, Harris has a vision of what the social order should be like and how people should live their lives, and he wishes to push it onto those he disagrees with. This is nothing unusual by itself, but the real trouble is that in a way similar to an orthodox Marxist, Harris insists that his ideology has the force of "science" and therefore there can be no tolerance for those pathological elements who refuse to submit to his vision.

Traditional religious people, except for the greatest extremists, at least accept the fact that there will be other people around them who don't share their religion, so that it's desirable to find a way to agree to disagree. People like Harris, however, with their faith that their ideology is a product of "science" and thus infallible and necessarily accepted by anyone honest and sane, have no such concerns. Ultimately, if you have different ideas on how you would like to live your life and what kind of society you would like to live in, they are far more dangerous than all but the most extreme religious zealots.

Comment author: komponisto 06 October 2010 06:45:20AM *  3 points [-]

I should first state the general position I’m coming from, which motivates me to get into discussions of this sort. Namely, it is my firm belief that when we look at the present state of human knowledge, one of the principal sources of confusion, nonsense, and pseudosicence is physics envy, which leads people in all sorts of fields to construct nonsensical edifices of numerology and then pretend, consciously or not, that they’ve reached some sort of exact scientific insight.

I'll point out here that reversed stupidity is not intelligence, and that for every possible error, there is an opposite possible error.

In my view, if someone's numbers are wrong, that should be dealt with on the object level (e.g. "0.001 is too low", with arguments for why), rather than retreating to the meta level of "using numbers caused you to err". The perspective I come from is wanting to avoid the opposite problem, where being vague about one's beliefs allows one to get away without subjecting them to rigorous scrutiny. (This, too, by the way, is a major hallmark of pseudoscience.)

But I'll note that even as we continue to argue under opposing rhetorical banners, our disagreement on the practical issue seems to have mostly evaporated; see here for instance. You also do admit in the end that fear of poor calibration is what is underlying your discomfort with numerical probabilities:

If I wish to express these probabilities as numbers, however, this is not a legitimate step unless the resulting numbers can be justified... If they can be so justified, then we say that the intuitive estimate is “well-calibrated.” However, calibration is usually not possible in practice...

As a theoretical matter, I disagree completely with the notion that probabilities are not legitimate or meaningful unless they're well-calibrated. There is such a thing as a poorly-calibrated Bayesian; it's a perfectly coherent concept. The Bayesian view of probabilities is that they refer specifically to degrees of belief, and not anything else. We would of course like the beliefs so represented to be as accurate as possible; but they may not be in practice.

If my internal "Bayesian calculator" believes P(X) = 0.001, and X turns out to be true, I'm not made less wrong by having concealed the number, saying "I don't think X is true" instead. Less embarrassed, perhaps, but not less wrong.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 06 October 2010 07:33:07AM *  0 points [-]

komponisto:

In my view, if someone's numbers are wrong, that should be dealt with on the object level (e.g. "0.001 is too low", with arguments for why), rather than retreating to the meta level of "using numbers caused you to err".

Trouble is, sometimes numbers can be not even wrong, with their very definition lacking logical consistency or any defensible link with reality. It is that category that I am most concerned with, and I believe that it sadly occurs very often in practice, with entire fields of inquiry sometimes degenerating into meaningless games with such numbers. My honest impression is that in our day and age, such numerological fallacies have been responsible for much greater intellectual sins than the opposite fallacy of avoiding scrutiny by excessive vagueness, although the latter phenomenon is not negligible either.

You also do admit in the end that fear of poor calibration is what is underlying your discomfort with numerical probabilities:

Here we seem to be clashing about terminology. I think that "poor calibration" is too much of a euphemism for the situations I have in mind, namely those where sensible calibration is altogether impossible. I would instead use some stronger expression clarifying that the supposed "calibration" is done without any valid basis, not that the result is poor because some unfortunate circumstance occurred in the course of an otherwise sensible procedure.

There is such a thing as a poorly-calibrated Bayesian; it's a perfectly coherent concept. The Bayesian view of probabilities is that they refer specifically to degrees of belief, and not anything else.

As I explained in the above lengthy comment, I simply don't find numbers that "refer specifically to degrees of belief, and not anything else" a coherent concept. We seem to be working with fundamentally different philosophical premises here.

Can these numerical "degrees of belief" somehow be linked to observable reality according to the criteria I defined in my reply to the points (1)-(2) above? If not, I don't see how admitting such concepts can be of any use.

If my internal "Bayesian calculator" believes P(X) = 0.001, and X turns out to be true, I'm not made less wrong by having concealed the number, saying "I don't think X is true" instead. Less embarrassed, perhaps, but not less wrong.

But if you do this 10,000 times, and the number of times X turns out to be true is small but nowhere close to 10, you are much more wrong than if you had just been saying "X is highly unlikely" all along.

On the other hand, if we're observing X as a single event in isolation, I don't see how this tests your probability estimate in any way. But I suspect we have some additional philosophical differences here.

Comment author: mattnewport 05 October 2010 08:22:31PM 0 points [-]

I just don't see any practical examples of people successfully betting by doing calculations with probability numbers derived from their intuitive feelings of confidence that would go beyond what a mere verbal expression of these feelings would convey. Can you think of any?

I'd speculate that bookies and professional sports bettors are doing something like this. By bookies here I mean primarily the kind of individuals who stand with a chalkboard at race tracks rather than the large companies. They probably use some semi-rigorous / scientific techniques to analyze past form and then mix it with a lot of intuition / expertise together with lots of detailed domain specific knowledge and 'insider' info (a particular horse or jockey has recently recovered from an illness or injury and so may perform worse than expected, etc.). They'll then integrate all of this information together using some non mathematically rigorous opaque mental process and derive a probability estimate which will determine what odds they are willing to offer or accept.

I've read a fair bit of material by professional investors and macro hedge fund managers describing their thinking and how they make investment decisions. I think they are often doing something similar. Integrating information derived from rigorous analysis with more fuzzy / intuitive reasoning based on expertise, knowledge and experience and using it to derive probabilities for particular outcomes. They then seek out investments that currently appear to be mis-priced relative to the probabilities they've estimated, ideally with a fairly large margin of safety to allow for the imprecise and uncertain nature of their estimates.

It's entirely possible that this is not what's going on at all but it appears to me that something like this is a factor in the success of anyone who consistently profits from dealing with risk and uncertainty.

The problem with discussing investment strategies is that any non-trivial public information about this topic necessarily has to be bullshit, or at least drowned in bullshit to the point of being irrecoverable, since exclusive possession of correct information is a sure path to getting rich, but its effectiveness critically depends on exclusivity.

My experience leads me to believe that this is not entirely accurate. Investors are understandably reluctant to share very specific time critical investment ideas for free but they frequently share their thought processes for free and talk in general terms about their approaches and my impression is that they are no more obfuscatory or deliberately misleading than anyone else who talks about their success in any field.

In addition, hedge fund investor letters often share quite specific details of reasoning after the fact once profitable trades have been closed and these kinds of details are commonly elaborated in books and interviews once time-sensitive information has lost most of its value.

Either your "rationality" manifests itself only in irrelevant matters, or you have to ask yourself what is so special and exclusive about you that you're reaping practical success that eludes so many other people, and in such a way that they can't just copy your approach.

This seems to be taking the ethos of the EMH a little far. I comfortably attribute a significant portion of my academic and career success to being more intelligent and a clearer thinker than most people. Anyone here who through a sense of false modesty believes otherwise is probably deluding themselves.

Where your own individual judgment falls within this picture, you cannot know, unless you're one of these people with esoteric expertise.

This seems to be the main point of ongoing calibration exercises. If you have a track record of well calibrated predictions then you can gain some confidence that your own individual judgement is sound.

Overall I don't think we have a massive disagreement here. I agree with most of your reservations and I'm by no means certain that improving one's own calibration is feasible but I suspect that it might be and it seems sufficiently instrumentally useful that I'm interested in trying to improve my own.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 06 October 2010 06:22:43AM *  0 points [-]

mattnewport:

I'd speculate that bookies and professional sports bettors are doing something like this. [...] I've read a fair bit of material by professional investors and macro hedge fund managers describing their thinking and how they make investment decisions. I think they are often doing something similar.

Your knowledge about these trades seems to be much greater than mine, so I'll accept these examples. In the meantime, I have expounded my whole view of the topic in a reply to an excellent systematic list of questions posed by prase, and in those terms, this would indicate the existence of what I called the third type of exceptions under point (3). I still maintain that these are rare exceptions in the overall range of human judgments, though, and that my basic point holds for the overwhelming majority of human common-sense thinking.

Investors are understandably reluctant to share very specific time critical investment ideas for free but they frequently share their thought processes for free and talk in general terms about their approaches and my impression is that they are no more obfuscatory or deliberately misleading than anyone else who talks about their success in any field.

I don't think they're being deliberately misleading. I just think that the whole mechanism by which the public discourse on these topics comes into being inherently generates a nearly impenetrable confusion, which you can dispel to extract useful information only if you are already an expert in the first place. There are many specific reasons for this, but it all ultimately comes down to the stability of the weak EMH equilibrium.

This seems to be taking the ethos of the EMH a little far. I comfortably attribute a significant portion of my academic and career success to being more intelligent and a clearer thinker than most people. Anyone here who through a sense of false modesty believes otherwise is probably deluding themselves.

Oh, absolutely! But you're presumably estimating the rank of your abilities based on some significant accomplishments that most people would indeed find impossible to achieve. What I meant to say (even though I expressed it poorly) is that there is no easy and readily available way to excel at "rationality" in any really relevant matters. This in contrast to the attitude, sometimes seen among the people here, that you can learn about Bayesianism or whatever else and just by virtue of that set yourself apart from the masses in accuracy of thought. The EMH ethos is, in my opinion, a good intellectual antidote against such temptations of hubris.

Comment author: prase 05 October 2010 11:33:21AM *  1 point [-]

Are you just saying that MWI is wrong because it is not Lorentz invariant, or that it is wrong because it cannot be made Lorentz invariant, or that it is wrong because it cannot be made Lorentz invariant without giving up the interpretation that there are many worlds?

This is a difficult question. I have written the disclaimer above the grandparent precisely because I am not able to demonstrate that MWI is wrong. I believe MWI can be made Lorentz invariant and retain its interpretation, for the price of losing its intuitive appeal and making it awkward. One can postulate some kind of Lorentz invariant measurement procedure (like the one suggested in articles I've linked to) and do the interpretational stuff on the level of observer. In the Schrödinger picture it looks nice - in the Heisenberg picture not so.

My attack doesn't aim to MWI specifically. I think the objective collapse is even a greater problem. Partly, to include MWI in the statement was part of my dirty tactic to make the statement more prominent, since belief in MWI is accepted here as one of the rationality tests (hell, there is even a sequence about it). But I suspect that the very dispute between collapse and many worlds is an artifact of asking about the behaviour of objective states of the system, and if it is possible to avoid speaking about states, the problem disappears. I want to explain away what MWI proponents want to explain. To further justify my inclusion of MWI specifically in the formulation of my supposedly irrational belief, I can add that, unlike the MWI proponents, there are (and were since the very beginning of the quantum theory) Copenhagenists who accept that the collapse is only a mathematical tool useful within our imperfect understanding of nature and it has no independent ontological status. This is a position with which I sympathise.

But I thought we already have one. Feynman's sum-over-histories approach.

Could you explain in more detail?

I thought the paths being integrated were paths (trajectories) through a kind of state space.

When the path integral formulation is derived from the standard formulation, one integrates over paths in the phase space. However the integrations over momenta can be performed exactly and one is left with the integration over paths in the configuration space only (which is half of the phase space). This is the form which is prefered, as after the integration sign stands the exponential of action, which is a functional of the classical trajectory or field configuration (we can call both path). These paths needn't solve the equations of motion, so there even isn't a correspondence path - state.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 06 October 2010 05:46:21AM *  0 points [-]

prase:

I can add that, unlike the MWI proponents, there are (and were since the very beginning of the quantum theory) Copenhagenists who accept that the collapse is only a mathematical tool useful within our imperfect understanding of nature and it has no independent ontological status.

How do these people interpret interaction-free measurements? Specifically, let's observe one of the possible outcomes of the Elitzur-Vaidman bomb-tester thought experiment, namely the one that identifies a working bomb without exploding it. To describe this experiment in Copenhagen terms, we could say that the interaction between the photon wave function and the bomb has, as a measurement, collapsed the photon wave function to the upper arm of the interferometer. Since we actually see this result in the detector, and obtain useful information about the bomb from it, I don't see how we can deny that the collapse has been observed as an actual process while still insisting on Copenhagen. (But I'm sure there is a way to do it, if there are actual physicists who hold this position.)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 06 October 2010 12:52:21AM 6 points [-]

Also, here are some excellent online resources for those wiling to plunge into mathematical logic, math foundations, and computability theory:

  • A two-part online text by Karlis Podnieks: Introduction to Mathematical Logic and What is Mathematics: Gödel's Theorem and Around. Written in ugly plain text, and with some bits still incomplete, but on the upside, extremely well-written and probably as readable as a rigorous text on this topic could ever hope to be. (The text is also peppered with the author's philosophical opinions, but you can skip those if you don't like them.)

  • Stephen Cook's lecture notes in computability and logic. A rigorous build-up to Goedel's incompleteness theorems with minimal background knowledge assumed, which introduces the basics of mathematical logic and computability theory on the way. The text is very readable and surprisingly short considering the whole range of topics covered.

This could take a while to go through, but despite cousin_it's optimistic estimates, I would say that working through at least one of these texts would be necessary before you can discuss topics such as Loeb's theorem with any real understanding. If you've never studied math, or if you've studied it only in a very applied and non-theoretical way, the greatest problem will be getting used to the necessary way of thinking.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 06 October 2010 12:27:14AM 11 points [-]

Should take you a few days if you've studied math before, a few weeks if you haven't.

Do you seriously believe that someone who has never studied math before can understand Loeb's theorem and start solving puzzles in mathematical logic after a few weeks of study?! I can imagine that someone very smart could figure out (1)-(3) from scratch fairly quickly, but (4) strikes me as a much harder step. Also, mathy LW discussions often touch on quantum mechanics, various things in computability theory, and sundry other stuff where I don't see any easy way up (especially for QM).

In any case, here's a neat test for those who'd like to tackle step (1):
http://www.rasmusen.org/GI/_stest1/selftest1.htm

Comment author: Vladimir_M 05 October 2010 10:42:20PM *  3 points [-]

That’s an excellent list of questions! It will help me greatly to systematize my thinking on the topic.

Before replying to the specific items you list, perhaps I should first state the general position I’m coming from, which motivates me to get into discussions of this sort. Namely, it is my firm belief that when we look at the present state of human knowledge, one of the principal sources of confusion, nonsense, and pseudosicence is physics envy, which leads people in all sorts of fields to construct nonsensical edifices of numerology and then pretend, consciously or not, that they’ve reached some sort of exact scientific insight. Therefore, I believe that whenever one encounters people talking about numbers of any sort that look even slightly suspicious, they should be considered guilty until proven otherwise -- and this entire business with subjective probability estimates for common-sense beliefs doesn’t come even close to clearing that bar for me.

Now to reply to your list.


(1) Confession of frequentism. Only sensible numerical probabilities are those related to frequencies, i.e. either frequencies of outcomes of repeated experiments, or probabilities derived from there. (Creative drawing of reference-class boundaries may be permitted.) Especially, prior probabilities are meaningless.

(2) Any sensible numbers must be produced using procedures that ultimately don't include any numerical parameters (maybe except small integers like 2,3,4). Any number which isn't a result of such a procedure is labeled arbitrary, and therefore meaningless. (Observation and measurement, of course, do count as permitted procedures. Admittedly arbitrary steps, like choosing units of measurement, are also permitted.)

My answer to (1) follows from my opinion about (2).

In my view, a number that gives any information about the real world must ultimately refer, either directly or via some calculation, to something that can be measured or counted (at least in principle, perhaps using a thought-experiment). This doesn’t mean that all sensible numbers have to be derived from concrete empirical measurements; they can also follow from common-sense insight and generalization. For example, reading about Newton’s theory leads to the common-sense insight that it’s a very close approximation of reality under certain assumptions. Now, if we look at the gravity formula F=m1*m2/r^2 (in units set so that G=1), the number 2 in the denominator is not a product of any concrete measurement, but a generalization from common sense. Yet what makes it sensible is that it ultimately refers to measurable reality via a well-defined formula: measure the force between two bodies of known masses at distance r, and you’ll get log(m1*m2/F)/log(r) = 2.

Now, what can we make out of probabilities from this viewpoint? I honestly can’t think of any sensible non-frequentist answer to this question. Subjectivist Bayesian phrases such as “the degree of belief” sound to me entirely ghostlike unless this “degree” is verifiable via some frequentist practical test, at least in principle. In this sense, I do confess frequentism. (Though I don’t wish to subscribe to all the related baggage from various controversies in statistics, much of which is frankly over my head.)

(3) Degrees of confidence shall be expressed without reflexive thinking about them. Trying to establish a fixed scale of confidence levels (like impossible - very unlikely - unlikely - possible - likely - very likely - almost certain - certain), or actively trying to compare degrees of confidence in different beliefs is cheating, since such scales can be then converted into numbers using a non-numerical procedure.

That depends on the concrete problem under consideration, and on the thinker who is considering it. The thinker’s brain produces an answer alongside a more or less fuzzy feeling of confidence, and the human language has the capacity to express these feelings with about the same level of fuziness as that signal. It can be sensible to compare intuitive confidence levels, if such comparison can be put to a practical (i.e. frequentist) test. Eight ordered intuitive levels of certainty might perhaps be too much, but with, say, four levels, I could produce four lists of predictions labeled “almost impossible,” “unlikely,” “likely,” and “almost certain,” such that common-sense would tell us that, with near-certainty, those in each subsequent list would turn out to be true in ever greater proportion.

If I wish to express these probabilities as numbers, however, this is not a legitimate step unless the resulting numbers can be justified in the sense discussed above under (1) and (2). This requires justification both in the sense of defining what aspect of reality they refer to (where frequentism seems like the only answer), and guaranteeing that they will be accurate under empirical tests. If they can be so justified, then we say that the intuitive estimate is “well-calibrated.” However, calibration is usually not possible in practice, and there are only two major exceptions.

The first possible path towards accurate calibration is when the same person performs essentially the same judgment many times, and from the past performance we extract the frequency with which their brain tends to produce the right answer. If this level of accuracy remains roughly constant in time, then it makes sense to attach it as the probability to that person’s future judgments on the topic. This approach treats the relevant operations in the brain as a black box whose behavior, being roughly constant, can be subjected to such extrapolation.

The second possible path is reached when someone has a sufficient level of insight about some problem to cross the fuzzy limit between common-sense thinking and an actual scientific model. Increasingly subtle and accurate thinking about a problem can result in the construction of a mathematical model that approximates reality well enough that when applied in a shut-up-and-calculate way, it yields probability estimates that will be subsequently vindicated empirically.

(Still, deciding whether the model is applicable in some particular situation remains a common-sense problem, and the probabilities yielded by the model do not capture this uncertainty. If a well-established physical theory, applied by competent people, says that p=0.9999 for some event, common sense tells me that I should treat this event as near-certain -- and, if repeated many times, that it will come out the unlikely way very close to one in 10,000 times. On the other hand, if p=0.9999 is produced by some suspicious model that looks like it might be a product of data-dredging rather than real insight about reality, common sense tells me that the event is not at all certain. But there is no way to capture this intuitive uncertainty with a sensible number. The probabilities coming from calibration of repeated judgment are subject to analogous unquantifiable uncertainty.)

There is also a third logical possibility, namely that some people in some situations have precise enough intuitions of certaintly that they can quantify them in an accurate way, just like some people can guess what time it is with remarkable precision without looking at the clock. But I see little evidence of this occurring in reality, and even if it does, these are very rare special cases.

(4) The question of whether somebody is well calibrated is confused for some reason. Calibrating people has no sense. Although we may take the "almost certain" statements of a person and look at how often they are true, the resulting frequency has no sense for some reason.

I disagree with this, as explained above. Calibration can be done successfully in the special cases I mentioned. However, in cases where it cannot be done, which includes the great majority of the actual beliefs and conclusions made by human brains, devising numerical probabilities makes no sense.

(5) Unlike #3, beliefs can be ordered or classified on some scale (possibly imprecisely), but assigning numerical values brings confusing connotations and should be avoided. Alternatively said, the meaning subjective probabilities is preserved after monotonous rescaling.

This should be clear from the answer to (3).


[Continued in a separate comment below due to excessive length.]

Comment author: Vladimir_M 05 October 2010 10:43:07PM *  3 points [-]

[Continued from the parent comment.]

(6) Although, strictly speaking, human reasoning can be modelled as a Bayesian network where beliefs have numerical strengths, human introspection is poor at assessing their values. Declared values more likely depend on anchoring than on the real strength of the belief. Speaking about numbers actually introduces noise into reasoning.

I have revised my view about this somewhat thanks to a shrewd comment by xv15. The use of unjustified numerical probabilities can sometimes be a useful figure of speech that will convey an intuitive feeling of certainty to other people more faithfully than verbal expressions. But the important thing to note here is that the numbers in such situations are mere figures of speech, i.e. expressions that exploit various idiosyncrasies of human language and thinking to transmit hard-to-convey intuitive points via non-literal meanings. It is not legitimate to use these numbers for any other purpose.

Otherwise, I agree. Except in the above-discussed cases, subjective probabilities extracted from common-sense reasoning are at best an unnecessary addition to arguments that would be just as valid and rigorous without them. At worst, they can lead to muddled and incorrect thinking based on a false impression of accuracy, rigor, and insight where there is none, and ultimately to numerological pseudoscience.

Also, we still don’t know whether and to what extent various parts of our brains involved in common-sense reasoning approximate Bayesian networks. It may well be that some, or even all of them do, but the problem is that we cannot look at them and calculate the exact probabilities involved, and these are not available to introspection. The fallacy of radical Bayesianism that is often seen on LW is in the assumption that one can somehow work around this problem so as to meaningfully attach an explicit Bayesian procedure and a numerical probability to each judgment one makes.

Note also that even if my case turns out to be significantly weaker under scrutiny, it may still be a valid counterargument to the frequently voiced position that one can, and should, attach a numerical probability to every judgment one makes.


So, that would be a statement of my position; I’m looking forward to any comments.

Comment author: prase 05 October 2010 02:31:33PM *  4 points [-]

I have read most of the responses and still am not sure whether to upvote or not. I doubt among several (possibly overlapping) interpretations of your statement. Could you tell to what extent the following interpretations really reflect what you think?

  1. Confession of frequentism. Only sensible numerical probabilities are those related to frequencies, i.e. either frequencies of outcomes of repeated experiments, or probabilities derived from there. (Creative drawing of reference-class boundaries may be permitted.) Especially, prior probabilities are meaningless.
  2. Any sensible numbers must be produced using procedures that ultimately don't include any numerical parameters (maybe except small integers like 2,3,4). Any number which isn't a result of such a procedure is labeled arbitrary, and therefore meaningless. (Observation and measurement, of course, do count as permitted procedures. Admittedly arbitrary steps, like choosing units of measurement, are also permitted.)
  3. Degrees of confidence shall be expressed without reflexive thinking about them. Trying to establish a fixed scale of confidence levels (like impossible - very unlikely - unlikely - possible - likely - very likely - almost certain - certain), or actively trying to compare degrees of confidence in different beliefs is cheating, since such scales can be then converted into numbers using a non-numerical procedure.
  4. The question of whether somebody is well calibrated is confused for some reason. Calibrating people has no sense. Although we may take the "almost certain" statements of a person and look at how often they are true, the resulting frequency has no sense for some reason.
  5. Unlike #3, beliefs can be ordered or classified on some scale (possibly imprecisely), but assigning numerical values brings confusing connotations and should be avoided. Alternatively said, the meaning of subjective probabilities is preserved after monotonous rescaling.
  6. Although, strictly speaking, human reasoning can be modelled as a Bayesian network where beliefs have numerical strengths, human introspection is poor at assessing their values. Declared values more likely depend on anchoring than on the real strength of the belief. Speaking about numbers actually introduces noise into reasoning.
  7. Human reasoning cannot be modelled by Bayesian inference, not even in approximation.
Comment author: Vladimir_M 05 October 2010 10:42:20PM *  3 points [-]

That’s an excellent list of questions! It will help me greatly to systematize my thinking on the topic.

Before replying to the specific items you list, perhaps I should first state the general position I’m coming from, which motivates me to get into discussions of this sort. Namely, it is my firm belief that when we look at the present state of human knowledge, one of the principal sources of confusion, nonsense, and pseudosicence is physics envy, which leads people in all sorts of fields to construct nonsensical edifices of numerology and then pretend, consciously or not, that they’ve reached some sort of exact scientific insight. Therefore, I believe that whenever one encounters people talking about numbers of any sort that look even slightly suspicious, they should be considered guilty until proven otherwise -- and this entire business with subjective probability estimates for common-sense beliefs doesn’t come even close to clearing that bar for me.

Now to reply to your list.


(1) Confession of frequentism. Only sensible numerical probabilities are those related to frequencies, i.e. either frequencies of outcomes of repeated experiments, or probabilities derived from there. (Creative drawing of reference-class boundaries may be permitted.) Especially, prior probabilities are meaningless.

(2) Any sensible numbers must be produced using procedures that ultimately don't include any numerical parameters (maybe except small integers like 2,3,4). Any number which isn't a result of such a procedure is labeled arbitrary, and therefore meaningless. (Observation and measurement, of course, do count as permitted procedures. Admittedly arbitrary steps, like choosing units of measurement, are also permitted.)

My answer to (1) follows from my opinion about (2).

In my view, a number that gives any information about the real world must ultimately refer, either directly or via some calculation, to something that can be measured or counted (at least in principle, perhaps using a thought-experiment). This doesn’t mean that all sensible numbers have to be derived from concrete empirical measurements; they can also follow from common-sense insight and generalization. For example, reading about Newton’s theory leads to the common-sense insight that it’s a very close approximation of reality under certain assumptions. Now, if we look at the gravity formula F=m1*m2/r^2 (in units set so that G=1), the number 2 in the denominator is not a product of any concrete measurement, but a generalization from common sense. Yet what makes it sensible is that it ultimately refers to measurable reality via a well-defined formula: measure the force between two bodies of known masses at distance r, and you’ll get log(m1*m2/F)/log(r) = 2.

Now, what can we make out of probabilities from this viewpoint? I honestly can’t think of any sensible non-frequentist answer to this question. Subjectivist Bayesian phrases such as “the degree of belief” sound to me entirely ghostlike unless this “degree” is verifiable via some frequentist practical test, at least in principle. In this sense, I do confess frequentism. (Though I don’t wish to subscribe to all the related baggage from various controversies in statistics, much of which is frankly over my head.)

(3) Degrees of confidence shall be expressed without reflexive thinking about them. Trying to establish a fixed scale of confidence levels (like impossible - very unlikely - unlikely - possible - likely - very likely - almost certain - certain), or actively trying to compare degrees of confidence in different beliefs is cheating, since such scales can be then converted into numbers using a non-numerical procedure.

That depends on the concrete problem under consideration, and on the thinker who is considering it. The thinker’s brain produces an answer alongside a more or less fuzzy feeling of confidence, and the human language has the capacity to express these feelings with about the same level of fuziness as that signal. It can be sensible to compare intuitive confidence levels, if such comparison can be put to a practical (i.e. frequentist) test. Eight ordered intuitive levels of certainty might perhaps be too much, but with, say, four levels, I could produce four lists of predictions labeled “almost impossible,” “unlikely,” “likely,” and “almost certain,” such that common-sense would tell us that, with near-certainty, those in each subsequent list would turn out to be true in ever greater proportion.

If I wish to express these probabilities as numbers, however, this is not a legitimate step unless the resulting numbers can be justified in the sense discussed above under (1) and (2). This requires justification both in the sense of defining what aspect of reality they refer to (where frequentism seems like the only answer), and guaranteeing that they will be accurate under empirical tests. If they can be so justified, then we say that the intuitive estimate is “well-calibrated.” However, calibration is usually not possible in practice, and there are only two major exceptions.

The first possible path towards accurate calibration is when the same person performs essentially the same judgment many times, and from the past performance we extract the frequency with which their brain tends to produce the right answer. If this level of accuracy remains roughly constant in time, then it makes sense to attach it as the probability to that person’s future judgments on the topic. This approach treats the relevant operations in the brain as a black box whose behavior, being roughly constant, can be subjected to such extrapolation.

The second possible path is reached when someone has a sufficient level of insight about some problem to cross the fuzzy limit between common-sense thinking and an actual scientific model. Increasingly subtle and accurate thinking about a problem can result in the construction of a mathematical model that approximates reality well enough that when applied in a shut-up-and-calculate way, it yields probability estimates that will be subsequently vindicated empirically.

(Still, deciding whether the model is applicable in some particular situation remains a common-sense problem, and the probabilities yielded by the model do not capture this uncertainty. If a well-established physical theory, applied by competent people, says that p=0.9999 for some event, common sense tells me that I should treat this event as near-certain -- and, if repeated many times, that it will come out the unlikely way very close to one in 10,000 times. On the other hand, if p=0.9999 is produced by some suspicious model that looks like it might be a product of data-dredging rather than real insight about reality, common sense tells me that the event is not at all certain. But there is no way to capture this intuitive uncertainty with a sensible number. The probabilities coming from calibration of repeated judgment are subject to analogous unquantifiable uncertainty.)

There is also a third logical possibility, namely that some people in some situations have precise enough intuitions of certaintly that they can quantify them in an accurate way, just like some people can guess what time it is with remarkable precision without looking at the clock. But I see little evidence of this occurring in reality, and even if it does, these are very rare special cases.

(4) The question of whether somebody is well calibrated is confused for some reason. Calibrating people has no sense. Although we may take the "almost certain" statements of a person and look at how often they are true, the resulting frequency has no sense for some reason.

I disagree with this, as explained above. Calibration can be done successfully in the special cases I mentioned. However, in cases where it cannot be done, which includes the great majority of the actual beliefs and conclusions made by human brains, devising numerical probabilities makes no sense.

(5) Unlike #3, beliefs can be ordered or classified on some scale (possibly imprecisely), but assigning numerical values brings confusing connotations and should be avoided. Alternatively said, the meaning subjective probabilities is preserved after monotonous rescaling.

This should be clear from the answer to (3).


[Continued in a separate comment below due to excessive length.]

Comment author: [deleted] 05 October 2010 02:59:38AM 0 points [-]

To try to understand your point, I will try to clarify it.

We have very limited access to our mental processes. In fact, in some cases our access to our mental processes is indirect - that is, we only discover what we believe once we have observed how we act. We observe our own act, and from this we can infer that we must have believed such-and-such. We can attempt to reconstruct our own process of thinking, but the process we are modeling is essentially a black box whose internals we are modeling, and the outputs of the black box at any given time are meager. We are of course always using the black box, which gives us a lot of data to go on in an absolute sense, but since the topic is constantly changing and since our beliefs are also in flux, the relevance of most of that data to the correct understanding of a particular act of thinking is unclear. In modeling our own mental processes we are rationalizing, with all the potential pitfalls associated with rationalization.

Nevertheless, this does not stop us from using the familiar gambling method for eliciting probability assessments, understood as willingness to wager. The gambling method, even if it is artificial, is at least reasonable, because every behavior we exhibit involves a kind of wager. However the black box operates, it will produce a certain response for each offered betting odds, from which its probability assignments can be derived. Of course this won't work if the black box produces inconsistent (i.e. Dutch bookable) responses to the betting odds, but whether and to what degree it does or not is an empirical question. As a matter of fact, you've been talking about precision, and I think here's how we can define the precision of your probability assignment. I'm sure that the black box's responses to betting odds will be somewhat inconsistent. We can measure how inconsistent they are. There will be a certain gap of a certain size which can be Dutch booked - the bigger the gap the quicker you can be milked. And this will be the measure of the precision of your probability assignment.

But suppose that a person always in effect bets for something given certain odds or above, in whatever manner the bet is put to him, and always bets against if given odds anywhere below, and suppose the cutoff between his betting for and against is some very precise number such as pi to twelve digits. Then that seems to say that the odds his black box assigns is precisely those odds.

You write:

The problem is that the algorithms that your brain uses to perform common-sense reasoning are not transparent to your conscious mind, which has access only to their final output. This output does not provide a numerical probability estimate, but only a rough and vague feeling of certainty.

But I don't we should be looking at introspectable "output". The purpose of the brain isn't to produce rough and vague feelings which we can then appreciate through inner contemplation. The purpose of the brain is to produce action, to decide on a course of action and then move the muscles accordingly. Our introspective power is limited at best. Over a lifetime of knowing ourselves we can probably get pretty good at knowing our own beliefs, but I don't thing we should think of introspection as the gold standard of measuring a person's belief. Like preference, belief is revealed in action. And action is what the gambling method of eliciting probability assignments looks at. While the brain produces only rough and vague feelings of certainty for the purposes of one's own navel-gazing, at the same time it produces very definite behavior, very definite decisions, from which can be derived, at least in principle, probability assignments - and also, as I mention above, precision of those probability assignments.

I grant, by implication, that one's own probability assignments are not necessarily introspectable. That goes without saying.

You write:

Therefore, there are only two ways in which you can arrive at a numerical probability estimate for a common-sense belief:

  • Translate your vague feeling of certainly into a number in some arbitrary manner. This however makes the number a mere figure of speech, which adds absolutely nothing over the usual human vague expressions for different levels of certainty.

  • Perform some probability calculation, which however has nothing to do with how your brain actually arrived at your common-sense conclusion, and then assign the probability number produced by the former to the latter. This is clearly fallacious.

Your first described way takes the vague feeling for the output of the black box. But the purpose of the black box is action, decision, and that is the output that we should be looking at, and it's the output that the gambling method looks at. And that is a third way of arriving at a numerical probability which you didn't cover.

In response to comment by [deleted] on The Irrationality Game
Comment author: Vladimir_M 05 October 2010 05:44:55PM *  0 points [-]

Aside from some quibbles that aren't really worth getting into, I have no significant disagreement with your comments. There is nothing wrong with looking at people's acts in practice and observing that they behave as if they operated with subjective probability estimates in some range. However, your statement that "one's own probability assignments are not necessarily introspectable" basically restates my main point, which was exactly about the meaninglessness of analyzing one's own common-sense judgments to arrive at a numerical probability estimate, which many people here, in contrast, consider to be the right way to increase the accuracy of one's thinking. (Though I admit that it should probably be worded more precisely to make sure it's interpreted that way.)

Comment author: mattnewport 05 October 2010 12:06:34AM *  0 points [-]

In reality, it is rational to bet only with people over whom you have superior relevant knowledge, or with someone who is suffering from an evident failure of common sense.

You still have to be able to translate your superior relevant knowledge into odds in order to set the terms of the bet however. Do you not believe that this is an ability that people have varying degrees of aptitude for?

Look at the stock market: it's pure gambling, unless you have insider knowledge or vastly higher expertise than the average investor.

Vastly higher expertise than the average investor would appear to include something like the ability in question - translating your beliefs about the future into a probability such that you can judge whether investments have positive expected value. If you accept that true alpha exists (and the evidence suggests that though rare a small percentage of the best investors do appear to have positive alpha) then what process do you believe those who possess it use to decide which investments are good and which bad?

What's your opinion on prediction markets? They seem to produce fairly good probability estimates so presumably the participants must be using some better-than-random process for arriving at numerical probability estimates for their predictions.

I'm not familiar with the details of this business, but from what I understand, bookmakers work in such a way that they're guaranteed to make a profit no matter what happens.

They certainly aim for a balanced book but they wouldn't be very profitable if they were not reasonably competent at setting initial odds (and updating them in the light of new information). If the initial odds are wildly out of line with their customers' then they won't be able to make a balanced book.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 05 October 2010 07:18:42AM *  -1 points [-]

mattnewport:

You still have to be able to translate your superior relevant knowledge into odds in order to set the terms of the bet however. Do you not believe that this is an ability that people have varying degrees of aptitude for?

They sure do, but in all the examples I can think of, people either just follow their intuition directly when faced with a concrete situation, or employ rigorous science to attack the problem. (It doesn't have to be the official accredited science, of course; the Venn diagram of official science and valid science features only a partial overlap.) I just don't see any practical examples of people successfully betting by doing calculations with probability numbers derived from their intuitive feelings of confidence that would go beyond what a mere verbal expression of these feelings would convey. Can you think of any?

If you accept that true alpha exists (and the evidence suggests that though rare a small percentage of the best investors do appear to have positive alpha) then what process do you believe those who possess it use to decide which investments are good and which bad?

Well, if I knew, I would be doing it myself -- and I sure wouldn't be talking about it publicly!

The problem with discussing investment strategies is that any non-trivial public information about this topic necessarily has to be bullshit, or at least drowned in bullshit to the point of being irrecoverable, since exclusive possession of correct information is a sure path to getting rich, but its effectiveness critically depends on exclusivity. Still, I would be surprised to find out that the success of some alpha-achieving investors is based on taking numerical expressions of common-sense confidence seriously.

In a sense, a similar problem faces anyone who aspires to be more "rational" than the average folk in any meaningful sense. Either your "rationality" manifests itself only in irrelevant matters, or you have to ask yourself what is so special and exclusive about you that you're reaping practical success that eludes so many other people, and in such a way that they can't just copy your approach.

What's your opinion on prediction markets? They seem to produce fairly good probability estimates so presumably the participants must be using some better-than-random process for arriving at numerical probability estimates for their predictions.

I agree with this assessment, but the accuracy of information aggregated by a prediction market implies nothing about your own individual certainty. Prediction markets work by cancelling out random errors and enabling specialists who wield esoteric expertise to take advantage of amateurs' systematic biases. Where your own individual judgment falls within this picture, you cannot know, unless you're one of these people with esoteric expertise.

Comment author: Mass_Driver 05 October 2010 02:06:20AM 3 points [-]

To give some sense of the problem, if such calibration were possible, then why not calibrate yourself to generate accurate probabilities about the stock market movements and bet on them? It would be an easy and foolproof way to get rich.

I think this statement reflects either an ignorance of finance or the Dark Arts.

First, the stock market is the single worst place to try to test out ideas about probabilities, because so many other people are already trying to predict the market, and so much wealth is at stake. Other people's predictions will remove most of the potential for arbitrage (reducing 'signal'), and the insider trading and other forms of cheating generated by the potential for quick wealth will further distort any scientifically detectable trends in the market (increasing 'noise'). Because investments in the stock market must be made in relatively large quantities to avoid losing your money through trading commissions, a causal theory tester is likely to run out of money long before hitting a good payoff even if he or she is already well-calibrated.

Of course, in real life, people might be moderately-calibrated. The fact that one is capable of making some predictions with some accuracy and precision is not a guarantee that one will be able to reliably and detectably beat even a thin market like a political prediction clearinghouse. Nevertheless, some information is often better than none: I am (rationally) much more concerned about automobile accidents than fires, despite the fact that I know two people who have died in fires and none who have died in automobile accidents. I know this based on my inferences from published statistics, the reliability of which I make further inferences about. I am quite confident (p ~ .95) that it is sensible to drive defensively (at great cost in effort and time) while essentially ignoring fire safety (even though checking a fire extinguisher or smoke detector might take minimal effort.)

I don't play the stock market, though. I'm not that well calibrated, and probably nobody is without access to inside info of one kind or another.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 05 October 2010 05:33:28AM *  1 point [-]

Mass_Driver:

I think this statement reflects either an ignorance of finance or the Dark Arts.

I'm not an expert on finance, but I am aware of everything you wrote about it in your comment. So I guess this leaves us with the second option. The Dark Arts hypothesis is probably that I'm using the extreme example of the stock market to suggest a general sweeping conclusion that in fact doesn't hold in less extreme cases.

To which I reply: yes, the stock market is an extreme example, but I honestly can't think of any other examples that would show otherwise. There are many examples of scientific models that provide more or less accurate probability estimates for all kinds of things, to be sure, but I have yet to hear about people achieving practical success in anything relevant by translating their common-sense feelings of confidence in various beliefs into numerical probabilities.

In my view, calibration of probability estimates can succeed only if (1) you come up with a valid scientific model which you can then use in a shut-up-and-calculate way instead of applying common sense (though you still need it to determine whether the model is applicable in the first place), or (2) you make an essentially identical judgment many times, and from your past performance you extrapolate how frequently the black box inside your head tends to be right.

Now, you try to provide some counterexamples:

I am (rationally) much more concerned about automobile accidents than fires, despite the fact that I know two people who have died in fires and none who have died in automobile accidents. I know this based on my inferences from published statistics, the reliability of which I make further inferences about. I am quite confident (p ~ .95) that it is sensible to drive defensively (at great cost in effort and time) while essentially ignoring fire safety (even though checking a fire extinguisher or smoke detector might take minimal effort.)

Frankly, the only subjective probability estimate I see here is the p~0.95 for your belief about driving. In this case, I'm not getting any more information from this number than if you just described your level of certainty in words, nor do I see any practical application to which you can put this number. I have no objection to your other conclusions, but I see nothing among them that would be controversial to even the most extreme frequentist.

Comment author: jimrandomh 05 October 2010 12:04:33AM 0 points [-]

Given your position on the meaninglessness of assigning a numerical probability value to a vague feeling of how likely something is, how would you decide whether you were being offered good odds if offered a bet?

In reality, it is rational to bet only with people over whom you have superior relevant knowledge, or with someone who is suffering from an evident failure of common sense

You're dodging the question. What if the odds arose from a natural process, so that there isn't a person on the other side of the bet to compare your state of knowledge against?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 05 October 2010 02:22:08AM *  0 points [-]

jimrandomh:

You're dodging the question. What if the odds arose from a natural process, so that there isn't a person on the other side of the bet to compare your state of knowledge against?

Maybe it's my failure of English comprehension (I'm not a native speaker, as you might guess from my frequent grammatical errors), but when I read the phrase "being offered good odds if offered a bet," I understood it as asking about a bet with opponents who stand to lose if my guess is right. So, honestly, I wasn't dodging the question.

But to answer your question, it depends on the concrete case. Some natural processes can be approximated with models that yield useful probability estimates, and faced with some such process, I would of course try to use the best scientific knowledge available to calculate the odds if the stakes are high enough to justify the effort. When this is not possible, however, the only honest answer is that my decision would be guided by whatever intuitive feeling my brain happens to produce after some common-sense consideration, and unless this intuitive feeling told me that losing the bet is extremely unlikely, I would refuse to bet. And I honestly cannot think of a situation where translating this intuitive feeling of certainty into numbers would increase the clarity and accuracy of my thinking, or provide for any useful practical guidelines.

For example, if I come across a ditch and decide to jump over to save the effort of walking around to cross over a bridge, I'm effectively betting that it's narrow enough to jump over safely. In reality, I'll feel intuitively either that it's safe to jump or not, and I'll act on that feeling, produced by some opaque module for physics calculations in my brain. Of course, my conclusion might be wrong, and as a kid I would occasionally injure myself by judging wrongly in such situations, but how can I possibly quantify this feeling of certainty numerically in a meaningful way? It simply makes no sense. The overwhelming majority of real-life cases where I have to produce some judgment, and perhaps even bet on it, are of this sort.

It would be cool to have a brain that produces confidence estimates for its conclusions with greater precision, but mine simply isn't like that, and it's useless to pretend that it is.

Comment author: xv15 04 October 2010 11:35:11PM *  1 point [-]

Fair. Let me be precise too. I read your original statement as saying that numbers will never add meaning beyond what a vague figure of speech would, i.e. if you say "I strongly believe this" you cannot make your position more clear by attaching a number. That I disagree with. To me it seems clear that:

i) "Common-sense conclusions and beliefs" are held with varying levels of precision. ii) Often even these beliefs are held with a level of precision that can be best described with a number. (Best=most succinctly, least misinterpretable, etc...indeed it seems to me that sometimes "best" could be replaced with "only." You will never get people to understand 60% by saying "I reasonably strongly believe"...and yet your belief may be demonstrably closer to 60 than 50 or 70).

I don't think your statement is defensible from a normal definition of "common sense conclusions," but you may have internally defined it in such a way as to make your statement true, with a (I think) relatively narrow sense of "meaningfulness" also in mind. For instance if you ignore the role of numbers in transmission of belief from one party to the next, you are a big step closer to being correct.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 05 October 2010 12:53:29AM *  1 point [-]

xv15:

I don't think your statement is defensible from a normal definition of "common sense conclusions," but you may have internally defined it in such a way as to make your statement true, with a (I think) relatively narrow sense of "meaningfulness" also in mind. For instance if you ignore the role of numbers in transmission of belief from one party to the next, you are a big step closer to being correct.

You have a very good point here. For example, a dialog like this could result in a real exchange of useful information:

A: "I think this project will probably fail."
B: "So, you mean you're, like, 90% sure it will fail?"
A: "Um... not really, more like 80%."

I can imagine a genuine meeting of minds here, where B now has a very good idea of how confident A feels about his prediction. The numbers are still used as mere figures of speech, but "vague" is not a correct way to describe them, since the information has been transmitted in a more precise way than if A had just used verbal qualifiers.

So, I agree that "vague" should probably be removed from my original claim.

Comment author: mattnewport 04 October 2010 10:50:08PM 1 point [-]

Given your position on the meaninglessness of assigning a numerical probability value to a vague feeling of how likely something is, how would you decide whether you were being offered good odds if offered a bet? If you're not in the habit of accepting bets, how do you think someone who does this for a living (a bookie for example) should go about deciding on what odds to assign to a given bet?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 04 October 2010 11:49:54PM -2 points [-]

mattnewport:

Given your position on the meaninglessness of assigning a numerical probability value to a vague feeling of how likely something is, how would you decide whether you were being offered good odds if offered a bet?

In reality, it is rational to bet only with people over whom you have superior relevant knowledge, or with someone who is suffering from an evident failure of common sense. Otherwise, betting is just gambling (which of course can be worthwhile for fun or signaling value). Look at the stock market: it's pure gambling, unless you have insider knowledge or vastly higher expertise than the average investor.

This is the basic reason why I consider the emphasis on subjective Bayesian probabilities that is so popular here misguided. In technical problems where probability calculations can be helpful, the experts in the field already know how to use them. On the other hand, for the great majority of the relevant beliefs and conclusions you'll form in life, they offer nothing useful beyond what your vague common sense is already telling you. If you start taking them too seriously, it's easy to start fooling yourself that your thinking is more accurate and precise than it really is, and if you start actually betting on them, you'll be just gambling.

If you're not in the habit of accepting bets, how do you think someone who does this for a living (a bookie for example) should go about deciding on what odds to assign to a given bet?

I'm not familiar with the details of this business, but from what I understand, bookmakers work in such a way that they're guaranteed to make a profit no matter what happens. Effectively, they exploit the inconsistencies between different people's estimates of what the favorable odds are. (If there are bookmakers who stake their profit on some particular outcome, then I'm sure that they have insider knowledge if they can stay profitable.) Now of course, the trick is to come up with a book that is both profitable and offers odds that will sell well, but here we get into the fuzzy art of exploiting people's biases for profit.

Comment author: xv15 04 October 2010 03:09:50PM 4 points [-]

Again, meaningless is a very strong word, and it does not make your case easy. You seem to be suggesting that NO number, however imprecise, has any place here, and so you do not get to refute me by saying that I have to embrace arbitrary precision.

In any case, if you offer me some bets with more significant digits in the odds, my choices will reveal the cutoff to more significant digits. Wherever it may be, there will still be some bets I will and won't take, and the number reflects that, which means it carries very real meaning.

Now, maybe I will hold the line at 54% exactly, not feeling any gain to thinking harder about the cutoff (as it gets harder AND less important to nail down further digits). Heck, maybe on some other issue I only care to go out to the nearest 10%. But so what? There are plenty of cases where I know my common sense belief probability to within 10%. That suggests such an estimate is not meaningless.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 04 October 2010 11:08:11PM *  1 point [-]

xv15:

Again, meaningless is a very strong word, and it does not make your case easy.

To be precise, I wrote "meaningless, except perhaps as a vague figure of speech." I agree that the claim would be too strong without that qualification, but I do believe that "vague figure of speech" is a fair summary of the meaningfulness that is to be found there. (Note also that the claim specifically applies to "common-sense conclusions and beliefs," not things where there is a valid basis for employing mathematical models that yield numerical probabilities.)

In any case, if you offer me some bets with more significant digits in the odds, my choices will reveal the cutoff to more significant digits. Wherever it may be, there will still be some bets I will and won't take, and the number reflects that, which means it carries very real meaning.

You seem to be saying that since you perceive this number as meaningful, you will be willing to act on it, and this by itself renders it meaningful, since it serves as guide for your actions. If we define "meaningful" to cover this case, then I agree with you, and this qualification should be added to my above statement. But the sense in which I used the term originally doesn't cover this case.

Comment author: Perplexed 04 October 2010 09:25:15PM 1 point [-]

Subjective probabilities of isolated propositions don't have the kind of meaning you want numbers to have. But they have exactly the kind of meaning I want them to have - specifically they can be used in computations that produce consistent results.

Fair enough, but I still don't see how this solves the problem of the correspondence between numbers and reality.

It doesn't have to. That is a problem you made up. Other people don't have to buy in to your view on the proper relationship between numbers and physical reality.

My viewpoint on numbers is somewhere between platonism and formalism. I think that the meaning of a number is a particular structure in my mind. If I have an axiom system that is categorical (and, of course, usually I don't) then that picture in my mind can be made inter-subjective in that someone who also accepts those axioms can build an isomorphic structure in their own mind. The real world has absolutely nothing to do with Tarski's semantics - which is where I look to find out what the "meaning" of a number is.

Your complaint that subjective probabilities have no meaning is very much like the complaint of a new convert to atheism who laments that without God, life has no meaning. My advice: stop telling other people what the word "meaning" should mean.

However, if you really need some kind of affirmation, then I will provide some. I agree with you that the numbers used in subjective probabilities are less, ... what is the right word, ... less empirical than are the numbers you usually find in science classes. Does that make you feel better?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 04 October 2010 10:27:41PM 2 points [-]

Perplexed:

It doesn't have to. That is a problem you made up. Other people don't have to buy in to your view on the proper relationship between numbers and physical reality.

You probably wouldn't buy that same argument if it came from a numerologist, though. I don't think I hold any unusual and exotic views on this relationship, and in fact, I don't think I have made any philosophical assumptions in this discussion beyond the basic common-sense observation that if you want to use numbers to talk about the real world, they should have a clear connection with something that can be measured or counted to make any sense. I don't see any relevance of these (otherwise highly interesting) deep questions of the philosophy of math for any of my arguments.

Comment author: komponisto 04 October 2010 06:09:18PM 12 points [-]

Let's see if we can try to hug the query here. What exactly is the mistake I'm making when I say that I believe such-and-such is true with probability 0.001?

Is it that I'm not likely to actually be right 999 times out of 1000 occasions when I say this? If so, then you're (merely) worried about my calibration, not about the fundamental correspondence between beliefs and probabilities.

Or is it, as you seem now to be suggesting, a question of attire: no one has any business speaking "numerically" unless they're (metaphorically speaking) "wearing a lab coat"? That is, using numbers is a privilege reserved for scientists who've done specific kinds of calculations?

It seems to me that the contrast you are positing between "numerical" statements and other indications of degree is illusory. The only difference is that numbers permit an arbitrarily high level of precision; their use doesn't automatically imply a particular level. Even in the context of scientific calculations, the numbers involved are subject to some particular level of uncertainty. When a scientist makes a calculation to 15 decimal places, they shouldn't be interpreted as distinguishing between different 20-decimal-digit numbers.

Likewise, when I make the claim that the probability of Amanda Knox's guilt is 10^(-3), that should not be interpreted as distinguishing (say) between 0.001 and 0.002. It's meant to be distinguished from 10^(-2) and (perhaps) 10^(-4). I was explicit about this when I said it was an order-of-magnitude estimate. You may worry that such disclaimers are easily forgotten -- but this is to disregard the fact that similar disclaimers always apply whenever numbers are used in any context!

In any case, you seem to concede that these numbers ultimately don't convey any more information than various vague verbal expressions of confidence. If you want to make the latter more systematic and clear, I have no problem with that, but I see no way to turn them into actual numbers without introducing spurious precision.

Here's the way I do it: I think approximately in terms of the following "scale" of improbabilities:

(1) 10% to 50% (mundane surprise)

(2) 1% to 10% (rare)

(3) 0.1% (=10^(-3)) to 1% (once-in-a-lifetime level surprise on an important question)

(4) 10^(-6) to 10^(-3) (dying in a plane crash or similar)

(5) 10^(-10) to 10^(-6) (winning the lottery; having an experience unique among humankind)

(6) 10^(-100) to 10^(-10) (religions are true)

(7) below 10^(-100) (theoretical level of improbability reached in thought experiments).

Comment author: Vladimir_M 04 October 2010 09:59:04PM *  3 points [-]

komponisto:

What exactly is the mistake I'm making when I say that I believe such-and-such is true with probability 0.001? Is it that I'm not likely to actually be right 999 times out of 1000 occasions when I say this? If so, then you're (merely) worried about my calibration, not about the fundamental correspondence between beliefs and probabilities.

It's not that I'm worried about your poor calibration in some particular instance, but that I believe that accurate calibration in this sense is impossible in practice, except in some very special cases.

(To give some sense of the problem, if such calibration were possible, then why not calibrate yourself to generate accurate probabilities about the stock market movements and bet on them? It would be an easy and foolproof way to get rich. But of course that there is no way you can make your numbers match reality, not in this problem, nor in most other ones.)

Or is it, as you seem now to be suggesting, a question of attire: no one has any business speaking "numerically" unless they're (metaphorically speaking) "wearing a lab coat"? That is, using numbers is a privilege reserved for scientists who've done specific kinds of calculations?

The way you put it, "scientists" sounds too exclusive. Carpenters, accountants, cashiers, etc. also use numbers and numerical calculations in valid ways. However, their use of numbers can ultimately be scrutinized and justified in similar ways as the scientific use of numbers (even if they themselves wouldn't be up to that task), so with that qualification, my answer would be yes.

(And unfortunately, in practice it's not at all rare to see people using numbers in ways that are fundamentally unsound, which sometimes gives rise to whole edifices of pseudoscience. I discussed one such example from economics in this thread.)

Now, you say:

It seems to me that the contrast you are positing between "numerical" statements and other indications of degree is illusory. The only difference is that numbers permit an arbitrarily high level of precision; their use doesn't automatically imply a particular level. Even in the context of scientific calculations, the numbers involved are subject to some particular level of uncertainty. When a scientist makes a calculation to 15 decimal places, they shouldn't be interpreted as distinguishing between different 20-decimal-digit numbers.

However, when a scientist makes a calculation with 15 digits of precision, or even just one, he must be able to rigorously justify this degree of precision by pointing to observations that are incompatible with the hypothesis that any of these digits, except the last one, is different. (Or in the case of mathematical constants such as pi and e, to proofs of the formulas used to calculate them.) This disclaimer is implicit in any scientific use of numbers. (Assuming valid science is being done, of course.)

And this is where, in my opinion, you construct an invalid analogy:

Likewise, when I make the claim that the probability of Amanda Knox's guilt is 10^(-3), that should not be interpreted as distinguishing (say) between 0.001 and 0.002. It's meant to be distinguished from 10^(-2) and (perhaps) 10^(-4). I was explicit about this when I said it was an order-of-magnitude estimate. You may worry that such disclaimers are easily forgotten -- but this is to disregard the fact that similar disclaimers always apply whenever numbers are used in any context!

But these disclaimers are not at all the same! The scientist's -- or the carpenter's, for that matter -- implicit disclaimer is: "This number is subject to this uncertainty interval, but there is a rigorous argument why it cannot be outside that range." On the other hand, your disclaimer is: "This number was devised using an intuitive and arbitrary procedure that doesn't provide any rigorous argument about the range it must be in."

And if I may be permitted such a comment, I do see lots of instances here where people seem to forget about this disclaimer, and write as if they believed that they could actually become Bayesian inferers, rather than creatures who depend on capricious black-box circuits inside their heads to make any interesting judgment about anything, and who are (with the present level of technology) largely unable to examine the internal functioning of these boxes and improve them.

Here's the way I do it: I think approximately in terms of the following "scale" of improbabilities:

I don't think such usage is unreasonable, but I think it falls under what I call using numbers as vague figures of speech.

Comment author: Perplexed 04 October 2010 08:33:45PM 0 points [-]

I don't see how you can argue that a number is meaningful by merely noting its relationships with other numbers that follow from pure mathematics. Or am I missing something with this analogy?

The only thing you are missing is the first paragraph of my reply. Just because something doesn't have the kind of meaning you think it ought to have (by virtue of being a number, for example) that doesn't justify your claim that it is meaningless.

Subjective probabilities of isolated propositions don't have the kind of meaning you want numbers to have. But they have exactly the kind of meaning I want them to have - specifically they can be used in computations that produce consistent results.

Do you think that the digits of pi beyond the first half dozen are also meaningless?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 04 October 2010 08:52:48PM *  1 point [-]

Perplexed:

Subjective probabilities of isolated propositions don't have the kind of meaning you want numbers to have. But they have exactly the kind of meaning I want them to have - specifically they can be used in computations that produce consistent results.

Fair enough, but I still don't see how this solves the problem of the correspondence between numbers and reality. Any number can be used in computations that produce consistent results if you just start plugging it into formulas derived from some consistent mathematical theory. It is when the numbers are used as basis for claims about the real, physical world that I insist on an explanation of how exactly they are derived and how their claimed correspondence with reality is justified.

Do you think that the digits of pi beyond the first half dozen are also meaningless?

The digits of pi are an artifact of pure mathematics, so I don't think it's a good analogy for what we're talking about. Once you've built up enough mathematics to define lengths of curves in Euclidean geometry, the ratio between the circumference and diameter of a circle follows by pure logic. Any suitable analogy for what we're talking about must encompass empirical knowledge, and claims which can be falsified by empirical observations.

Comment author: Perplexed 04 October 2010 02:27:15PM 7 points [-]

assigning numerical probabilities to common-sense conclusions and beliefs is meaningless

It is risky to deprecate something as "meaningless" - a ritual, a practice, a word, an idiom. Risky because the actual meaning may be something very different than you imagine. That seems to be the case here with attaching numbers to subjective probabilities.

The meaning of attaching a number to something lies in how that number may be used to generate a second number that can then be attached to something else. There is no point in providing a number to associate with the variable 'm' (i.e. that number is meaningless) unless you simultaneously provide a number to associate with the variable 'f' and then plug both into "f=ma" to generate a third number to associate with the variable 'a', an number which you can test empirically.

Similarly, a single isolated subjective probability estimate may seem somewhat meaningless in isolation, but if you place it into a context with enough related subjective probability estimates and empirically measured frequencies, then all those probabilities and frequencies can be combined and compared using the standard formulas of Bayesian probability:

  • P(~A) = 1 - P(A)
  • P(B|A)*P(A)=P(A&B)=P(A|B)*P(B)

So, if you want to deprecate as "meaningless" my estimate that the Democrats have a 40% chance to maintain their House majority in the next election, go ahead. But you cannot then also deprecate my estimate that the Republicans have a 70% of reaching a House majority. Because the conjunction of those two probability estimates is not meaningless. It is quite respectably false.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 04 October 2010 08:15:43PM *  2 points [-]

I think you're not drawing a clear enough distinction between two different things, namely the mathematical relationships between numbers, and the correspondence between numbers and reality.

If you ask an astronomer what is the mass of some asteroid, he will presumably give you a number with a few significant digits and and uncertainty interval. If you ask him to justify this number, he will be able to point to some observations that are incompatible with the assumption that the mass is outside this interval, which follows from a mathematical argument based on our best knowledge of physics. If you ask for more significant digits, he will say that we don't know (and that beyond a certain accuracy, the question doesn't even make sense, since it's constantly losing and gathering small bits of mass). That's what it means for a number to be rigorously justified.

But now imagine that I make an uneducated guess of how heavy this asteroid might be, based on no actual astronomical observation. I do of course know that it must be heavier than a few tons or otherwise it wouldn't be noticeable from Earth as an identifiable object, and that it must be lighter than 10^20 or so tons since that's roughly the range where smaller planets are, but it's clearly nonsensical for me to express that guess with even one digit of precision. Yet I could insist on a precise guess, and claim that it's "meaningful" in a way analogous to your above justification of subjective probability estimates, by deriving various mathematical and physical implications of this fact. If you deprecate my claim that its mass is 4.5237 x 10^15kg, then you cannot also deprecate my claim that it is a sphere of radius 1km and average density 1000kg/m^3, since the conjunction of these claims is by the sheer force of mathematics false.

Therefore, I don't see how you can argue that a number is meaningful by merely noting its relationships with other numbers that follow from pure mathematics. Or am I missing something with this analogy?

Comment author: wedrifid 04 October 2010 02:03:08PM 1 point [-]

For those who want the latter, there are other places on the web full of people whose talent for such things is considerably greater than yours.

I specifically object to your implied argument in the grandparent. I will continue to reject comments that make that mistake regardless of how many times you insult me.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 04 October 2010 06:14:48PM *  0 points [-]

Look, in this thread, you have clearly been making jabs for rhetorical effect, without any attempt to argue in a clear and constructive manner. I am calling you out on that, and if you perceive that as insulting, then so be it.

Everything I wrote here has been perfectly honest and upfront, and written with the goal of eliciting rational counter-arguments from which I might perhaps change my opinion. I have neither the time nor the inclination for the sort of one-upmanship and showing off that you seem to be after, and even if I were, I would pursue it in some more suitable venue. (Where, among other things, one would indeed expect to see the sort of performance you're striving for done in a much more skilled and entertaining way.)

Comment author: wedrifid 04 October 2010 06:34:01AM 3 points [-]

Or, you could slide up your arbitrary and fallacious slippery slope and end up with Shultz.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 04 October 2010 06:55:00AM *  0 points [-]

Even if you believe that my position is fallacious, I am sure not the one to be accused of arbitrariness here. Arbitrariness is exactly what I object to, in the sense of insisting on the validity of numbers that lack both logically correct justification and clear error bars that would follow from it. And I'm asking the above question in full seriousness: a Bayesian probability calculation will give you as many significant digits as you want, so if you believe that it makes sense to extract a Bayesian probability with two significant digits from your common sense reasoning, why not more than that?

In any case, I have explained my position at length, and it would be nice if you addressed the substance of what I wrote instead of trying to come up with witty one-liner jabs. For those who want the latter, there are other places on the web full of people whose talent for such things is considerably greater than yours.

Comment author: xv15 04 October 2010 03:56:14AM 2 points [-]

I tell you I believe X with 54% certainty. Who knows, that number could have been generated in a completely bogus way. But however I got here, this is where I am. There are bets about X that I will and won't take, and guess what, that's my cutoff probability right there. And by the way, now I have communicated to you where I am, in a way that does not further compound the error.

Meaningless is a very strong word.

In the face of such uncertainty, it could feel natural to take shelter in the idea of "inherent vagueness"...but this is reality, and we place our bets with real dollars and cents, and all the uncertainty in the world collapses to a number in the face of the expectation operator.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 04 October 2010 05:43:37AM *  2 points [-]

So why stop there? If you can justify 54%, then why not go further and calculate a dozen or two more significant digits, and stand behind them all with unshaken resolve?

Comment author: orthonormal 04 October 2010 02:39:47AM 2 points [-]

Um, so when Nate Silver tells us he's calculated odds of 2 in 3 that Republicans will control the house after the election, this number should be discarded as noise because it's a common-sense belief that the Republicans will gain that many seats?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 04 October 2010 05:29:34AM *  2 points [-]

Boy did I hit a hornets' nest with this one!

No, of course I didn't mean anything like that. Here is how I see this situation. Silver has a model, which is ultimately a piece of mathematics telling us that some p=0.667, and for reasons of common sense, Silver believes (assuming he's being upfront with all this) that this model closely approximates reality in such a way that p can be interpreted, with reasonable accuracy, as the probability of Republicans winning a House majority this November.

Now, when you ask someone which party is likely to win this election, this person's brain will activate some algorithm that will produce an answer along with some rough level of confidence. Someone completely ignorant about politics might answer that he has no idea, and cannot say anything with any certainty. Other people will predict different results with varying (informally expressed) confidence. Silver himself, or someone else who agrees with his model, might reply that the best answer is whatever the model says (i.e. Republicans win with p=0.667), since it is completely superior to the opaque common-sense algorithms used by the brains of non-mathy political analysts. Others will have greater or lesser confidence in the accuracy of the model, and might take its results into account, with varying weight, alongside other common-sense considerations.

Ultimately, the status of this number depends on the relation between Silver's model and reality. If you believe that the model is a vast improvement over any informal common-sense considerations in predicting election results, just like Newton's theory is a vast improvement over any common-sense considerations in predicting the motions of planets, then we're not talking about a common-sense conclusion any more. On the other hand, if you believe that the model is completely out of touch with reality, then you would discard its result as noise. Finally, if you believe that it's somewhat accurate, but still not reliably superior to common sense, you might revise its conclusion using common sense.

What you believe about Silver's model, however, is still ultimately a matter of common-sense judgment, and unless you think that you have a model so good that it should be used in a shut-up-and-calculate way, your ultimate best prediction of the election results won't come with any numerical probabilities, merely a vague feeling of how confident you are.

Comment author: prase 03 October 2010 10:58:04PM 8 points [-]

Many-world interpretation of quantum physics is wrong. Reasonably certain (80%).

I suppose the MWI is an artifact of our formulation of physics, where we suppose systems can be in specific states that are indexed by several sets of observables. I think there is no such thing as a state of the physical system.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 04 October 2010 12:22:01AM 4 points [-]

prase:

I think there is no such thing as a state of the physical system.

Could you elaborate by any chance? I can't really figure out what exactly you mean by this, but I suspect it is very interesting.

Comment author: komponisto 03 October 2010 10:33:09PM *  7 points [-]

Translate your vague feeling of certainly into a number in some arbitrary manner. This however makes this number a mere figure of speech, which adds absolutely nothing over the usual human vague expressions for different levels of certainty.

Disagree here. Numbers get people to convey more information about their beliefs. It doesn't matter whether you actually use numbers, or do something similar (and equivalent) like systematize the use of vague expressions. I'd be just as happy if people used a "five-star" system, or even in many cases if they just compared the belief in question to other beliefs used as reference-points.

Perform some probability calculation, which however has nothing to do with how your brain actually arrived at your common-sense conclusion, and then assign the probability number produced by the former to the latter. This is clearly fallacious.

Disagree here also. The probability calculation you present should represent your brain's reasoning, as revealed by introspection. This is not a perfect process, and may be subject to later refinement. But it is definitely meaningful.

For example, consider my current probability estimate of 10^(-3) that Amanda Knox killed her roommate. On my current analysis, this is obtained as follows: I start with a prior of 10^(-4) (from a general homicide rate of about 10^(-3), plus reasoning that Knox is demographically an order of magnitude less likely to kill than the typical person; the figure happens to match my intuitive sense that I'd have to meet about 10,000 similar people before I'd have any fear for my life). Then all the evidence in the case raises the probability by about an order of magnitude at most, yielding 10^(-3).

Now, this is just a rough order-of-magnitude argument. But it's already much more meaningful and useful than my just saying "I don't think she did it". It provides a way of breaking down the reasoning, so that points of disagreement can be precisely identified in an efficient manner. (If you happened to disagree, the next step would be to say something like "but surely evidence X alone raises the odds by more than a factor of ten", and then we'd iterate the process specifically on X rather than the original proposition.)

It's a very useful technique for keeping debates informative, and preventing them from turning into (pure) status signaling contests.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 04 October 2010 12:11:00AM *  2 points [-]

komponisto:

Numbers get people to convey more information about their beliefs. It doesn't matter whether you actually use numbers, or do something similar (and equivalent) like systematize the use of vague expressions. I'd be just as happy if people used a "five-star" system, or even in many cases if they just compared the belief in question to other beliefs used as reference-points.

If I understand correctly, you're saying that talking about numbers rather than the usual verbal expressions of certainty prompts people to be more careful and re-examine their reasoning more strictly. This may be true sometimes, but on the other hand, numbers also tend to give a false feeling of accuracy and rigor where there is none. One of the usual symptoms (and, in turn, catalysts) of pseudoscience is the use of numbers with spurious precision and without rigorous justification.

In any case, you seem to concede that these numbers ultimately don't convey any more information than various vague verbal expressions of confidence. If you want to make the latter more systematic and clear, I have no problem with that, but I see no way to turn them into actual numbers without introducing spurious precision.

The probability calculation you present should represent your brain's reasoning, as revealed by introspection. This is not a perfect process, and may be subject to later refinement. But it is definitely meaningful.

Trouble is, this is often not possible. Most of what happens in your brain is not amenable to introspection, and you cannot devise a probability calculation that will capture all the important things that happen there. Take your own example:

For example, consider my current probability estimate of 10^(-3) that Amanda Knox killed her roommate. On my current analysis, this is obtained as follows: I start with a prior of 10^(-4) (from a general homicide rate of about 10^(-3), plus reasoning that Knox is demographically an order of magnitude less likely to kill than the typical person; the figure happens to match my intuitive sense that I'd have to meet about 10,000 similar people before I'd have any fear for my life). Then all the evidence in the case raises the probability by about an order of magnitude at most, yielding 10^(-3).

See, this is where, in my opinion, you're introducing spurious numerical claims that are at best unnecessary and at worst outright misleading.

First you note that murderers are extremely rare, and that AK is a sort of person especially unlikely to be one. OK, say you can justify these numbers by looking at crime statistics. Then you perform a complex common-sense evaluation of the evidence, and your brain tells you that on the whole it's weak, so it's highly unlikely that AK killed the victim. So far, so good. But then you insist on turning this feeling of near-certainty about AK's innocence into a number, and you end up making a quantitative claim that has no justification at all. You say:

Now, this is just a rough order-of-magnitude argument. But it's already much more meaningful and useful than my just saying "I don't think she did it".

I strongly disagree. Neither is this number you came up with any more meaningful than the simple plain statement "I think it's highly unlikely she did it," nor does it offer any additional practical benefit. On the contrary, it suggests that you can actually make a mathematically rigorous case that the number is within some well-defined limits. (Which you do disclaim, but which is easy to forget.)

Even worse, your claims suggest that while your numerical estimates may be off by an order of magnitude or so, the model you're applying to the problem captures reality well enough that it's only necessary to plug in accurate probability estimates. But how do you know that the model is correct in the first place? Your numbers are ultimately based on an entirely non-mathematical application of common sense in constructing this model -- and the uncertainty introduced there is altogether impossible for you to quantify meaningfully.

In response to Slava!
Comment author: multifoliaterose 03 October 2010 05:59:53AM *  4 points [-]

I don't have a good answer to your question, but I have some choral musical recommendations I've found powerful in the same way that you find Slava! powerful.

I'd recommend the Bach choral works to interested readers. The major ones (St. John Passion, St. Matthew Passion, Mass in B Minor, Christmas Oratorio, Easter Oratorio) are all worth listening to, but there are also a couple hundred of cantatas. Unfortunately, the sheer number of cantatas makes the collection overwhelming and in my opinion there's an issue of uneven quality, but there are some really excellent pieces among them and I've found it worthwhile to spend time with them as well.

I also really like the Brahms German Requiem, particularly the sixth movement.

Will add more examples as they occur to me.

In response to comment by multifoliaterose on Slava!
Comment author: Vladimir_M 03 October 2010 10:11:41PM *  4 points [-]

I'm surprised nobody mentioned Handel's Messiah. The Hallelujah chorus is, in my opinion, one of the best practical illustrations of the theme of the above article.

The traditional Catholic hymn Te Deum sounds beautifully solemn when sung as an a cappella Gregorian chant, but when done in an arrangement for chorus and organ, it is, for me at least, mind-blowing. (Of course, a Youtube recording doesn't come close to the experience of hearing it live in a church with a large organ.)

As for the Russian Orthodox music, this rendering of Grechaninov's Credo is one of my favorite vocal performances I've ever heard.

Comment author: [deleted] 03 October 2010 08:34:24PM 2 points [-]

you are not performing the judgment itself as a rigorous Bayesian procedure that would give you the probability for the conclusion.

No, but do you think it is meaningless to think of the messy brain procedure (that produces these intuitive feelings) as approximating this rigorous Bayesian procedure? This could probably be quantified using various tests. I don't dispute that one couldn't lay claim to mathematical rigor, but I'm not sure that means that any human assignment of numerical probabilities is meaningless.

In response to comment by [deleted] on The Irrationality Game
Comment author: Vladimir_M 03 October 2010 09:03:15PM *  1 point [-]

Yes, with good enough calibration, it does make sense. If you have an assembly line worker whose job is to notice and remove defective items, and he's been doing it with a steady (say) 99.7% accuracy for a long time, it makes sense to assign p=0.997 to each single judgment he makes about an individual item, and this number can be of practical value in managing production. However, this doesn't mean that you could improve the worker's performance by teaching him about Bayesianism; his brain remains a black box. The important point is that the same typically holds for highbrow intellectual tasks too.

Moreover, for the great majority of interesting questions about the world, we don't have the luxury of a large reference class of trials on which to calibrate. Take for example the recent discussion about the AD-36 virus controversy. If you look at the literature, you'll presumably form an opinion about this question with a higher or lower certainty, depending on how much confidence you have in your own ability to judge about such matters. But how to calibrate this judgment in order to arrive at a probability estimate? There is no way.

Comment author: Perplexed 03 October 2010 08:01:43PM 1 point [-]

Downvoted for agreement. This might make a good topic for a top-level posting.

Adding or averaging utilities of different people seems like adding apples and oranges to me. But be aware that at least one top-flight economist might disagree. John Harsanyi in this classic pdf.pdf).

Comment author: Vladimir_M 03 October 2010 08:34:44PM *  0 points [-]

The link is broken -- I assume you mean this paper? (URLs with parentheses get messed up due to the odd markup syntax here.)

Comment author: mattnewport 03 October 2010 08:00:14PM 4 points [-]

It seems plausible to me that routinely assigning numerical probabilities to predictions/beliefs that can be tested and tracking these over time to see how accurate your probabilities are (calibration) can lead to a better ability to reliably translate vague feelings of certainty into numerical probabilities.

There are practical benefits to developing this ability. I would speculate that successful bookies and professional sports bettors are better at this than average for example and that this is an ability they have developed through practice and experience. Anyone who has to make decisions under uncertainty seems like they could benefit from a well developed ability to assign well calibrated numerical probability estimates to vague feelings of certainty. Investors, managers, engineers and others who must deal with uncertainty on a regular basis would surely find this ability useful.

I think a certain degree of skepticism is justified regarding the utility of various specific methods for developing this ability (things like predictionbook.com don't yet have hard evidence for their effectiveness) but it certainly seems like it is a useful ability to have and so there are good reasons to experiment with various methods that promise to improve calibration.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 03 October 2010 08:28:13PM -2 points [-]

I addressed this point in another comment in this thread:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/2sl/the_irrationality_game/2qgm

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 03 October 2010 07:20:24PM 2 points [-]

What are the fictional metaphysical entities?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 03 October 2010 08:21:09PM *  1 point [-]

I have in mind primarily the way "utility" is reified, especially in arguments that assume that cross-personal utility comparisons are meaningful. The subsequent leap over the is-ought problem typically also qualifies.

Comment author: [deleted] 03 October 2010 07:26:06PM 1 point [-]

In your linked comment you write:

For just about any interesting question you may ask, the algorithm that your brain uses to find the answer is not transparent to your consciousness -- and its output doesn't include a numerical probability estimate, merely a vague and coarsely graded feeling of certainty.

Do you not think that this feeling response can be trained through calibration exercises and by making and checking predictions? I have not done this myself yet, but this is how I've thought others became able to assign numerical probabilities with confidence.

In response to comment by [deleted] on The Irrationality Game
Comment author: Vladimir_M 03 October 2010 08:09:57PM *  0 points [-]

Luke_Grecki:

Do you not think that this feeling response can be trained through calibration exercises and by making and checking predictions?

Well, sometimes frequentism can come to the rescue, in a sense. If you are repeatedly faced with an identical situation where it's necessary to make some common-sense judgment, like e.g. on an assembly line, you can look at your past performance to predict how often you'll be correct in the future. (This assuming you're not getting better or worse with time, of course.) However, what you're doing in that case is treating a part of your own brain as a black box whose behavior you're testing empirically to extrapolate a frequentist rule -- you are not performing the judgment itself as a rigorous Bayesian procedure that would give you the probability for the conclusion.

That said, it's clear that smarter and more knowledgeable people think with greater accuracy and subtlety, so that their intuitive feelings of (un)certainty are also subtler and more accurate. But there is still no magic step that will translate these feelings output by black-box circuits in their brains into numbers that could lay claim to mathematical rigor and accuracy.

Comment author: komponisto 03 October 2010 02:56:45PM 5 points [-]

Upvoted. Definitely can't back you on this one.

Are you sure you're not just worried about poor calibration?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 03 October 2010 07:45:28PM *  2 points [-]

komponisto:

Are you sure you're not just worried about poor calibration?

No, my objection is fundamental. I provide a brief explanation in the comment I linked to, but I'll restate it here briefly.

The problem is that the algorithms that your brain uses to perform common-sense reasoning are not transparent to your conscious mind, which has access only to their final output. This output does not provide a numerical probability estimate, but only a rough and vague feeling of certainty. Yet in most situations, the output of your common sense is all you have. There are very few interesting things you can reason about by performing mathematically rigorous probability calculations (and even when you can, you still have to use common sense to establish the correspondence between the mathematical model and reality).

Therefore, there are only two ways in which you can arrive at a numerical probability estimate for a common-sense belief:

  1. Translate your vague feeling of certainly into a number in some arbitrary manner. This however makes the number a mere figure of speech, which adds absolutely nothing over the usual human vague expressions for different levels of certainty.

  2. Perform some probability calculation, which however has nothing to do with how your brain actually arrived at your common-sense conclusion, and then assign the probability number produced by the former to the latter. This is clearly fallacious.

Honestly, all this seems entirely obvious to me. I would be curious to see which points in the above reasoning are supposed to be even controversial, let alone outright false.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 03 October 2010 10:45:08AM *  26 points [-]

Although lots of people here consider it a hallmark of "rationality," assigning numerical probabilities to common-sense conclusions and beliefs is meaningless, except perhaps as a vague figure of speech. (Absolutely certain.)

Comment author: Risto_Saarelma 30 September 2010 09:17:56AM *  5 points [-]

I wonder if it should be reformatted in LaTeX to pass item #1 from here.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 02 October 2010 10:40:09PM *  2 points [-]

I wonder if it should be reformatted in LaTeX

I'm currently reading through the document, and yes, it definitely should. The present format is an unprofessional-looking eyesore, and the references are presented in a weird, clumsy, and inconsistent way. Using Latex/Bibtex would solve both problems easily and effectively.

(Personally, I can't fathom why anyone capable of grasping the notion of a markup language would ever want to write a document longer than five pages in Word instead of Latex.)

In response to Eutopia is Scary
Comment author: [deleted] 01 October 2010 09:52:32PM 7 points [-]

Reviving the concept of sending children away to be trained by some kind of a strict brotherhood, the way medieval children would be sent to a monastery or fostered out to become a knight.

It's egalitarian -- those who send away their children can have them educated for free, and perhaps physically or chemically altered to improve their capacities. In exchange, the Brotherhood takes a lifetime of your work, your private life, and a large portion of whatever you earn. They own you, they decide where you live, they manage every instant of your time, every action results in the addition or deduction of points from your public profile, entertainment and non-procreative sex are strictly forbidden. Even the smallest details of life are brutally competitive; points are everything, so your work is pristine and your room is spotless and your physical fitness is superb. Punishment is ubiquitous, and luxuries rare, but that means that sharing a smuggled candy bar after you've started to heal up from your last whipping is impossibly wonderful. You have no choice at all -- but you also don't have the "choice" to fail, to procrastinate, to do anything but perform excellently and serve your Brotherhood.

It is scary how incredibly appealing I find this fantasy. It sounds much more fun -- literally fun -- than the present.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Eutopia is Scary
Comment author: Vladimir_M 01 October 2010 10:34:43PM *  11 points [-]

What you write sounds a lot like the system of classical Sparta. Historically, lots of people have shared that fascination.

Comment author: orthonormal 01 October 2010 12:27:33AM 5 points [-]

I'm working on a top-level post about AI (you know what they say, write what you don't know), and I'm wondering about the following question:

Can we think of computer technologies which were only developed at a time when the processing power they needed was insignificant?

That is, many technologies are really slow when first developed, until a few cycles of Moore's Law make them able to run faster than humans can input new requests. But is there anything really good that was only thought of at a time when processor speed was well above that threshold, or anything where the final engineering hurdle was something far removed from computing power?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 01 October 2010 10:10:29PM *  6 points [-]

To clarify the question a bit, I would consider dividing software technologies into three categories:

  1. Technologies developed while the necessary computing resources were still unavailable or too expensive, which flourished later when the resources became cheap enough. For example, Alan Turing famously devised a chess program which he could only run using paper and pencil.

  2. Technologies that appeared very soon after the necessary computing resources became available and cheap enough, suggesting that the basic idea was fairly straightforward after all, and it was only necessary to give smart people some palpable incentive to think about it. Examples such as the first browsers and spreadsheets would be in this category.

  3. Technologies for which the necessary computing resources had been cheaply available for a long time before someone finally came up with them, suggesting an extraordinary intellectual breakthrough. I cannot think of any such examples, and it doesn't seem like anyone else in this thread can either.

This reinforces my cynical view of software technologies in general, namely that their entire progress in the last few decades has been embarrassingly limited considering the amount of intellectual power poured into them.

Here's an interesting related thought experiment that reinforces my cynicism further. Suppose that some miraculous breakthrough in 1970 enabled the production of computers equally cheap, powerful, compact, and easily networked as we have today. What do we have today in terms of software technology that the inhabitants of this hypothetical world wouldn't have by 1980?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 01 October 2010 09:35:04PM 1 point [-]

I'm not sure what exactly you're asking. Would you like to read an in-depth survey of the present state of the art in automated theorem proving and automatic verification? Or are you interested in the fundamental question of why these problems are intractable in the great majority of really interesting cases? The former would require expert input, but the latter mostly boils down to some basic observations from the theory of computation, the foundations of math, and complexity theory.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 01 October 2010 02:04:06AM *  0 points [-]

What exactly do you mean by "a pragmatic perspective"?

In other words, how exactly is the question "Which parts of philosophy are worth studying from a pragmatic perspective?" different from just "Which parts of philosophy are worth studying?"?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 01 October 2010 01:56:18AM *  9 points [-]

The answer is that human minds are not Bayesian, nor is it possible for them to become such. For just about any interesting question you may ask, the algorithm that your brain uses to find the answer is not transparent to your consciousness -- and its output doesn't include a numerical probability estimate, merely a vague and coarsely graded feeling of certainty. The only exceptions are situations where a phenomenon can be modeled mathematically in a way that allows you to work through the probability calculations explicitly, but even then, your confidence that the model captures reality ultimately comes down to a common-sense judgment produced by your non-transparent brain circuits.

In your concrete example, if you're knowledgeable about politics, you can have a good hunch for how likely a certain future election outcome is. But this insight is produced by a mostly opaque process in your brain, which doesn't give you any numerical probabilities. This is not a problem you can attack with an explicit mathematical calculation, and even if you devised a way to do so, the output of this calculation would be altogether different from the conclusion you'll make using common sense, and it makes no sense to assign the probability calculated by the former to the latter.

Therefore, insisting on attaching a numerical probability to your common-sense conclusions makes no sense, except insofar as such numbers are sometimes used as vague figures of speech.

Comment author: whpearson 30 September 2010 12:15:03AM 0 points [-]
  • Seasteading
  • Control of smaller organisations than governments, e.g. charities. Some charities have people vote for trustees, so you get similar problems there. So alternate systems might create charities more responsive to their stakeholders.

If the political systems were seen to be better in these smaller situations, they might very slowly move into the larger states (probably multi-century timescales).

Comment author: Vladimir_M 30 September 2010 06:54:15PM 1 point [-]

Control of smaller organisations than governments, e.g. charities.

Organization and management of businesses and nonprofits is, if not exactly a well-understood problem, then at least the subject of a large body of expertise, and more importantly, of constant real-life tests in the marketplace. If there existed a way to reach useful insight there by theorizing from first principles, I would guess that someone would have already found it (and used it to great practical success).

Seasteading

Setting aside the questions about the practical viability of seasteading, it can be viewed as a special case of colonizing an uninhabited territory. While this may seem as an opportunity to design institutions from scratch, in reality it's naive to ignore the culture that the colonists will bring with them, and the constraints this imposes on the way the colony's institutions can work. As de Maistre wrote, "Sovereigns command effectively and in a lasting way only within the circle of things acknowledged by opinion, and they are not the ones who trace the circle of opinion." How would your abstract model capture that?

If the political systems were seen to be better in these smaller situations, they might very slowly move into the larger states (probably multi-century timescales).

Even a casual glance at the history of the last two centuries shows that transplanting political institutions from one culture to another doesn't work in practice. Attempts to do so occasionally work by sheer luck, but more often fail miserably, and it's not at all rare to see them blow up spectacularly.

Comment author: whpearson 29 September 2010 09:19:37PM 0 points [-]

Thanks, good to get a second opinion.

Do you think there would be any way at all of developing new political systems that would be better than picking new systems randomly?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 30 September 2010 12:04:25AM 0 points [-]

What exactly do you mean by "developing new political systems"? What kind of situations do you have in mind where such a thing would be possible?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 29 September 2010 08:26:34PM 4 points [-]

No, it doesn't seem to me like the right track.

To me, it sounds like a proposal to base medicine on a model of the human body that would start from the basic laws of chemistry. In other words, the phenomena you'd like to model and the systems you'd like to design are so complex and subject to such ill-understood forces and mechanisms that your model, given the realistic limitations you're working under, cannot even begin to capture reality.

That said, just like in medicine you can often figure out things by looking at some simpler aspects of what happens in the human body, you can model certain aspects of the existing political systems with some accuracy. Public choice theory is one such reasonably successful attempt. However, such models must start from a deep understanding of an existing system based on observation and experience that will tell you what peculiar simplifying assumptions can be made about it, which gives you a workable starting point. Beginning from the first principles will get you nowhere at all.

Comment author: CronoDAS 27 September 2010 07:38:56PM 3 points [-]

My current impression of McCarthy is that he was basically right that there were, indeed, Soviet infiltrators, but he didn't have any particular insight into finding them and ended up making accusations basically at random. Is that a reasonable one-sentence summary?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 28 September 2010 03:36:47AM *  2 points [-]

No, I wouldn’t say that’s a good summary, and the phenomenon was unfortunately much too complex to be described with a one-liner with any degree of accuracy.

The fundamental problem with such simple summaries is that they implicitly assume an oversimplified historical background to the whole situation: the U.S. pitched against the U.S.S.R. in a state of all-out Cold War hostility, with the entire U.S. government acting in a coherent way as a unified entity in this struggle for global supremacy, and individuals accused of acting as Soviet agents being either conscious and willing traitors working for Moscow or innocent victims of a witch-hunt. One must replace these simplistic preconceptions with a much more nuanced and detailed view before one can even begin to form anything more than a cartoonish picture of the so-called "Second Red Scare" period. (Which was in fact well underway, with the HUAC hearings, the Hollywood blacklist, the Hiss-Chambers affair, etc., years before McCarthy came to any national prominence.)

I could write a great deal about this topic, but I think that such a lengthy off-topic diversion would probably be too much.

Comment author: PhilGoetz 27 September 2010 05:17:16PM *  6 points [-]

the assumption that government policy is determined by elected politicians in a way that can be actively and predictably influenced by voters is outright false in the great majority of cases.

I think OP intends just the opposite: Voters shouldn't try to influence policy. The OP is making the case for representative democracy as opposed to democracy, which is that voters should just elect smart, capable, virtuous people rather than concerning themselves with issues.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 27 September 2010 05:51:43PM *  2 points [-]

There is however still the underlying assumption that representative democracy is possible under the present political system. This view is, in my opinion, very far from reality considering the realistic position of elected politicians within it.

Comment author: PhilGoetz 27 September 2010 05:13:03PM *  3 points [-]

I'm reacting against OP's recommendations especially strongly today, on account of just having read the reader reviews for this book trying to exhonerate Joseph McCarthy yesterday.

Note that the people writing reviews who are sympathetic to McCarthy characterize him as noble, American, and patriotic. People with different values will consider different people to have good characters. It's not surprising that political parties align with ideas on what constitutes good character. Politicians already run more on character than on issues. This is the problem, not the solution.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 27 September 2010 05:36:04PM *  5 points [-]

By the way, have you actually read Blacklisted by History? I have, and I strongly recommend it as an interesting debiasing experience if you have any interest in the 20th century American history. The book is a work of propaganda with a clear goal (as might be gathered from the subtitle), but on this subject, the conventional wisdom happens to be so extremely biased and full of falsities that reading some contrarian material which is biased in the other direction is likely to improve one's understanding significantly.

(Unfortunately, nothing even approximating an unbiased history of the whole McCarthy phenomenon has been written yet, and the best one can do is to make judgments based on the propaganda from both sides. Trouble is, the mainstream sources offer almost exclusively one side of it.)

Also, McCarthy's senatorial career provides an interesting case study of the rare phenomenon when an elected politician goes into an all-out war with the entrenched bureaucracy (mainly the State Department, in this case). There is almost no other case that elucidates certain essential aspects of the modern Western political systems so clearly, assuming of course that one is willing and able to analyze it without moral and ideological preconceptions, which are in this case unfortunately very strong and widespread.

Comment author: Emile 27 September 2010 06:37:42AM *  28 points [-]

OK, but apart from Marxism, nuclear power, coercive eugenics, Christianity, psychoanalysis, and the respective importance of nature and nurture - when has the intellectual establishment ever been an unreliable guide to finding truth?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 27 September 2010 04:58:43PM 5 points [-]

Come to think of it, one thing I'm surprised nobody mentioned is the present neglect of technology-related existential risks.

Comment author: [deleted] 26 September 2010 01:04:06PM *  6 points [-]

I don't know what to make of this:

Suicide note

Article

The man who took his own life on Harvard's campus Saturday left a 1,904-page suicide note online.

According to the Harvard Crimson, Mitchell Heisman wrote "Suicide Note," posted at http://suicidenote.info, while living in an apartment near the school. The note is a "sprawling series of arguments that touch upon historical, religious and nihilist themes," his mother, Lonni Heisman, told the Crimson. She said her son would have wanted people to know about his work.

The complex note, divided into four parts, touches on Christianity, the Holocaust and social progress, among other topics, and mentions Harvard several times.

IvyGate calls the note "probing, deeply researched, and often humorous."

Heisman was 35 when he shot himself on the steps of Harvard's Memorial Church Saturday. He had a bachelor's degree in psychology from the University of Albany. According to the Crimson, he worked in area bookstores and lived on inheritance from his father, who died when he was young.

I've begun skimming a few of the chapters (the titles aren't anything if not provocative). On the one hand I am quite predisposed to view the entire work as mostly bunk, because manifestos of this nature often are. However on the other hand, the idea of a philosopher driven to death by his learning is a stimulating archetype enough for me to explore this. And yes I know that considering he quotes:

Ordinary people seem not to realize that those who really apply themselves in the right way to philosophy are directly and of their own accord preparing themselves for dying and death. If this is true, and they have actually been looking forward to death all their lives, it would of course be absurd to be troubled when the thing comes for which they have so long been preparing and looking forward. —SOCRATES, PHAEDO

Its certain he was playing on that.

I've decided to post this here for rationality detox so I don't pick up any craziness (I'd wager a high probability of there being some there).

He seems to have developed what he terms a sociobiolgical analysis of the history of liberal democracy, reminiscent so far in parts of Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals. This judging by a few excerpts of the ending chapter culminates in a kind of singularitarian view and the inevitability of human extinction at the hands of our self created transhuman Gods.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Open Thread, September, 2010-- part 2
Comment author: Vladimir_M 27 September 2010 04:41:03PM *  9 points [-]

I just skimmed a few random pages of the book, and ran into this stunning passage:

Marx’s improbable claim that economic-material development will ultimately trump the need for elite human leaders may turn out to be a point on which he was right. What Marx failed to anticipate is that capitalism is driving economic-technological evolution towards the development of artificial intelligence. The advent of greater-than-human artificial intelligence is the decisive piece of the puzzle that Marx failed to account for. Not the working class [as Marx believed - V.], and not a human elite [as Lenin believed - V.], but superhuman intelligent machines may provide the conditions for “revolution”.
[...]
If this is correct, the first signs of evidence may be unprecedented levels of permanent unemployment as automation increasingly replaces human workers. While this development may begin to require a new form of socialism to sustain demand, artificial intelligence will ultimately provide an alternative to “the dictatorship of the proletariat.” [...] The creation of an artificial intelligence trillions of times greater than all human intelligence combined is not simply the advent of another shiny new gadget. The difference between Leninism-Stalinism and the potential of AI can be compared to the difference between Caesar and God.

The small part of the book I've seen so far sounds lucid and without any signs of craziness, and based on this passage, I would guess that there is whole lot of interesting stuff in there. I'll try reading more as time permits.

Comment author: SilasBarta 27 September 2010 03:57:17PM 1 point [-]

I have the opposite problem, so perhaps I can add some insight.

Basically, I have Yvain's sensitivity to audio distractions, plus I have more sensitive hearing -- I'll sometimes complain about sounds that others can't hear. (And yes, I'll verify that it's real by following it to the source.)

Ear plugs don't actually work against these distractions -- I've tried it (I can sometimes hear riveting going on from my office at work). They block out a lot of those external sounds, but then create an additional path that allows you to hear your own breathing.

I agree that I wouldn't be better off deaf, but there is such a thing as too much hearing.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 27 September 2010 04:09:34PM 3 points [-]

Have you tried simplynoise.com? For me, their Brown noise generator is the best thing for eliminating sound distractions.

Comment author: jimrandomh 26 September 2010 10:08:32PM 6 points [-]

There is one thing I'd like to add, which I thought was implicit but which the feedback so far indicates wasn't.

If an issue has smart people on one side and stupid people on the other, then taking the wrong side is overwhelming evidence that a politician is stupid, and therefore unqualified. For example, it would be wrong to vote for a politician who was a creationist, regardless of their other qualifications, because there aren't any smart and sane creationists. But this isn't really a controversial issue, in the sense that I meant it - the overwhelming majority of intelligent people agree.

I mean this only to apply to issues that are controversial in the sense that approximately equally sized groups of qualified people exist on either side. In those cases, people should expect that most of their opinions were picked up socially and reinforced by confirmation bias.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 27 September 2010 04:43:04AM *  23 points [-]

jimrandomh:

For example, it would be wrong to vote for a politician who was a creationist, regardless of their other qualifications, because there aren't any smart and sane creationists.

I have a question for you and all the other people who agree with this statement. Let's say you're looking for someone to fill a very demanding leadership position in a business. Whom would you rather appoint:

  1. A Mormon who professes belief in the literal truth of both the Bible and the Book of Mormon, and thus fails the above test of smarts and sanity, but whose resume features an impressive track record of relevant professional accomplishments, and who is known for an extraordinary ability for getting things done and completing projects that seem impossibly difficult. (You will find a significant number of people that fit this description in real life.)

  2. An average Less Wrong member. (Who will presumably pass all these little litmus tests of "rationality" with flying colors.)

If the answer is (1), do you believe that the same conclusion cannot be extended to at least some political leadership positions? If not, why exactly?

(I also second Relsqui's earlier comment on this issue.)

Comment author: JoshuaZ 27 September 2010 01:20:29AM 5 points [-]

The fact that the educated and intelligent are sometimes in the wrong doesn't mean it isn't a good heuristic. Pretty much any heuristic is going to fail sometimes. The question is whether the heuristic is accurate (in the sense of being more often correct than not) and, if so, how accurate it is. This heuristic seems to be one where the general trend is clear. I can't identify a single example other than Marxism in the last hundred years where the intellectual establishment has been very wrong, and even then, that's an example where the general public in many areas also had a fair bit of support for that view.

I'm curious about your claim that that "intellectuals care much more about the status-signaling aspects of their opinions than the common folk." This seems plausible to me, but I'd be curious what substantial evidence there for the claim.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 27 September 2010 04:07:15AM *  11 points [-]

JoshuaZ:

I can't identify a single example other than Marxism in the last hundred years where the intellectual establishment has been very wrong, and even then, that's an example where the general public in many areas also had a fair bit of support for that view.

Well, on any issue, there will be both intellectuals and non-intellectuals on all sides in some numbers. We can only observe how particular opinions correlate with various measures of intellectual status, and how prevalent they are among people who are in the upper strata by these measures. Marxism is a good example of an unsound belief (or rather a whole complex of beliefs) that was popular among intellectuals because its basic unsoundness is no longer seriously disputable. Other significant examples from the last hundred years are unfortunately a subject of at least some ongoing controversy; most of that period is still within living memory, after all.

Still, some examples that, in my view, should not be controversial given the present state of knowledge are various highbrow economic theories that managed to lead their intellectual fans into fallacies even deeper than those of the naive folk economics, the views of human nature and behavior of the sort criticized in Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate, and a number of foreign policy questions in which the subsequent historical developments falsified the fashionable intellectual opinion so spectacularly that the contemporary troglodyte positions ended up looking good in comparison. There are other examples I have in mind, but those are probably too close to the modern hot-button issues to be worth bringing up.

The question is whether the heuristic is accurate (in the sense of being more often correct than not) and, if so, how accurate it is. This heuristic seems to be one where the general trend is clear.

Frankly, in matters of politics and ideology, I don't find the trend so clear. To establish the existence of such a trend, we would have to define a clear metric for the goodness of outcomes of various policies, and then discuss and evaluate various hypothetical and counterfactual scenarios of policies that have historically found, or presently find, higher or lower favor among the (suitably defined) intellectual class.

This, however, doesn't seem feasible in practice. Neither is it possible to evaluate the overall goodness of policy outcomes in an objective or universally agreed way (except perhaps in very extreme cases), nor is it possible to construct accurate hypotheticals in matters of such immense complexity where the law of unintended consequences lurks behind every corner.

I'm curious about your claim that that "intellectuals care much more about the status-signaling aspects of their opinions than the common folk." This seems plausible to me, but I'd be curious what substantial evidence there for the claim.

My answer is similar to the earlier comment by Perplexed: given the definition of "intellectual" I assume, the claim is self-evident, in fact almost tautological.

I define "intellectuals" as people who derive a non-negligible part of their social status -- either as public personalities or within their social networks -- from the fact that other people show some esteem and interest for their opinions about issues that are outside the domain of mathematical, technical, or hard-scientific knowledge, and that are a matter of some public disagreement and controversy. This definition corresponds very closely to the normal usage of the term, and it implies directly that intellectuals will have unusually high stakes in the status-signaling implications of their beliefs.

Comment author: erratio 26 September 2010 08:19:33AM 0 points [-]

ok, the main book is "Second language learning theories" by Rosamond Mitchell and Florence Myles, p32-33 in my library copy. The main studies you'll want to fact check are by Dulay and Burt (various years and publications) for children acquiriing a second language. Bailey, Madden and Krashen (1974) for the Dulay and Burt results replicated in adults, and (from a different textbook) Zobl and Liceras "functional categories and acquisition order" (1994) in the journal language learning which I seem to remember provides a good summary of the studies to date

I would expect that the conclusion doesn't hold when comparing with learners speaking a closely related vs. a distant or unrelated language.

Probably not, no, but I did find it striking that the results held across such typologically different languages. For example, English has plenty of derivational morphology and so do most European languages, but most Asian languages don't. But the order or acquisition was still pretty much the same.

Another issue is how "acquisition" is defined

I believe the bar for 'acquired' is usually set somewhere around 80-95% accuracy, but I haven't looked into this aspect much. Another sensible way of measuring it would be perfect or near-perfect use in common contexts, and ok accuracy in less common contexts

Comment author: Vladimir_M 27 September 2010 02:02:02AM 0 points [-]

Thanks for the references!

Comment author: jimrandomh 26 September 2010 10:08:32PM 6 points [-]

There is one thing I'd like to add, which I thought was implicit but which the feedback so far indicates wasn't.

If an issue has smart people on one side and stupid people on the other, then taking the wrong side is overwhelming evidence that a politician is stupid, and therefore unqualified. For example, it would be wrong to vote for a politician who was a creationist, regardless of their other qualifications, because there aren't any smart and sane creationists. But this isn't really a controversial issue, in the sense that I meant it - the overwhelming majority of intelligent people agree.

I mean this only to apply to issues that are controversial in the sense that approximately equally sized groups of qualified people exist on either side. In those cases, people should expect that most of their opinions were picked up socially and reinforced by confirmation bias.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 27 September 2010 01:10:33AM *  16 points [-]

jimrandomh:

If an issue has smart people on one side and stupid people on the other, then taking the wrong side is overwhelming evidence that a politician is stupid, and therefore unqualified.

Trouble is, there are lots of historical examples when the level of smarts on one side of an issue was noticeably higher, but in retrospect, it turned out that the intellectuals' favored position was frightfully deluded. For example, just look at the enormous popularity of Marxism among Western intellectuals two generations ago.

The basic problem is that intellectuals care much more about the status-signaling aspects of their opinions than the common folk, so even if they have more information and higher intellectual abilities, their incentives to bias their views for the sake of appearing enlightened and affiliated with high-status positions and individuals are also greater. (As Orwell commented about some ideological positions that were fashionable in his time: "One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.")

Comment author: Vladimir_M 27 September 2010 12:45:36AM *  26 points [-]

I find this article poorly argued, and committing serious errors and fallacies at multiple levels.

The worst single problem is that it's based on a simplistic model of the political system which is too distant from reality to be useful. This is basically the same objection that I had to the recent "Politics as Charity" post: the assumption that government policy is determined by elected politicians in a way that can be actively and predictably influenced by voters is outright false in the great majority of cases. Sticking to this unrealistic model cannot lead to an accurate understanding of the modern political systems, let alone to any useful practical guidelines for interacting with them.

Moreover, nearly all concrete claims, examples, and hypotheticals in the article are written in a very imprecise and inaccurate way that sounds superficially sensible and plausible, but cannot stand to any real scrutiny. Just a few examples:

  1. "Whether a budget is good or bad depends on how well its author can distinguish between efficient and inefficient spending..." This ignores the crucial problem of incentives. The ability of the "author" (note the vagueness -- who exactly is meant by this?) to figure out what's efficient is irrelevant if his incentives favor inefficiencies.

  2. "Whether a regulation is good or bad depends on how well its author [presumably a politician? - V.] can predict the effects and engineer the small details for optimal effect, and not on whether it is more or less strict overall." This completely ignores the actual way regulations work: politicians crank out extremely vague legislation, which is shaped into concrete policy by bureaucratic agencies, and to some extent the courts, which however normally have to defer to the bureaucrats' interpretation of the law. An accurate analysis of the likely practical outcomes of this process would be completely over the politicians' heads, even if we ignore the law of unintended consequences.

  3. "In the United States and other countries, we elect our leaders." Only a subset of them, and arguably the least important one, for any definition of "leader" based on the person's actual influence in the system of government.

  4. "[N]early every description of a political candidate will also mention their political party, and this is the one fact we most need to avoid..." Why? It is simply untrue that party affiliation gives no useful information about a politician's relevant characteristics, even if only statistically. If you're afraid that you might have so strong partisan biases that this information will give you more prejudice than knowledge, you have no realistic chance to process any other information correctly either.

And so on. Almost the entire article could be criticized like this piece by piece.

Comment author: [deleted] 25 September 2010 06:32:07AM 1 point [-]

Oh god. I have heard several picture criticisms here and from people I know personally. The fact is that I really don't photograph well. It's hard enough to find pictures where I have a nice expression and don't look fat. Good posture and good camera quality -- not gonna happen.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Open Thread, September, 2010-- part 2
Comment author: Vladimir_M 25 September 2010 06:24:35PM 0 points [-]

The picture is funny in a cute way. It looks like you had a severe case of that semi-conscious reflex to assume a "proper" position when someone points a camera at you, so you ended up striking a pose straight from the drill manual. :-) Getting rid of that misleading instinct is a good first step towards making oneself more photogenic.

In any case, look at it as a cost-benefit question. How much do you care about this particular mode of public self-presentation, and how much effort for procuring good photos does this justify? (The easiest way to get some good photos is to hang around those irritating people who relentlessly snap their digital cameras next time you go to a party, and then just ask them to email you the pictures and make a selection out of the huge pile. The best way is to ask someone who has some basic photography skills to snap a few pictures of you.)

In response to comment by Raw_Power on Mere Messiahs
Comment author: AdeleneDawner 25 September 2010 03:26:06AM 11 points [-]

"If I'm going to favour my own principles AND empirical evidence OVER Word Of God, I might as well give up on religion entirely and save myslef much guilt and fear."

Drop the 'empirical evidence' bit and this is basically how I decided to leave Christianity: Some bits of advice in the bible are obviously wrong, and if I'm going to be using my own judgment to determine which of the questionable bits are right and which are wrong, I might as well just use my own judgment in general.

I suspect that this kind of reasoning might be more palatable to religious folks than the more common proofs that religion is wrong on matters of fact.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 25 September 2010 06:32:22AM 2 points [-]

That argument is applicable only to Protestants, though. As a Catholic, you have no business interpreting the Bible yourself. (And the same holds for the Orthodox too.)

Comment author: [deleted] 24 September 2010 06:50:49PM 5 points [-]
In response to comment by [deleted] on Open Thread, September, 2010-- part 2
Comment author: Vladimir_M 25 September 2010 06:27:12AM 0 points [-]

The third picture looks like you're standing at attention. I'd recommend a more relaxed-looking pose!

Comment author: erratio 25 September 2010 12:28:31AM 1 point [-]

According to the book I'm referencing from, one of the studies was other language -> English, where the other languages were: Greek, Persian, Italian, Turkish, Japanese, Chinese, Thai, Afghani, Hebrew, Arabic, Vietnames.So a decent spread of different types, with lots of points of similarity and difference between them and English. There have also been other studies showing similar findings in other L2 languages and from other researchers in general confirming those results, although this particular book doesn't go into much detail about the others. Oh and the aggregate of the results also show that the order is the same regardless of the method/environment of acquisition, too.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 25 September 2010 05:46:08AM *  1 point [-]

Could you please write what book that is? I'd be curious to look it up.

One issue I see with the study (according to your description) is that English, by historical accident, doesn't have any related languages that would be close enough to preserve some mutual intelligibility and make the analogous grammatical rules immediately obvious for their speakers (like e.g. between Slavic or Romance languages). I would expect that the conclusion doesn't hold when comparing with learners speaking a closely related vs. a distant or unrelated language.

Another issue is how "acquisition" is defined. How accurate does one's use of a particular grammatical feature have to be so that it qualifies as "acquired"? For many subtler grammatical rules, nearly all adult learners will never master them fully; for example, I still don't know how to use the English definite article accurately, and neither does any other non-native English speaker I know. Formulating these criteria in a way that makes sense seems like a very tricky problem.

Comment author: erratio 24 September 2010 10:27:27PM *  2 points [-]

Cognitive and linguistic development is something that continues over our whole lives, but at the earlier ages there are a whole lot of basic concepts that aren't in place yet, like theory of mind (anecdotally, most roleplayers who try to roleplay with their young <10 year old kids find that the kids have trouble pretending to be someone else), and there are lots of linguistic structures that have certain thresholds of complexity.

So children pick up new linguistic structures at around the same rate as they develop the cognitive machinery to deal with them, and they try to regularise everything. Adults on the other hand already have all that machinery in place, plus they already know what language is supposed to be like based on prior experience, so a lot of structures are much easier for them to acquire (and interesting, the order of acquisition for adults in a particular language is largely the same regardless of their first language, so it's prior experience with language in general that's important, not experience with similar structures). Oh, and there's some not-yet-repeated results that also say that education/literacy is a big factor in individual linguistic complexity, which would probably have knock-on effects for acquisition.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 24 September 2010 10:42:18PM *  1 point [-]

erratio:

the order of acquisition for adults in a particular language is largely the same regardless of their first language, so it's prior experience with language in general that's important, not experience with similar structures

Suppose language X inflects verbs for present/past tense, but has no definite article, whereas for language Y, it's the other way around. Assume now the a native speaker of X and a native speaker of Y are learning some third language Z, which has both features. Are you saying that both learners are going to acquire the use of the article and the past tense in Z in the same order?

This sounds strikingly implausible to me, though I might be wrong.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 24 September 2010 05:36:57PM *  15 points [-]

OkCupid thread, anyone?

I was thinking that those of us that aren't shy could share our OkCupid profiles for critique from people who know better. (Not that we have to accept the critiques as valid, but this is an area where it'd be good to have others' opinions anyway.)

If anyone wants to get the ball rolling, post a link to your profile and hopefully someone will offer a suggestion (or a compliment).

Also, I bet cross-sexual-preference critique would be best: which for most of us means gals critiquing guys and guys critiquing gals. But I realize the LW gender skew limits that.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 24 September 2010 10:26:35PM *  11 points [-]

I've never used any dating websites, but people who care about that sort of thing should note that the advice they'll get this way may have a very low, or even negative correlation with what actually works. I don't mean to say that people will consciously write misleading things -- just that, for various reasons, they may not work with a realistic idea of the thought process of those who are supposed to be attracted by the profile in question. To get useful advice, the best way to go is to ask someone of the same sex (and preferences) who has successfully used some such site to share their insight.

Comment author: SilasBarta 23 September 2010 05:47:17PM *  5 points [-]

Very well said, Vladimir_M -- a comment I wish I could vote up twice.

That basically agrees with my experience (mentioned in the discussion you linked) that economists lack a Level 2 understanding of their speciality. That is, they cannot trace the inferential paths they rely on, all the way back to the layman level. In my estimation, this leads them to advocate truly absurd policies, since this poor understanding prevents them from identifying where a model no longer outputs policies justifiable through such an inferential path.

For example, they equate growing GDP with a good economy. And as a general rule, that's a good measure. But you have to know where the rule breaks down, and this requires a deeper understanding than most economists have. A Level-2 economist would say something like,

"Yes, GDP generally correlates with good economic health, but in the wake of this hurricane, most of that spending is just rebuilding destroyed stuff. Now, it's certainly better to rebuild, given the hurricane, but this is just restoring the previous level of economic health -- the high GDP numbers you see can't be taken to mean that the economy was somehow improved, in any sense that we care about, as a result of the hurricane striking."

But we never hear anything like that.

As another example, the consensus seems to be that we have to make sub-zero interest rates to clumsy banks that just revealed themselves to be extremely incompetent, without asking whether those banks are actually satisfying genuine consumer desires better than such desires would be satisfied without such a policy.

In contrast, physicists can say, "Why do we make that assumption? Well, because you have to account for these observations, and most of that work is done by these models, which leaves you with ..." That's tracing back to the layman level, and so a Level 2 understanding. If they're reluctant to do so, then yes, it could be a (less common) Level 1 physicist, but more likely, it's because they realize it will take a long time to trace out the inferential path.

Unfortunately, high schools don't show students this path very well, which I'm finding out as I "relearn" the basis of physics from some books I've been reading that specifically discuss how these models in physics were discovered (like Atom by Asimov).

Comment author: Vladimir_M 23 September 2010 09:05:28PM 2 points [-]

SilasBarta:

That basically agrees with my experience (mentioned in the discussion you linked) that economists lack a Level 2 understanding of their speciality. That is, they cannot trace the inferential paths they rely on, all the way back to the layman level.

Yes, that's a very good remark. This summarizes my frustration with economic concepts very well.

Comment author: mattnewport 23 September 2010 08:09:53PM *  4 points [-]

To answer your question fully, I would have to expound my entire theory of the modern state, which would unfortunately require much more time and space than can be dedicated to a blog comment.

If you ever do write this up, I'd be very interested to read it. Incidentally, your theory sounds quite similar to Yes Minister, incidentally also the source of one of my favourite quotes about politics:

"Politician's logic:
We must do something.
This is something.
Therefore we must do it."

Comment author: Vladimir_M 23 September 2010 08:26:51PM *  6 points [-]

mattnewport:

Incidentally, your theory sounds quite similar to Yes Minister.

Oh, yes! In full seriousness, while the plot and dialogue in that series are exaggerated for comic effect, it depicts the structure of modern governments with more essential accuracy than probably any academic work of political science.

There's a good reason for it. The series was vaguely based on the published diaries of Richard Crossman, who might be the only modern-age politician who published an unadorned day-to-day diary of his work instead of a customary auto-hagiography of the sort we usually get from politicians.

Here's the opening passage of his diaries (with the source of the legendary "Yes, Minister" title highlighted by me):

I was appointed Minister of Housing on Saturday, October 17th, 1964. Now it is only the 22nd... and already I realize the tremendous effort it requires not to be taken over by the Civil Service. My Minister's room is like a padded cell, and in certain ways I am like a person who is suddenly certified a lunatic and put safely into this great, vast room, cut off from real life and surrounded by male and female trained nurses and attendants. When I am in a good mood they occasionally allow an ordinary human being to come and visit me; but they make sure that I behave right, and that the other person behaves right; and they know how to handle me. Of course, they don't behave quite like nurses because the Civil Service is profoundly deferential - 'Yes, Minister! No, Minister! If you wish it, Minister!' and combined with this there is a constant preoccupation to ensure that the Minister does what is correct. The Private Secretary's job is to make sure that when the Minister comes into Whitehall he doesn't let the side or himself down and behaves in accordance with the requirements of the institution. It's also profoundly true that one has only to do absolutely nothing whatsoever in order to be floated forward on the stream...

Comment author: multifoliaterose 23 September 2010 04:30:18PM 1 point [-]

It seems to me that the entire running theme of this post greatly underestimates the uncertainty of any feasible answer to this question, and that it also greatly overplays the strength of this relationship.

In fairness to Carl, he said that he'll be addressing the question of what the relationship between purchased votes and policy outcomes in a future post.

In modern Western political systems, the effective role of elected politicians is far smaller and subject to much stronger and more complicated constraints than people who care about day-to-day politics commonly imagine.

What evidence do you have to support this claim?

Another source of great uncertainty is the relation between policy outcomes and the kinds of consequences by which you measure their desirability. (To the extent that these measures are even defined clearly -- even if all the facts are known, in many situations there is no obviously correct definition of "saving a life," and different definitions will lead to very different evaluations.)

Agreed, but despite the uncertainty, the magnitude of the potential impact may be sufficient to justify focus on policy outcomes. See Nick Beckstead's comment #15 at the Singularity Summit posting on the GiveWell blog.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 23 September 2010 08:00:27PM *  14 points [-]

multifoliaterose:

What evidence do you have to support this claim?

To answer your question fully, I would have to expound my entire theory of the modern state, which would unfortunately require much more time and space than can be dedicated to a blog comment. So what I write will be very cursory, simplified, and incomplete.

The basic insight is that elected politicians are transitory and in constant danger of having their careers destroyed by bad PR, while the bureaucrats are entrenched like the rock of Gibraltar, constantly running circles around politicians and preventing them from doing anything that deviates significantly from the direction in which things are carried by the bureaucratic inertia. Politicians lack any means to dislodge the bureaucrats, who can in turn make their life miserable in many different ways. In case there's a direct conflict, the politician loses without exception. The only sensible strategy, which successful politicians inevitably follow, is to simply give up any thought of such conflict.

Of course, the bureaucrats won't mind if politicians do things that create more bureaucracy, but even in that case, the actual consequences of such measures are principally in the hands of bureaucrats, not politicians. Legislation is nowadays typically written in a long-winded and extremely vague style, leaving it up to the bureaucracy and to some extent the judiciary to shape it into actual policy.

This simple view omits the crucial roles played by the judiciary and by various other centers of non-elective power whose social, organizational, and financial structure effectively blends into the government even though they're theoretically not part of it, such as the mainstream media, academia, and various for-profit and non-profit nominally private institutions. However, these merely present additional limitations to the power and influence of elected politicians, and they typically operate in concert with the bureaucrats, giving them some of their crucial leverage against politicians. It also ignores some (mostly vestigial) limited ways in which politicians can sometimes exert direct control over things.

On the whole, this is an immensely complex and controversial topic. However, any plan for influencing things by electing politicians must recognize this state of affairs, or otherwise it completely loses touch with reality.

Comment author: mattnewport 23 September 2010 06:09:34PM 1 point [-]

That's true, but on the other hand, the economic and social status consequences can be very severe. For one, insubordination at work is a sure path to unemployability.

For a sufficiently narrow definition of insubordination it may be a path to being fired (which is not the same thing as a path to unemployability in general). However not exactly following 'orders' from a nominal superior in the workplace can often be an effective strategy in my experience. In most workplaces the nominal org-chart hierarchy is imperfectly aligned with the defacto power structure and large gaps can be profitably arbitraged. A lot of 'office politics' revolves around shifting the defacto power structure in order to bring about changes in the nominal hierarchy. Naturally there is a degree of risk and uncertainty involved in this kind of activity but this is true of most things in life.

Could you give some details about what exact forms of ignoring authority you have in mind?

I'm afraid I by necessity have to be fairly circumspect. What I have learned from such friends however is that the nominal structure of authority in the world in general (what we might call 'arbitrary authority') is very loosely aligned with meaningful authority - that is the power to actually impose on your personal freedom of action. Some people seem to have a natural ability to largely disregard the nominal rules and arbitrary authorities and focus entirely on the reality of what you can get away with. It turns out that this is quite a lot.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 23 September 2010 06:52:59PM *  4 points [-]

mattnewport:

What I have learned from such friends however is that the nominal structure of authority in the world in general (what we might call 'arbitrary authority') is very loosely aligned with meaningful authority - that is the power to actually impose on your personal freedom of action. Some people seem to have a natural ability to largely disregard the nominal rules and arbitrary authorities and focus entirely on the reality of what you can get away with. It turns out that this is quite a lot.

I think I know exactly what you mean. I also know some people who regularly do things that look like nonchalant recklessness, and yet never suffer the consequences you might expect. They seem to have an extraordinary instinct for distinguishing meaningful from nominal authority. In concrete situations, this can be thanks to technical knowledge (for example, knowing that a punishment you're threatened with is an enormous hassle to execute in practice, so the threat is effectively empty), or thanks to sheer people skills (e.g. inferring that a threat is not serious just from the way it was delivered).

Another important point is that when you interact with authority figures in practice, a lot of the time they don't stick to a stern and reserved officialist attitude, but instead lapse into the normal human mental state where they want the interaction to be nice, friendly, and conflict-free, and where it's possible to establish rapport where they're effectively treating you as an equal. Individuals with good people skills can reap amazing advantages from such situations. Of course, a wrong step may snap them back into the official mode, possibly with bad consequences.

Comment author: CarlShulman 23 September 2010 04:45:48PM 3 points [-]

The post mentioned these elements, and explicitly focused on the cost of influencing votes. Otherwise, it would have bloated to a mega-post of many thousands of words, rather than a series of manageable chunks. The 'value of information' discussion at the bottom is illustrative, highlighting the use of analyzing the other components (an analysis forthcoming in the follow-on posts)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 23 September 2010 04:59:34PM *  4 points [-]

I understand that. However, in my opinion, before delving into the technical details of the economics of influencing voters (which you have indeed researched and discussed skilfully), it would be desirable to present at least a rough outline of a general argument showing that the whole approach is feasible in the first place. The problems I pointed out in my comment, in my view, make its feasibility uncertain at best.

In response to Politics as Charity
Comment author: Vladimir_M 23 September 2010 04:00:16PM *  5 points [-]

The key question, however, is:

What is the relationship between purchased votes and policy outcomes?

It seems to me that the entire running theme of this post greatly underestimates the uncertainty of any feasible answer to this question, and that it also greatly overplays the strength of this relationship. In modern Western political systems, the effective role of elected politicians is far smaller and subject to much stronger and more complicated constraints than people who care about day-to-day politics commonly imagine.

Another source of great uncertainty is the relation between policy outcomes and the kinds of consequences by which you measure their desirability. (To the extent that these measures are even defined clearly -- even if all the facts are known, in many situations there is no obviously correct definition of "saving a life," and different definitions will lead to very different evaluations.)

Also, b1shop has already made the important point that electioneering is rent-seeking behavior, so that contributing additional resources to it may have the effect of intensifying the arms race, resulting in even more resources wasted on it.

Comment author: mattnewport 22 September 2010 09:33:42PM 0 points [-]

Agreed, but I brought up cultural context because I think that in most modern Western societies the consequences to not acknowledging authority are generally less dire than they have been in other times and cultural contexts (less likely to result in death or serious violence). They can certainly be inconvenient however. While I have a certain respect for this guy for example I would probably not want the hassle. He was never in any real danger by not showing respect for arbitrary authority however.

I have friends who have opened my eyes to how far it is possible to safely ignore authority in modern society and I think there are quite a few examples of people achieving significant success by ignoring arbitrary authority that others unquestioningly accept. There are certainly risks however and at certain times and in certain places this strategy can have fatal consequences.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 23 September 2010 07:26:53AM 2 points [-]

mattnewport:

I think that in most modern Western societies the consequences to not acknowledging authority are generally less dire than they have been in other times and cultural contexts (less likely to result in death or serious violence).

That's true, but on the other hand, the economic and social status consequences can be very severe. For one, insubordination at work is a sure path to unemployability.

Moreover, often the magnitude and even the sign of the consequences is impossible to predict. Suppose you're tempted to stand up to your boss. Will it make him respect you more, or will you get fired as a consequence? If you get fired, does it mean that you've just sabotaged your career, or will you eventually realize that you should have quit that job long ago since much better options are available elsewhere? Often it's impossible to know.

I have friends who have opened my eyes to how far it is possible to safely ignore authority in modern society and I think there are quite a few examples of people achieving significant success by ignoring arbitrary authority that others unquestioningly accept.

Could you give some details about what exact forms of ignoring authority you have in mind? I'm really curious, but of course I understand if you think it would mean divulging too many personal details in public.

Comment author: Wei_Dai 22 September 2010 08:44:34PM *  1 point [-]

Besides decision theory and AI cooperation, I mean things like better understanding of biases and ways to counteract them (see most posts in Top Posts). Ethics and other rationality-related philosophy (Are wireheads happy?). Ways to encourage/improve rational discussions. Ways to make probability/decision theory more intuitive/useful/relevant in practice.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 23 September 2010 02:44:52AM *  3 points [-]

It might be that we got into a misunderstanding because we mean different things when we speak about "soft" areas. To me, the topics you listed except for the first two ones, and the posts that exemplify them, look like they could be reasonably described as addressing (either directly or indirectly) various soft fields where the conventional wisdom is dubious, disorganized, and contradictory. Therefore, what you list can be seen as a subset of the soft topics I had in mind, rather than something altogether different.

To support this, I would note that most of the top posts bring up issues (including some ideologically sensitive ones) about which much has been written by prominent academics and other mainstream intellectual figures but in a pre-paradigmatic way, that ethics and philosophy are clear examples of soft fields, and that improvements in the understanding of biases achieved in LW discussions are extremely unlikely to be useful for people in hard fields who already use sophisticated and effective area-specific bias-eliminating methodologies, but they could lead to non-trivial insight in various soft topics (and the highest-scoring top posts have indeed applied them to soft topics, not hard ones).

So, on the whole, the only disagreement we seem to have (if any) is about what specific range of soft topics should be encouraged as the subject of discussions here.

Comment author: mattnewport 22 September 2010 08:41:45PM 1 point [-]

But I always thought they do not resist arbitrary authority, they resist all authority.

Is there a difference?

Seriously though, the smart approach is to acknowledge authority to the minimum extent reflective of the degree to which they can actually make life difficult for you.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 22 September 2010 09:06:46PM *  2 points [-]

mattnewport:

Seriously though, the smart approach is to acknowledge authority to the minimum extent reflective of the degree to which they can actually make life difficult for you.

That's easy to say, but in reality, it's often very hard to know where these limits are. Moreover, it can be very hard to maintain optimal emotional reactions: you want to feel rebellious when it's rational to stand up for yourself, but you also want to be meek and submissive and feel good about it whenever rebellion would be self-destructive (or otherwise you'll suffer the feeling of subjugation, and you'll have to fight the temptation to do something stupid). As I wrote in one of my recent comments, I suspect that an important secret to the achievements of at least some very successful high-climbing individuals is that their emotional reactions happen to be very luckily calibrated in this regard.

In response to comment by Aurini on The Meaning of Life
Comment author: [deleted] 22 September 2010 08:26:21PM 2 points [-]

Heh.

Some psych experiment -- I forget the details -- showed that there's a minority group of people who consistently, temperamentally, resist arbitrary authority. It almost behaves like a phenotype. If it is a gene, I sure as hell haven't got it, but I kind of envy those who do.

In response to comment by [deleted] on The Meaning of Life
Comment author: Vladimir_M 22 September 2010 08:34:09PM 2 points [-]

SarahC:

Some psych experiment -- I forget the details -- showed that there's a minority group of people who consistently, temperamentally, resist arbitrary authority. It almost behaves like a phenotype. If it is a gene, I sure as hell haven't got it, but I kind of envy those who do.

Envy? The way you describe it, it sounds to me like people who end up jailed or killed.

Comment author: Wei_Dai 22 September 2010 07:21:42PM 3 points [-]

Or do you believe that LW might turn out to be the first example of such an approach actually working?

LW does seem to be working to some extent, in the core areas related to rationality. Presumably it's because even though we're technically amateurs, we all share enough interest and have enough background knowledge in those areas to spot wrongness relatively quickly.

Also, I believe Math Overflow has previously been cited as another such site, although I'm not personally familiar with it.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 22 September 2010 08:05:17PM *  2 points [-]

Wei_Dai:

LW does seem to be working to some extent, in the core areas related to rationality.

What would be the concrete examples you have in mind, if by "working" we mean making progress in some hard area, or at least doing something that might plausibly lead to such progress (i.e. your above expressed benchmark of success)?

The only things I can think of are occasional threads on mathy topics like decision theory and AI cooperation, but in such cases, what we see is a clearly distinguished informal group of several people who are up to date with the relevant knowledge, and whose internal discussions are mostly impenetrable to the overwhelming majority of other participants here. In effect, we see a closely-knit expert group with a very high bar for joining, which merely uses a forum with a much wider membership base as its communication medium.

I don't think this situation is necessarily bad, though it does generate frustration whenever non-expert members try joining such discussions and end up just muddling them. However, if the goal of LW is defined as progress in hard areas -- let alone progress of wider-society-influencing magnitude -- then it is an unavoidable conclusion that most of what actually happens here is sheer dead weight, imposed by the open nature of the forum that is inherently in conflict with such goals.

Also, I believe Math Overflow has previously been cited as another such site, although I'm not personally familiar with it.

I wouldn't say that Math Overflow is a good counterexample to my claims. First, from what I understand, it's a place where people exchange information about the existing mathematical knowledge, rather than a community of researchers collaborating on novel problems. Second, it requires extremely high qualifications from participants, and the discourse is rigorously limited to making technical points strictly pertinent to the topic at hand. That's an extremely different sort of community than LW, which would have to undergo a very radical transformation to be turned into something like that.

Comment author: Wei_Dai 22 September 2010 08:50:15AM 11 points [-]

In contrast, the present state of knowledge in softer fields is so abysmally bad, and contaminated with so much bias and outright intellectual incompetence, that a group of smart and unbiased amateurs can easily reach insight beyond what's readily available from reputable mainstream sources about a great variety of issues.

I'm afraid that if we accept this suggestion, most posts about softer fields will consist of seemingly plausible but wrong contrarian ideas, and since most of us won't be experts in the relevant fields, it will take a lot of time and effort for us to come up with the necessary evidence to show that the ideas are wrong.

And if we do manage to identify some correct contrarian insight, it will have minimal impact on society at large, because nobody outside of LW will believe that a group of smart and unbiased amateurs can easily reach such insight.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 22 September 2010 05:17:54PM 2 points [-]

That is undoubtedly true. However, it seems to me that my main objection to cousin_it's position applies to yours too, namely that the ambitious goals you have in mind are incompatible with the nature of this website as a public forum that solicits participation from the wide general public and warmly welcomes anyone who is not acting outright stupid, trollish, or obnoxious. On the whole, the outcome you describe in the above comment as undesirable and falling short of your vision is in reality the very best that can be realistically achieved by a public forum with such a low bar for entry and participation.

I absolutely admire your ambitions to achieve progress in hard areas, but building a community capable of such accomplishments requires a radically different and far more elitist approach, as I explained in my other comments. There are good reasons why scientists don't approach problems by opening web forums that solicit ideas from the public, and don't try to find productive collaborators among random people who would gather at such forums. Or do you believe that LW might turn out to be the first example of such an approach actually working?

Comment author: JoshuaZ 22 September 2010 04:55:47AM 1 point [-]

This isn't a "dark side" tactic. Vlad wrote:

the strains of HIV found in these accidentally infected individuals were effectively identical to those from the source of their accidental infection, showing much less difference than is usual for strains taken from two random patients.

It seemed pretty clear from context that Vlad was talking about substrains. If there's anything that went wrong here, judging from Jacob's followup remark, it was an illusion of transparency failure on my part in that Vlad's meaning seemed clear to me, and I then made the (erroneous) conclusion that someone with a basic background would also get what Vlad was talking about.

Note incidentally, that using heuristics about whether or not someone has enough background to understand or discuss something is not intrinsically a dark side issue to start with. Indeed, sometimes it is very necessary. See for example some of the discussion on cousin it's recent post where it seemed that some individuals (well, primarily one individual) were making repeated subtle but highly relevant errors about certain ideas related to Godel's theorems and Turing machines. After repeated attempts to explain, the mathematicians in the thread (including myself) started trying to explain that the errors in question were basic enough that further attempts to explain would likely be fruitless. That's not a dark side tactic, sometimes that's just true.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 22 September 2010 07:10:01AM 0 points [-]

JoshuaZ:

It seemed pretty clear from context that Vlad was talking about substrains.

Yes, of course. I'm not familiar with the finer points of terminology in this area, but the O'Brien-Goedert paper uses the term "strain" both for the two major strains and their sub-strains, and I've noticed the same in many other papers too. So I don't think this was imprecise in any way.

Comment author: jacob_cannell 22 September 2010 03:00:29AM 0 points [-]

I was under the impression that there was only 2 HIV strains, and only HIV-1 is of concern in the west, but I'm no expert on this.

Do you have the O'Brien/Goedert paper link or any of this discussion? Your earlier link was just an editorial summary. Sounds interesting, I'd like to read more into it. (i am going to search now, but if you have the link . . .)

If O'Brien and Goedert are right, it would depend on how many strains there are and what their prevalence is ahead of time - I think Bayes' Theorem would apply, no? Also, I guess we just have to presume that no other sick people from the sample were not reported. And finally, the sample size of 1 or 2 raises some theoretical issues, but still it would be interesting.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 22 September 2010 05:52:35AM *  1 point [-]

(I initially posted an excerpt from the paper in this comment, but in the meantime, I found an ungated version. The stuff about the accidental transmissions is on page 615.)

Comment author: jacob_cannell 22 September 2010 02:00:15AM *  0 points [-]

I have seen that, but I don't take it as strong evidence of anything either way.

Clearly HIV antibodies are correlated with ill-health, poor immune function and low CD4 counts - that was established in the very beginning by Gallo et all and is the entire basis of their original claim.

But the competing hypothesis is not the null hypothesis, the competing hypothesis is that the HIV presence is a marker of some severe immune function failure, and that HIV itself is a largely harmless vertically transmitted retrovirus - like all the others. If it does become active, it is because something is already seriously wrong.

So of course if you have a lab, and you are testing lab-workers deathly afraid of contracting HIV, in either theory some may come up HIV+, and in either theory those that test positive will be ill.

This is very different than the intentional infection test you need to establish strong causation along a koch's postulate principle. I think one of the stronger flaws in current HIV theory is the chimpanzee models - they have many HIV similar retroviruses (SIV's), they are common in wild chimps, are all vertically transmitted, and don't appear to be problematic for chimps. If HIV killed chimps outright, the mainstream theory would have some more ammo.

Instead the theory is that HIV came from a chimp SIV and somehow became lethal and horizontally transmissable at the same time in humans. But from the studies of sexual transmission - it is only weakly blood transmissable. So overall, it's alot to swallow. I think it is plausible that this happened and HIV causes novel problems in humans, but it certainly has not been well demonstrated, mainly because HIV doesn't cause specific symptoms and it is extremely difficult to properly dissociate other causitive factors. As Duesberg notes, the cocaine/meth craze boomed in the 80's right as the AIDS epidemic started - they overlap perfectly.

Deusberg's theory is that drugs specifically are a major cause of the immunosupression, which I think has some absolute validity, but we should also notice that there are other causes, and some people just have poor immune health, and this has been the case for long before HIV came on the scene.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 22 September 2010 02:53:49AM *  1 point [-]

jacob_cannell:

But the competing hypothesis is not the null hypothesis, the competing hypothesis is that the HIV presence is a marker of some severe immune function failure, and that HIV itself is a largely harmless vertically transmitted retrovirus - like all the others. If it does become active, it is because something is already seriously wrong. So of course if you have a lab, and you are testing lab-workers deathly afraid of contracting HIV, in either theory some may come up HIV+, and in either theory those that test positive will be ill.

According to O'Brien and Goedert, however, the strains of HIV found in these accidentally infected individuals were effectively identical to those from the source of their accidental infection, showing much less difference than is usual for strains taken from two random patients. This looks like powerful evidence against the competing hypothesis. On the other hand, it seems like there have been disputes about the validity of these identification procedures, and Duesberg and other skeptics raised some specific objections to them back then. However, this gets into technical issues that I'm definitely not competent to judge on.

(I should add that I haven't delved into the references provided by O'Brien and Goedert, which Robin has conveniently listed in his above comment, to see if their summary of the facts is accurate and complete.)

Comment author: Relsqui 22 September 2010 12:52:49AM 3 points [-]

In my experience, and with very few honorable exceptions, economists are extremely difficult to reason with as soon as one starts questioning the logical and empirical soundness of some basic concepts in modern economics, or pointing out seemingly bizarre and illogical things found in the mainstream economic literature.

I'm sure this wasn't your intent, but this comes across to me like a situation where you've been having a high-level conversation about economics and then switch to asking the conomist to explain or justify the basic premises of the field to you. While the idea that you need to be convinced of the truth of the basics before productively discussing the complexities is sound, I'm less hasty to assume that the economists' refusal is due to a disregard for rationality. They just may be less interested in teaching you lower-level concepts of the field than they were in having the high-level conversation about it. If that were the case, the mismatch would be social, not rational.

I certainly don't know that the above is what actually happened, but it fits my model of human behavior better than your explanation does.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 22 September 2010 01:54:20AM *  10 points [-]

Relsqui:

I'm sure this wasn't your intent, but this comes across to me like a situation where you've been having a high-level conversation about economics and then switch to asking the conomist to explain or justify the basic premises of the field to you.

The thing is, if you ask a physicist to answer a critical question you have about some fundamental thing in physics, he'll likely be able to point you to the literature where your specific conundrum is resolved clearly and in great detail, or provide such an answer himself. I don't know what would happen if you came up with an entirely novel question (I sure never did), but from what I've observed, I would expect that it would be met with genuine curiosity. Moreover, good introductory literature in physics often anticipates and preemptively answers many objections to the basic concepts that a smart critical student of the subject might come up with. Of course, if you're being block-headed and impervious to arguments, that's a different story, but that's not what I'm talking about.

In contrast, in economics one rarely sees anything like this. The concepts are presented with an air of high authority, and various more or less straightforward questions about their validity that occur to me after some thinking are often left unaddressed. Mathematical models are typically discussed in a bizarre blinkered way that bears no resemblance to the ingenious modes of thought that I've learned to know and love from mathematicians and physicists. Even more maddeningly, one sometimes runs into literature written by prominent insiders in the field that points out such problems, but instead of provoking debate, these works are languishing in obscurity. There are many other bizarre things I've found in my amateur forays into the field, which could be the subject of a long essay.

Comment author: James_Miller 21 September 2010 01:13:42PM 8 points [-]

"Less Wrong Should Confront Wrongness Wherever it Appears"

As an economist I can tell you that most public discussions of economics contain a huge amount of wrongness. Do we want hundreds of econ posts?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 22 September 2010 12:28:43AM *  7 points [-]

I, for one, would love to have a place where a rational and open-minded discussion of economics would be possible with people who have some knowledge of the subject. In my experience, and with very few honorable exceptions, economists are extremely difficult to reason with as soon as one starts questioning the logical and empirical soundness of some basic concepts in modern economics, or pointing out seemingly bizarre and illogical things found in the mainstream economic literature. You quickly run into an authoritative and stonewalling attitude of the sort that you never get by posing similar questions to, say, physicists.

I would venture to say that a radical re-examination of several basic economic concepts is probably the lowest-hanging fruit when it comes to valuable insight that could potentially be gained by a group of smart amateur contrarians. The whole field is certainly long overripe for the sort of treatment that Robin Hanson metes out to medicine.

Comment author: jacob_cannell 21 September 2010 11:36:42PM *  1 point [-]

Yes, but were they treated with chemotherapy agents such as AZT which cause bone marrow and immune supression? (I am asking before I read the article)

For the controlled experiment example, it would have to be double blind the entire time. Nobody would ever know who got placebo and who didnt', and no difference in treatment regimens either way - all on the same diet, same lifestyle, etc etc. I highly doubt the accidental cases fit that profile.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 22 September 2010 12:04:55AM *  1 point [-]

jacob_cannell:

Yes, but were they treated with chemotherapy agents such as AZT which cause bone marrow and immune supression?

From what I see, O'Brien and Goedert don't report about this. However, Cohen's Science article to which I linked above provides more details about the cases of infected lab workers, claiming that two of them didn't receive any antivirals until the progress of AIDS was well underway:
http://www.sciencemag.org/feature/data/cohen/266-5191-1647a.pdf

Comment author: cousin_it 21 September 2010 11:22:07PM *  1 point [-]

Thanks, I understand your point now. It seems my original comment was unclear: I didn't mean to demand that everyone shut up about soft topics. RobinZ expressed the intended meaning.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 21 September 2010 11:55:55PM 0 points [-]

cousin_it:

It seems my original comment was unclear: I didn't mean to demand that everyone shut up about soft topics.

For what that's worth, I didn't understand your comment that way. I merely wanted to point out the inherent tension between the public and inviting nature of the forum and your vision of the goals it should ideally achieve.

Comment author: jacob_cannell 21 September 2010 09:49:28PM *  1 point [-]

Ah you read this while I was editing it.

Yes I have browsed that abstract, although I can't see if there is a full copy of the whole thing. Notice the link to the toxicity right next to it:

The toxicity of azidothymidine (AZT) in the treatment of patients with AIDS and AIDS-related complex. A double-blind, placebo-controlled trial.

Notice that it has serious toxicity side effects, including bone marrow supression, and thus it can massively damage the innate immune system.

This is evident in the abstract itself:

We conducted a double-blind, placebo-controlled trial of oral azidothymidine (AZT) in 282 patients with the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) or AIDS-related complex. Although significant clinical benefit was documented (N Engl J Med 1987; 317:185-91), serious adverse reactions, particularly bone marrow suppression, were observed. Nausea, myalgia, insomnia, and severe headaches were reported more frequently by recipients of AZT; macrocytosis developed within weeks in most of the AZT group. Anemia with hemoglobin levels below 7.5 g per deciliter developed in 24 percent of AZT recipients and 4 percent of placebo recipients (P less than 0.001). Twenty-one percent of AZT recipients and 4 percent of placebo recipients required multiple red-cell transfusions (P less than 0.001). Neutropenia (less than 500 cells per cubic millimeter) occurred in 16 percent of AZT recipients, as compared with 2 percent of placebo recipients (P less than 0.001).

The original AZT study could not possibly be placebo controlled, due to the high toxicity - this is basically chemotherapy. Now chemotherapy can be effective, but it can not be double blind.

Furthermore, due to high toxicity, only a fraction of patients actually completed the intended trial:

The subjects were stratified according to numbers of T cells with CD4 surface markers and were randomly assigned to receive either 250 mg of AZT or placebo by mouth every four hours for a total of 24 weeks. One hundred forty-five subjects received AZT, and 137 received placebo. When the study was terminated, 27 subjects had completed 24 weeks of the study, 152 had completed 16 weeks, and the remainder had completed at least 8 weeks

Only 27 out of 245 AZT subjects completed the full 24 weeks! One in the AZT group of 245 died in this period, but how many more in the AZT group would have died if they had been able to complete the full 24 week chemotherapy trial?

These were crazy times. These patients were very ill and very worried. It was a full scale terror panic. It was obvious who was on placebo and who wasn't, and from what I have read, placebo patients were swapping and trading pills with AZT patients who couldn't finish. It was many things, but not double-blind.

There seems to be an issue here involving what level of evidence is necessary.

Here is what would be required to prove with > 99% certainty that HIV is the sole cause of AIDS:

Take a random sample of perfectly healthy test subjects. Now inject half of them with HIV and half with a placebo, and follow their health over the long term. That is about the only test that could get you 99% accuracy, and it is obviously not ethical.

So, instead we have to make due with what we have.

And again, showing that AZT improves long-term mortality - which the AZT trial clearly did not show, only shows that AZT improves mortality in sick AIDS patients. It doesn't tell you much else about HIV as a theory.

It's important that we agree on that subpoint - for it has nothing to do with the level of evidence.

There are many, many things that could improve mortality in sick AIDS patients. Stoss therapy, better diet, more sex, aspirin, etc etc. Do you think that proving a mortality decrease correlation in any of these categories would 'prove' they are the true cause of AIDS?

Moreover, there are studies which show that the the standard drug cocktails work better than AZT or 3TC alone. That makes sense for the standard model of HIV as the cause of AIDS.

It also makes sense for the common sense model that reducing AZT doses down from outright lethal to mildly poisonous but tolerable 'works better'.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 21 September 2010 11:29:06PM *  3 points [-]

jacob_cannell:

Take a random sample of perfectly healthy test subjects. Now inject half of them with HIV and half with a placebo, and follow their health over the long term. That is about the only test that could get you 99% accuracy, and it is obviously not ethical.

There have been documented cases of accidental HIV infection of lab workers and dental patients that are not too terribly far from such a controlled experiment. See: S.J. O'Brien and J.J. Goedert, "HIV causes AIDS: Koch's postulates fulfilled," Current Opinion in Immunology, Vol. 8, Issue 5, October 1996, pp. 613-618.

UPDATE: Ungated link to the paper here.

Comment author: cousin_it 21 September 2010 09:22:12PM *  3 points [-]

This part:

To me, this sounds way too ambitious for a place that advertises itself as a public forum

contradicts the other part:

a group of smart and unbiased amateurs can easily reach insight beyond what's readily available from reputable mainstream sources about a great variety of issues

so I'm not sure that your well-worded and well-upvoted comment even has a point I could respond to. Anyway. The politically charged discussions here have been useless to me (with one exception that sadly didn't get the follow-through it deserved), so I'll go on waiting for insight, and avoid talking when I have no insight, and encourage others to do the same.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 21 September 2010 10:59:24PM *  7 points [-]

The comment definitely wasn't well-worded if it seems like there's a contradiction there; in fact, my failure to convey the point suggests that the wording was quite awful. (Thus providing more evidence that people are way too generous with upvoting.) So please let me try once more.

I was trying to draw a contrast between the following:

  • Topics in math and hard science, in which any insight that can't be found by looking up the existing literature is extremely hard to come by. It seems to me that a public web forum that invites random visitors to participate freely is, as a community, inherently unusable for achieving any such goal. What is required is a closely-knit group of dedicated researchers that imposes extremely high qualifications for joining and whose internal discussions will be largely incomprehensible to outsiders, the only exception being the work of lone geniuses.

  • Topics in softer fields, in which the present state of knowledge is not in the form of well-organized literature that is almost fully sound and extremely hard to improve on, but instead even the very basics are heavily muddled and biased. Here, in contrast, there is plenty of opportunity to achieve some new insight or at least to make some sense out of the existing muddled and contradictory information, even by casual amateurs, if the topics are just approached with a good epistemology and a clear and unbiased mind.

Of course, a web forum can serve for all other kinds of fun chit-chat and exchange of useful information, but when it comes to generating novel insight, that's basically it.

Or do you really find it within the realm of the possible that a public forum that gets its membership by warmly inviting random readers might be up to standard for advancing the state of knowledge in some hard area?

Comment author: cousin_it 21 September 2010 12:35:25PM *  43 points [-]

I don't want LW to change in that direction.

In the famous talk "You and Your Research", Richard Hamming explained why physicists don't spend much time on researching antigravity:

The three outstanding problems in physics, in a certain sense, were never worked on while I was at Bell Labs. By important I mean guaranteed a Nobel Prize and any sum of money you want to mention. We didn't work on (1) time travel, (2) teleportation, and (3) antigravity. They are not important problems because we do not have an attack. It's not the consequence that makes a problem important, it is that you have a reasonable attack.

We can talk productively here about topics like decision theory because we have an attack, a small foothold of sanity (established mostly by Eliezer and Wei) that gives us a firm footing to expand our understanding. As far as I can see, we have no such footholds in politics, or gender relations, or most of those other important topics you listed. I've been here for a long time and know that most of our interminable "discussions" of these controversial topics have been completely useless. Our rationality helps us maintain a civil tone, but not actually, you know, make progress.

Human understanding progresses through small problems solved conclusively, once and forever. The first step in any pre-paradigmatic field (like politics) is always the hardest: you need to generate a piece of insight that allows other people to generate new pieces of insight. It's not a task for our argumentative circuitry, it's a task for sitting down and thinking really hard. Encouraging wide discussion is the wrong step in the dance. If you don't have a specific breakthrough, I'd rather we talked about math.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 21 September 2010 05:05:38PM *  11 points [-]

cousin_it:

We can talk productively here about topics like decision theory because we have an attack, a small foothold of sanity (established mostly by Eliezer and Wei) that gives us a firm footing to expand our understanding. As far as I can see, we have no such footholds in politics, or gender relations, or most of those other important topics you listed.

To me, this sounds way too ambitious for a place that advertises itself as a public forum, where random visitors are invited with kind words to join and participate, and get upvoted as long as they don't write anything outright stupid or bad-mannered.

You're correct about the reasons why physicists don't work on on anti-gravity, but you'll also notice that they don't work by opening web forums to invite ideas and contributions from the general public. A community focusing strictly on hard scientific and mathematical progress must set the bar for being a contributor way higher, so high that well over 90% of the present rate of activity on this website would have to be culled, in terms of both the number of contributors and the amount of content being generated. At that point, you might as well just open an invitation-only mailing list.

As for the softer (or as you call them, "pre-paradigmatic") fields, many of them are subject to Trotsky's famous (though likely apocryphal) maxim that you might not be interested in war, but war is interested in you. Even if it's something like politics, where it's far from certain (though far from impossible either) that insight into it can yield useful practical guidelines, by relinquishing thinking about it you basically resign to the role of a pawn pushed around by forces you don't understand at all. Therefore, since you'll have an opinion one way or another, it can't hurt if it's been subjected to a high-standard rational discussion, even if only for eliminating clear errors of fact and logic. Also, I don't see anything wrong with discussing such things just for fun.

Moreover, the real problem with such discussions are the "who-whom?" issues and the corresponding feelings of group solidarity, not the inability to resolve questions of fact. In fact, when it comes to clearly defined factual questions, I think the situation is much better than in the hard fields. Progress in hard fields is tremendously difficult because all the low-hanging fruit was picked generations ago. In contrast, the present state of knowledge in softer fields is so abysmally bad, and contaminated with so much bias and outright intellectual incompetence, that a group of smart and unbiased amateurs can easily reach insight beyond what's readily available from reputable mainstream sources about a great variety of issues. Of course, the tricky part is actually avoiding passions and biases, but that's basically the point, isn't it?

Comment author: Perplexed 21 September 2010 03:33:06AM 10 points [-]

While I am generally impressed with the level of rationality in discourse here, I really doubt that we have the quantity of information necessary to really come to a well-informed consensus on any controversial subject.

I'm not sure exactly what kinds of issues the OP had in mind, but I worry that we wouldn't do particularly well here on topics like AGW, or what went wrong with the housing market, or how much of IQ is genetic, or nuclear power, or any number of other fascinating and important topics where a dose of rationality might do some good.

We wouldn't do well on these topics, in spite of our rationality, because doing well on these topics requires information, and we don't have any inside track to reliable information.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 21 September 2010 04:50:37AM *  12 points [-]

Perplexed:

I worry that we wouldn't do particularly well here on topics like AGW, or what went wrong with the housing market, or how much of IQ is genetic, or nuclear power... We wouldn't do well on these topics, in spite of our rationality, because doing well on these topics requires information, and we don't have any inside track to reliable information.

There are indeed such topics, but in my opinion, none of the specific ones you mention are among them. In all of these, the public information available at the click of a mouse (or, in the worst case, with a visit to a university library) is almost as good as anyone in the world has, and the truly difficult part is how to sort out correct insight from bullshit using general rules of good epistemology.

Comment author: jacob_cannell 20 September 2010 04:35:56PM *  8 points [-]

In my last post on Health Optimization, one commenter inadverntently brought up a topic which I find interesting, although it is highly contraversial - which is HIV/AIDS skepticism and rationality in science.

The particular part of that which I am interested in is proper levels of uncertainty and rationality errors in medical science.

I have some skepticism for the HIV/AIDS theory, perhaps on the level of say 20-30%. More concretely, I would roughly say I am only about 70% confident that HIV is the sole cause of AIDS, or 70% confident that the mainstream theory of HIV/AIDS is solid.

Most of that doubt comes from one particular flaw I in the current mainstream theory which I find particularly damning.

It is claimed that HIV is a sexually transmitted disease. However, the typical estimates of transmission rate are extremely low: 0.05% / 0.1% per insertive/receptive P/V sex act 0.065% / 0.5% per insertive/receptive P/A sex act

This data is from wikipedia - it lists a single paper as a source, but from what I recall this matches the official statistics from the CDC and what not.

For comparison, from the wikipedia entry on Gonorrhea, a conventional STD:

Men have a 20% risk of getting the infection from a single act of vaginal intercourse with a woman infected with gonorrhea. Women have a 60–80% risk of getting the infection from a single act of vaginal intercourse with a man infected with gonorrhea.[7]

So it would appear that HIV is roughly 100-500 times less sexually transmittable than a conventional STD like gonorrhea.

So in my mind this makes it technically impossible for HIV to be an STD. These transmission rates are so astronomically low that for it to spread from one infected person to an uninfected partner would take years and years of unprotected sex.

If you plug that it to a simulation, it just never can spread - even if everyone was having unprotected sex with a random stranger every single day, it would still require an unrealistic initial foothold in the population by other means before it could ever spread sexually.

And of course, if you plug in actual realistic data about frequency of unprotected sexual intercourse with strangers, it's just completely impossible. Bogus. It doesn't work. It can not be an STD.

As gonorrhea (and I presume other STDs) are hundreds of times more transmissable than HIV, their low rates in the population place bounds on HIV's sexual transmission.

Finally, these rates of transmission are so low that one should question the uncertainty and issues with false positives - how accurate are these numbers really?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 21 September 2010 03:48:03AM *  13 points [-]

A few years ago, I entered an online discussion with some outspoken HIV-AIDS skeptics who supported the theories of Peter Duesberg, and in the course of that debate, I read quite a bit of literature on the subject. My ultimate conclusion was that the HIV-AIDS link has been established beyond reasonable doubt after all; the entire web of evidence just seems too strong. For a good overview, I recommend the articles on the topic published in the Science magazine in December 1994:
http://www.sciencemag.org/feature/data/cohen/cohen.dtl

Regarding your concerns about transmission probabilities, in Western countries, AIDS as an STD has indeed never been more than a marginal phenomenon among the heterosexual population. (Just think of the striking fact that, to my knowledge, in the West there has never been a catastrophic AIDS epidemic among female prostitutes, and philandering rock stars who had sex with thousands of groupies in the eighties also managed to avoid it.) As much as it’s fashionable to speak of AIDS as an “equal opportunity” disease, it’s clear that the principal mechanism of its sexual transmission in the First World has been sex between men, because of both the level of promiscuity and the nature of the sexual acts involved. (And it may well be that HIV among heterosexuals would be even rarer if it weren’t constantly reintroduced into the heterosexual population via women having sex with bisexual men, let alone if the sexual transmissions from intravenous drug users were also absent.)

On the other hand, when it comes to African AIDS, it’s hard to say anything reliably. The public discussions of First World AIDS are full of nonsense, but at least there are enough reliable raw data to make some sense out of the situation; in the case of Africa, however, we don’t know anything beyond what we’re told from people with highly suspect interests in the matter, either careerist or ideological, and even if there are some truthful and reasonable voices in the whole mess, it's impossible to filter them out in the sea of misinformation.

Also, here’s a pertinent comment I left on OB in a thread about the recent Medical Hypotheses affair: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/05/rip-medical-hypotheses.html#comment-447400

Comment author: prase 20 September 2010 08:27:51AM 1 point [-]

Overall, my impression is that among the atheists found in North America, those of the latter kind are far more frequent and prominent compared to the post-Communist Eastern Europe

This is probably in agreement with my anecdotal experience, but I haven't realised it explicitly before. What I can think about at the moment is the webpage Daylight Atheism, whose author had spent a lot of time defending the concept of atheist spirituality (e.g. here), and there was usually surprisingly little opposition in the comments.

your username is the word for "piglet" in several (but not all) Slavic languages, one of which is Czech

It means simply "pig" in Czech.

(By the way, if you're curious, I'm Croatian.)

My original idea was that you were Russian, and after reading your previous comment, I have put a non-negligible probability to you being Czech too; hence, my nationality-predicting abilities are visibly inferior to yours.

your English is excellent but still a little bit Slavic-souding

Can you identify some specific instances of Slavic sounding structures in my writing? It could help me to eliminate them.

In response to comment by prase on The Meaning of Life
Comment author: Vladimir_M 20 September 2010 10:32:58PM *  2 points [-]

prase:

This is probably in agreement with my anecdotal experience, but I haven't realised it explicitly before. What I can think about at the moment is the webpage Daylight Atheism, whose author had spent a lot of time defending the concept of atheist spirituality (e.g. here), and there was usually surprisingly little opposition in the comments.

I don't have in mind only such overt manifestations of quasi-religiosity, but also the way many people find beliefs and causes that technically don't involve any supernatural elements, yet nevertheless become objects of mystical reverence in their lives, and are altogether impervious to any rational discussion. In many cases, I would argue that such beliefs effectively involve postulating the existence of metaphysical entities which, while not anthropomorphic, are no less imaginary than the deities postulated by various traditional religions. (One philosopher who made some original and radical inquiries along these lines was Max Stirner.) But this is a really difficult and controversial topic.

Can you identify some specific instances of Slavic sounding structures in my writing? It could help me to eliminate them.

One thing that's almost impossibly difficult for Slavic speakers is the use of articles, and you sometimes drop them in a quite Slavic-sounding way (I still do it occasionally too). However, these are just small and occasional things; your English is at a near-native level, and very well written overall. (Also, I should note that I probably notice this sort of thing more than a typical reader because I have a hobbyist interest in linguistics.)

Comment author: [deleted] 19 September 2010 08:04:43PM 1 point [-]

Why do you think that is? Longer history of atheism?

I do think that "converts" (either to a religion or to atheism) think differently than people who were raised in their current belief system. If you're childhood was religious, then you'll associate religion with childhood and your parents, either negatively ("religion is childish") or positively ("religion is comforting.")

In response to comment by [deleted] on The Meaning of Life
Comment author: Vladimir_M 20 September 2010 07:43:45AM *  1 point [-]

SarahC:

Why do you think that is?

Well, as I said, that question is very hard to answer not only because it's complex and involves many concepts that aren't amenable to a no-nonsense scientific approach, but also because any sensible answer must include ideologically sensitive claims. History of ideas is a fascinating subject, but also an extraordinarily difficult one.

I don't have anything like a complete and plausible theory that would answer your question, but one thing of which I am certain is that such a theory should start with re-examining the standard notion of "religion," which I believe has outlived its usefulness in the modern world, and is nowadays creating more confusion than insight. But getting even just into that topic means opening enormous cans of worms.

Comment author: prase 19 September 2010 03:14:30PM *  1 point [-]

Yes, I am Czech. Could you elaborate on the cultural differences you have in mind? Is it really possible to guess person's ethnicity from the attitude towards "purpose of life", or did you use other available heuristics to guess?

In response to comment by prase on The Meaning of Life
Comment author: Vladimir_M 19 September 2010 07:33:12PM *  10 points [-]

It's a very complex topic, but to put it as succinctly as possible, the key difference is between self-declared atheists who truly appear as such, and those who insist on their atheism, but various quasi-religious elements are nevertheless clearly discernible in their lives and worldviews (to the point where I would dispute whether it makes sense to exclude them from the general definition of "religion").

Overall, my impression is that among the atheists found in North America, those of the latter kind are far more frequent and prominent compared to the post-Communist Eastern Europe, with Western Europe being somewhere in-between, but closer to North America. (Of course, these large geographical regions contain parts of greatly different religiosity, but what I write tends to be true for the local atheists found there regardless of their percentage in the local population.) Why this is so, and what exact quasi-religious elements are commonly seen among different sorts of self-declared non-religious people, are complex and fascinating questions, which are however difficult to discuss because they touch on many ideologically sensitive issues.

When I read people's writings on all sorts of issues, I can usually discern the two types of atheists pretty quickly and reliably, and based on your comments I've read in this thread and elsewhere, you do seem to belong to the true sort like you declare. Assuming you're writing from somewhere in Europe or the Anglosphere, as most people here are, this by itself places a significant probability on you being Eastern European, and more specifically from one of the less religious EE states, like Hungary, Czech Republic, or various former Soviet republics (as opposed to much more religious places like Poland or Croatia). Considering that your username is the word for "piglet" in several (but not all) Slavic languages, one of which is Czech, this seemed like a high-probability guess. Also, some additional evidence is that your English is excellent but still a little bit Slavic-souding, and your writing has a slight and vague quality typical of Central Europe that is very hard to explain. (By the way, if you're curious, I'm Croatian.)

Comment author: AdeleneDawner 18 September 2010 10:25:35PM 3 points [-]

I've spent some time thinking about this, and my conclusion is that, at least personally, what I value about diversity is the variety of worldviews that it leads to.

This does result in some rather interesting issues, though. For example, one of the major factors in the difference in worldview between dark-skinned Americans and light-skinned Americans is the existence of racism, both overt and institutional. Thus, if I consider diversity to be very valuable, it seems that I should support racism. I don't, though - instead, I consider that the relevant preferences of dark-skinned Americans take precedence over my own preference for diversity. (Similarly, left-handed peoples' preference for non-abusive writing education appropriately took precedence over the cultural preference for everyone to write with their right hands, and left-handedness is, to the best of my knowledge, no longer a significant source of diversity of worldview.)

That assumes coherence in the relevant group's preference, though, which isn't always the case. For example, among people with disabilities, there are two common views that are, given limited resources, significantly conflicting: The view that disabilities should be cured and that people with disabilities should strive to be (or appear to be) as normal as possible, and the view that disabilities should be accepted and that people with disabilities should be free to focus on personal goals rather than being expected to devote a significant amount of effort to mitigating or hiding their disabilities. In such cases, I support the preference that's more like the latter, though I do prefer to leave the option open for people with the first preference to pursue that on a personal level (meaning I'd support the preference 'I'd prefer to have my disability cured', but not 'I'd prefer for my young teen's disability to be treated even though they object', and I'm still thinking about the grey area in the middle where such things as 'I'd prefer for my baby's disability to be cured, given that it won't be able to be cured when they're older if it's not cured now, and given that if it's not cured I'm likely to be obligated to take care of them for the rest of my life' exist).

I think that's coherent, anyway, as far as it goes. I'm sure there are issues I haven't addressed, though.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 18 September 2010 11:34:07PM *  10 points [-]

With your first example, I think you're on to an important politically incorrect truth, namely that the existence of diverse worldviews requires a certain degree of separation, and "diversity" in the sense of every place and institution containing a representative mix of people can exist only if a uniform worldview is imposed on all of them.

Let me illustrate using a mundane and non-ideological example. I once read a story about a neighborhood populated mostly by blue-collar folks with a strong do-it-yourself ethos, many of whom liked to work on their cars in their driveways. At some point, however, the real estate trends led to an increasing number of white collar yuppie types moving in from a nearby fancier neighborhood, for whom this was a ghastly and disreputable sight. Eventually, they managed to pass a local ordinance banning mechanical work in front yards, to the great chagrin of the older residents.

Therefore, when these two sorts of people lived in separate places, there was on the whole a diversity of worldview with regards to this particular issue, but when they got mixed together, this led to a conflict situation that could only end up with one or another view being imposed on everyone. And since people's worldviews manifest themselves in all kinds of ways that necessarily create conflict in case of differences, this clearly has implications that give the present notion of "diversity" at least a slight Orwellian whiff.

Comment author: Nisan 18 September 2010 07:43:51PM 1 point [-]

And a string of bits can be interpreted as implementing any arbitrary program, given an arbitrary choice of the interpreter.

You could discriminate between heaven and hell by considering the minimum length of an interpreting program. Such a program would have to produce output that would be directly comprehendible by us, and it would have to be written in a language that we wouldn't regard as crazy.

In order to see heaven in hell, your interpreter probably has to contain hell.

In response to comment by Nisan on The conscious tape
Comment author: Vladimir_M 18 September 2010 08:30:28PM *  1 point [-]

Fair enough; that's true when it comes to an arbitrary program. However, consider a program that contains both heaven and hell in different branches, and will take one of these different branches depending on the interpreter. Or, alternatively, consider a program simulating a "good" world that will, given some small tweak in the orignal interpreter, simulate a much worse world because some simple but essential thing will be off. Such thought experiments, as far as I see, override this objection.

Comment author: prase 18 September 2010 10:52:06AM 4 points [-]

It seems likely that people really do have a biological (not memetic) god or authority figure-shaped hole in their lives

Is the hole really biological? I was raised in an atheist family and never took religion as a serious possibility. It may be the reason that the phrases "meaning of life" and "purpose of life" were almost incomprehensible to me. Any suggestions that "meaning of life is X" I have interpreted as "you shouldn't just enjoy your life, since you must do X", and I have always felt quite strong negative emotions when the topic was discussed (which wasn't too often, fortunately).

Of course, my anecdote doesn't disprove the general existence of a biological god-shaped hole, but it would be good to investigate how much atheists who are not interested in philosophy really consider the question of "meaning of life" as meaningful or important.

In response to comment by prase on The Meaning of Life
Comment author: Vladimir_M 18 September 2010 08:25:21PM 2 points [-]

prase:

Is the hole really biological? I was raised in an atheist family and never took religion as a serious possibility.

Forgive me for asking a personal question, and of course please feel free to refuse to answer should you be so inclined, but are you by any chance Czech? I'm asking because I see here a potential instance of some cultural differences I find extremely interesting, and before elaborating, I'd like to see if my guess might be correct.

In response to The Meaning of Life
Comment author: [deleted] 18 September 2010 01:28:10PM *  13 points [-]

I liked this post.

I needed a few solid years of good strong individualist pep-talks before I was at all ready to be an adult.

"Non serviam,"

"I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine,"

"Listen to the fools reproach! It is a kingly title!"

"I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do."

"Truth forever on the scaffold/ Wrong forever on the throne,"

and so on. (This song is in the same vein. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZnV6hKhFDs)

There's a cluster of writers (generally science fiction, libertarian, and atheist, with a little Tom Paine and Blake and Joyce in the mix) who were really good at inspiring me to be less automatically servile, more willing to stand for things on my own, less excessively guilty. I actually knew some people who were like that in real life, and would say things to the effect that they'd rather die on their feet than live on their knees. Wonderful folks.

As time goes by, I find that the more I internalize personal independence, the less overt it becomes, and the less I seek out writing that has a propagandistic tone -- I find I need it less and less. This might be why the post has a lukewarm reception around here -- it's the sort of writing that's for inspiring people not to be lapdogs. People who have not been lapdogs for a long time sometimes forget how important this kind of language can be. And people who are still between "denunciation and confession" like b1shop find it hard to imagine that there will be a time when they'll completely take personal independence for granted.

In response to comment by [deleted] on The Meaning of Life
Comment author: Vladimir_M 18 September 2010 07:51:07PM *  7 points [-]

SarahC:

There's a cluster of writers (generally science fiction, libertarian, and atheist, with a little Tom Paine and Blake and Joyce in the mix) who were really good at inspiring me to be less automatically servile, more willing to stand for things on my own, less excessively guilty. I actually knew some people who were like that in real life, and would say things to the effect that they'd rather die on their feet than live on their knees.

Trouble is, there are things in life where being servile and shutting up about your complaints is the only sane thing to do, and standing up for yourself would be a self-destructive act. Someone who consistently lives by the principle you cite will almost inevitably end up prematurely dead or in prison.

Of course, in many cases you'll benefit from standing up for yourself, and in fact, the willingness to do so is one of the main things that sets successful people apart from losers. However, the problem is not only how to tell these cases apart in practice (which can be very difficult by itself), but also how to manage inconsistent attitudes that you're supposed to have. Ideally, you'd like to suppress your aversion against servility in situations where it's rational be servile, to eliminate the temptation for self-destructive rebellion and avoid the unhappiness of being reminded of your subjugation and low status. At the same time, you want to feel bad about being servile in situations where it's rational to snap out of it and stand up for yourself -- but only in those. It seems to me that one of the marks of very successful people is that they're extremely well calibrated in this regard.

Comment author: wedrifid 18 September 2010 06:59:54PM *  2 points [-]

Yet out of all difficult questions I've ever discussed, this seems to be the hardest one to open a rational discussion about; the amount of sanctimoniousness and/or logical incoherence in the answers one typically gets is just staggering.

My experience is similar. Even people that are usually extremely rational go loopy.

One exception are several discussions I've read on Overcoming Bias, which at least asked the right questions, but unfortunately only scratched the surface in answering them.

I seem to recall one post there that specifically targeted the issue. But you did ask "what basis should" while Robin was just asserting a controversial is.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 18 September 2010 07:08:39PM 2 points [-]

wedrifid:

But you did ask "what basis should" while Robin was just asserting a controversial is.

I probably didn't word my above comment very well. I am also asking only for an accurate description of the controversial "is."

The fact is that nearly all people attach great moral importance to these issues, and what I'd like (at least for start) is for them to state the "shoulds" they believe in clearly, comprehensively, and coherently, and to explain the exact principles with which they justify these "shoulds." My above stated questions should be understood in these terms.

Comment author: [deleted] 18 September 2010 04:05:22PM *  4 points [-]

Um, all I was saying was that women and black people are underrepresented here, but that ought not be explained away by the subject matter of Less Wrong. What does that have to do with my cultural background or the typical mind fallacy? What part of that do you disagree with?

Well I will try to elaborate.

Same for being female, black, or most of the groups that we think of as adding to >diversity.

After I read this it struck me that you may value a much smaller space of diversity than I do. And that you probably value the very particular kinds of diversity (race, gender,some types of culture) much more or even perhaps to the exclusion of others (non-neurotypical, ideological and especially values). I'm not saying you don't (I can't know this) or that you should. I at first assumed you thought the way you do because you came up with a system more or less similar to my own, a incredibly unlikely event, that is why I scolded myself for employing the mind projection fallacy while providing a link pointing that this particular component is firmly integrated into the whole "stuff White people like" (for lack of a better word) culture that exists in the West so anyone I encounter online with whom I share the desire for certain spaces of diversity is on average overwhelmingly more likely to get it from that memplex.

Also while I'm certainly sympathetic about hoping one's values are practical, but one needs to learn to live with the possibility one's values are neutral or even impractical or perhaps conflicting with each other. I overall in principle support efforts to lower unnecessary barriers for people to join Lesswrong.But the OP doesn't seem to make it explicit that this is about values, and you wanting other Lesswrongers to live by your values but seems to communicate that its about it being the optimal course of improving rationality.

You haven't done this. Your argument so far has been to simply go from:

"arbitrary designated group/blacks/women are capable of rationality, but are underrepresented on Lesswrong"

to

"Lesswrong needs to divert some (as much as needed?) efforts to correct this."

Why?

Like I said lowering unnecessary barriers (actually you at this point even have to make the case that they exist and that they aren't simply the result of the other factors I described in the post) won't repel the people who already find LW interesting, so it should in principle get a more effective and healthy community.

However what if this should prove to be insufficient? Divert resources to change the preferences of designated under-represented groups? Add elements to Lesswrong that aren't strictly necessary to reach its stated objectives? Which is not to say we don't have them now, however the ones we have now probably cater to the largest potential pool of people predisposed to find LW's goals interesting.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Less Wrong: Open Thread, September 2010
Comment author: Vladimir_M 18 September 2010 06:46:13PM *  8 points [-]

Konkvistador:

After I read this it struck me that you may value a much smaller space of diversity than I do. And that you probably value the very particular kinds of diversity (race, gender,some types of culture) much more or even perhaps to the exclusion of others (non-neurotypical, ideological and especially values).

There is a fascinating question that I've asked many times in many different venues, and never received anything approaching a coherent answer. Namely, among all the possible criteria for categorizing people, which particular ones are supposed to have moral, political, and ideological relevance? In the Western world nowadays, there exists a near-consensus that when it comes to certain ways of categorizing humans, we should be concerned if significant inequality and lack of political and other representation is correlated with these categories, we should condemn discrimination on the basis of them, and we should value diversity as measured by them. But what exact principle determines which categories should be assigned such value, and which not?

I am sure that a complete and accurate answer to this question would open a floodgate of insight about the modern society. Yet out of all difficult questions I've ever discussed, this seems to be the hardest one to open a rational discussion about; the amount of sanctimoniousness and/or logical incoherence in the answers one typically gets is just staggering. One exception are several discussions I've read on Overcoming Bias, which at least asked the right questions, but unfortunately only scratched the surface in answering them.

Comment author: randallsquared 18 September 2010 05:21:15AM 1 point [-]

This would make things much happier both for them

If this is true, why aren't they doing it? I'm not convinced that the heightening of happiness you speak of is worth the lessening of happiness that those guys evidently believe would occur were they to change themselves (or alternatively, act like someone else for as long as it takes).

Comment author: Vladimir_M 18 September 2010 07:39:26AM *  7 points [-]

randallsquared:

If this is true, why aren't they doing it?

Because the necessary information is difficult to obtain in a clear and convincing form, and it's drowned in a vast sea of nonsense that's produced on this subject by just about every source of information in the modern society. Therefore, a great many people are unaware of the problem, or even actively misled about it due to the prevailing hypocritical norms for discussing the subject.

Comment author: wedrifid 18 September 2010 04:13:42AM 0 points [-]

In any physically possible case, in which the computer's speed can be arbitrarily close to c, things develop completely normally in the computer's own reference frame.

For the right right value of 'arbitrary' the computer never performs a single operation. The entire box is obliterated by collision with a stray electron before the processor can tick. The collision releases arbitrarily large amounts of energy and from there things just start getting messy.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 18 September 2010 07:13:27AM *  2 points [-]

In a thought experiment, you can assume anything, however unrealistic, as long as it's logically consistent with the theory on which you're basing it. Assuming away stray electrons is therefore OK in this particular thought experiment, since the assumption of a universe that would provide an endless completely obstacle-free path would still be consistent with special relativity. In fact, among the standard conventions for discussing thought experiments is not to bring up objections about such things, since it's presumed that the author is intentionally assuming them away to make a more essential point about something else.

In contrast, introducing objects that move at exactly the speed c into a thought experiment based on special relativity results in a logical inconsistency. It's the same mistake as if you assumed that Peano axioms hold and then started talking about a natural number such that zero is its successor. Since the very definition of such an object involves a logical contradiction, nothing useful can ever come out of such a discussion.

In response to The conscious tape
Comment author: ciphergoth 17 September 2010 07:25:13AM *  2 points [-]

A powerful computer in a sealed box is about to be fired away from the Earth at the speed of light; it will never produce output and we'll never see it again. From the point of view of perspective 1, the whole program is thus equivalent to a gigantic no-op. Nonetheless, I'd rather that the program running on it simulated conscious beings in Utopia than conscious beings in Hell. This I think forces me to perspective 2: that actually doing the calculations makes a moral difference.

EDIT: the "speed of light" thing was a mistake. Make that "close to the speed of light".

Comment author: Vladimir_M 17 September 2010 07:58:17PM *  2 points [-]

I don't think your thought experiment is logically consistent. You're using a physical theory, namely special relativity, to discuss a case in which the theory explicitly refuses to say what happens, because it's considered unphysical within that theory.

If the computer moves at exactly the speed of light, and assuming special relativity, the time in which the computer will reach a given step of its program becomes undefined, not "never." In any physically possible case, in which the computer's speed can be arbitrarily close to c, things develop completely normally in the computer's own reference frame.

Moreover, if you observe the code of a program, it's just a string of bits (assuming a binary computer). And a string of bits can be interpreted as implementing any arbitrary program, given an arbitrary choice of the interpreter. Therefore, until an actual interpretation happens, what makes your hypothetical "hell" and "Utopia" essentially different?

Comment author: PhilGoetz 17 September 2010 06:02:03PM *  0 points [-]

Ouch. That hurts. This may be a better way to state the problem, because it doesn't intersect with the mysteries of time vs. static, and needing an observer.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 17 September 2010 07:17:35PM *  1 point [-]

You might also be interested in this recent comment of mine, if you haven't read it already:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/2m8/consciousness_of_simulations_uploads_a_reductio/2hky

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 17 September 2010 06:33:17PM *  2 points [-]

This surprises me. One explanation for the mismatch between my experience with Mensa and Adams' is that local groups vary a lot. Another is that he's making up a bunch of insults based on a cliche.

What I've seen of Mensa is people who seemed socially ordinary (bear in mind, my reference group is sf fandom), but not as intelligent as I hoped. I went to a couple of gatherings-- one had pretty ordinary discussion of Star Trek. Another was basically alright, but had one annoying person who'd been in the group so long that the other members didn't notice how annoying he was-- hardly a problem unique to Mensa.

Kate Jones, President of Kadon Games, is a Mensan and one of the more intelligent people I know. I know one other Mensan I consider intelligent, and there's no reason to think I have a complete list of the Mensans in my social circle.

I was in Mensa for a while-- I hoped it would be useful for networking, but I didn't get any good out of it. The publications were generally underwhelming-- there was a lot of articles which would start with more or less arbitrary definitions for words, and then an effort to build an argument from the definitions. This was in the 80s, and I don't know whether the organization has changed.

Still, if I'd lived in a small town with no access to sf fandom, Mensa might have been a best available choice for me.

These days, I'd say there are a lot of online communities for smart people.

All this being said, I suspect that IQ tests the like select for people with mild ADD (look! another question! no need to stay focused on a project!) and against people who want to do things which are directly connected to their goals.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 17 September 2010 07:09:58PM *  19 points [-]

I'd say that the problem is the selection effect for intelligent underachievers. People who are in the top 2% of the population by some widely recognized measure of intellectual accomplishment presumably already have affiliations, titles, and positions far more prestigious than the membership in an organization where the only qualification is passing a written test could ever be. Also, their everyday social circles are likely to consist of other individuals of the same caliber, so they have no need to seek them out actively.

Therefore, in an organization like Mensa, I would expect a strong selection effect for people who have the ability to achieve high IQ scores (whatever that might specifically imply, considering the controversies in IQ research), but who lack other abilities necessary to translate that into actual accomplishment and acquire recognition and connections among high-achieving people. Needless to say, such people are unlikely to end up as high-status individuals in our culture (or any other, for that matter). People of the sort you mention, smart enough to have flashes of extraordinary insight but unable to stay focused long enough to get anything done, likely account for some non-trivial subset of those.

That said, in such a decentralized organization, I would expect that the quality of local chapters and the sort of people they attract depends greatly on the ability and attitudes of the local leadership. There are probably places both significantly better and worse than what you describe.

Comment author: wedrifid 17 September 2010 06:54:37AM 2 points [-]

but probably hard to pull off in practice.

Really? I find it easier to pull off, given the colleagues I tend to build collaborative relationships with. In general it is a whole lot easier for me to work with girls than guys. Guys are more likely to compete, to try to force through bad ideas because they are being territorial. Control of the intellectual space is more important than getting stuff done, for obvious social and evolutionary reasons. On the other hand girls don't need to compete with me for the same social territory so a better balance of give and take can be reached.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 17 September 2010 04:04:14PM *  3 points [-]

The comment was about this particular case -- since Cyan complained about having few options in general, I figured that it made no sense to propose this additional enhancement. But yes, what you write is generally correct. This is also one of the principal reasons why women are on average better adapted to modern workplaces of white-collar drudgery, and are thus doing increasingly better in today's economy.

In addition, there is the basic fact that being surrounded by attractive people of the opposite sex creates a more pleasant environment, making one overall happier, more optimistic, and less prone to lethargy, especially for men. I've heard half-substantiated stories about companies that, under an informal policy, hire a certain number of attractive people who otherwise wouldn't pass muster, specifically to boost workplace morale.

Comment author: wedrifid 17 September 2010 06:08:06AM 3 points [-]

Bonus incentive if they are hot and of your sex of preference. (This is an entirely serious suggestion.)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 17 September 2010 06:22:35AM *  2 points [-]

That would indeed be a significant improvement over the basic scheme, but probably hard to pull off in practice.

Comment author: Cyan 17 September 2010 04:12:25AM *  0 points [-]

The only potential helpers competent to discuss the contents live in different cities (except possibly XFrequentist, if he's willing).

Comment author: Vladimir_M 17 September 2010 04:21:41AM 4 points [-]

It doesn't have to involve an in-depth discussion of the content. The important thing is to get the editing underway so as to dispel the ugh-field and get into the flow. For this, it should (hopefully) be sufficient to start doing things where any smart scientifically literate person will be able to provide some feedback. For example, devising the best way to organize tables and charts, figuring out how to reword hard-to-parse sentences and paragraphs, etc. You can even make it into a fun exercise where your non-expert collaborator tries to figure things out from the draft while you explain the details that are assumed as background knowledge, and you fix or fill in the text as you go forward. The possibilities are many.

Comment author: Cyan 17 September 2010 02:29:29AM *  9 points [-]

A request for help: I feel like I'm finally mastering my akrasia at work, but I have yet to find a technique to remove a pre-established Ugh Field. In this case, I have nearly complete drafts for two paper that I wrote as part of my Ph.D. thesis. I have a strong stress reaction to just thinking about opening the files (ETA: it's thinking about doing the work that causes the reaction; opening the files is just the first step in actually doing the work), but I want to want to whip them into shape and submit them for publication.

Less Wrong, other-optimize me!

Comment author: Vladimir_M 17 September 2010 03:39:28AM *  12 points [-]

Ask someone else to sit down together with you at the computer, open the files, and start reading and discussing them with you. Eventually, start editing them together. Tell your collaborator specifically to hang around for a while and disregard your (possible) requests to stop, until the work is well underway and you can continue with the flow.

This would of course require a significant commitment on part of the other person, but if this is really important, a good friend should be willing to help you, and you might even consider paying someone less close for their time and effort.

Comment author: jacob_cannell 17 September 2010 12:26:46AM *  2 points [-]

I don't understand what it could possibly mean for an output or an algorithm to be consciousness. Consciousness, whatever it might be caused by or composed of, means subjective awareness of qualia.

Everything that exists can be described precisely by some physics or algorithm, down to the point where it's actually meaningless to differentiate between the algorithm and the process itself. If consciousness exists, there exists some algorithm that is exactly equivalent to it.

Saying the only response to any questions about consciousness is "I don't know" is equivalent to shielding consciousness with the holy eternal veil of mystery.

Within the fields of computational neuroscience and AI, we actually do know a great deal about the algorithms underlying the supposed mystery of 'consciousness'. We dont' know enough yet to engineer a conscious machine, but that isn't so far away.

We had a general idea of how the heart worked long before we made an artificial heart, and we are in a similar situation with the brain. But the brain happens to be more complex than the heart.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 17 September 2010 03:29:15AM 2 points [-]

jacob_cannell:

Everything that exists can be described precisely by some physics or algorithm, down to the point where it's actually meaningless to differentiate between the algorithm and the process itself.

What exactly is an "algorithm," according to your usage of the term?

In response to The conscious tape
Comment author: Will_Sawin 17 September 2010 01:57:19AM 2 points [-]

Suppose we view consciousness as both a specific type of computation and a specific range of computable functions. For any N, there will always be a lookup table that appears conscious for a length of time N, in particular, "the lifetime of the conscious creature being simulated". A lookup table, as Eliezer once argued, is more like a cellphone than a person - it must have been copied off of some sort of real, conscious entity.

Is the feature of a lookup table that makes it unconscious its improbability without certain types of computation, that is, the large amount of code? Is consciousness computing some function without using much code? That doesn't seem right.

A Turing machine is much more reasonable than a lookup table.

Premise 1: I am conscious. Premise 2: The physical universe I am part of may be computable. Therefore: The physical universe I am part of may be a Turing machine. Conclusion: Aspects of a Turing machine computation may be conscious.

What are aspects of a computation? I know them when I see them, or at least do occasionally. There is no reason I know of that a rigorous definition is impossible.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 17 September 2010 02:47:37AM *  4 points [-]

However, in physical reality, there exist no Turing machines. There are only finite state machines whose behavior emulates a quasi-Turing machine with a finite tape (or an analogous crippled finite version of some other Turing-complete theoretical construct).

Now, every finite-state machine can be implemented using a lookup table and a transition function that simply performs a lookup based on the current state and input. Any computers we have now or in the future can be only clever optimizations of this model. For example, von Neumann machines (i.e. computers as we know them) avoid the impossibly large lookup table by implementing the transition function in the form of a processor that, at each step, examines one small subset of the state and produces a new state that differs only by another small subset based on simple rules. (I'm describing the effect of a single machine instruction, of course.)

So, the question is: what exactly makes a lookup table deficient compared to a "real" computer, whatever that might be?

Comment author: mattnewport 16 September 2010 05:47:18PM *  2 points [-]

It says they controlled for a variety of variables but the obvious question is whether families / cultures that discourage pre-marital sex also discourage divorce and whether this was controlled for. I don't have time to read the paper now so if anyone knows the answer to that I'd be interested.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 17 September 2010 02:13:40AM *  5 points [-]

I read Teachman's paper in the meantime; overall, it looks like a solid piece of work. The controls are definitely not broad enough to rule out the above hypothesis directly. This however should not be held against him, since this question is outside the scope of the study, and it would be a very difficult task to come up with controls that cover all such possible familial and cultural influences reliably.

Nevertheless, it seems to me that the basic finding of the paper is inconsistent with the above hypothesis. One would expect that conservative families and subcultures discourage premarital sex and (especially!) cohabitation even between future spouses to a significant extent. Therefore, if the effect of premarital sex on divorce risk is entirely due to such influences, we would expect to see a difference between women who practiced cohabitation or premarital sex only with their future husbands and those who didn't practice it at all. Yet as Slumlord points out, the striking result is exactly that there is no such difference.

That said, this finding is inconsistent with a previous study that looked into the question of why exactly virginity at marriage predicts lower probabilities of divorce: J.R. Kahn & K.A. London, Premarital Sex and the Risk of Divorce. (Unfortunately, I haven't found an ungated version.) Kahn & London's conclusion was that this is because lack of premarital sex correlates with traditionalist attitudes, i.e. basically the above hypothesis. However, their conclusion is based on a complex statistical model that makes it look quite far-fetched to me. Frankly, I lack the statistical knowledge to judge it reliably and authoritatively, but in any case, Teachman's work looks like a much stronger and more straightforward piece of evidence that points in the contrary direction.

[Update: after rummaging through the literature a bit more, I found a letter to the editor by one Tim Heaton, published in the same journal (vol. 55, p. 240), which harshly criticizes the soundness of Kahn & London's statistics. This was followed by an unconvincing response by K&L, presenting the usual cop-out of the sort, yes, our methodology is lousy, but we couldn't do any better. On the whole, my above conclusions are further reinforced by this finding.]

Comment author: HughRistik 12 September 2010 11:10:22PM 9 points [-]

This seems like an excellent reason for men to object to PUA: it focuses mainly on one night stands and short term relationships,

I've posted some thoughts on the orientation of PUAs to relationships. Although many PUAs do focus on short term relationships, most of what they are doing would be the same even for long-term relationships.

As far as I can tell, limiting factor of most PUAs in attracting women for either short-term or long-term relationships is that they are insufficiently masculine, high-status, and exciting. At least, with young women, who may well be skewed towards short-term mating (contra the stereotypical assumption that women always want relationships).

Young men are often accused of being "led by their dicks" when choosing mates. I think there is something analogous going on with young women. Even though in the abstract they may want relationships, they also want highly sexually attractive guys. And the most sexually attractive guy out there for many women isn't necessarily the guy who would make a good long-term relationship partner.

So if you are a young guy and you want a relationship with a young woman, you have to deal with competition from guys running a flashy short-term mating strategy. For a woman to notice you and be interested in getting to know you well enough to even think of you as a long-term mate, you have to outshine the local badboys. If you try to present yourself as stable, romantic, long-term mate from the start, you will be consistently overlooked.

Of course, not all women are following this type of mating strategy where most of their attention goes to the flashiest males, who they then try to "convert" into long-term mates. In fact, I'm willing to bet that there is at least a reasonable minority of women who only go for long-term mates. But it's common enough that men need to be aware of it. It pays for young men to have the kind of flashy presentation that PUAs teach, regardless of whether they are looking for short-term or long-term relationships.

which may reduce the ease and likelihood of pair bonding for the woman, later in life

I've seen this idea before, but I wonder if we actually have any empirical evidence that it is true that short-term mating reduces the likelihood of pair bonding for women later in life. My gut reaction is that this may be true for some female phenotypes, but not for others.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 16 September 2010 04:51:17PM *  6 points [-]

HughRistik:

I've seen this idea before, but I wonder if we actually have any empirical evidence that it is true that short-term mating reduces the likelihood of pair bonding for women later in life.

I just ran into an interesting link that's highly pertinent for this topic. Slumlord discusses a paper that provides for a very strong case that the answer is yes:
http://socialpathology.blogspot.com/2010/09/sexual-partner-divorce-risk.html

(H/t Thursday via OB.) I haven't had the time to read the paper in detail, but on a casual look, it seems quite convincing.

Comment author: kodos96 16 September 2010 07:41:53AM 0 points [-]

I've never been able to get over the initial learning curve of emacs or vi.... every once in awhile I try for a few days, but find myself not advancing up the curve fast enough to get real work done and end up ditching it for a conventional editor. Do you have any tips for how to quickly bring yourself up to speed on one of the editors, i.e. get far enough up the learning curve to be more productive with it than with a traditional editor, in a short period of time?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 16 September 2010 03:37:33PM *  0 points [-]

I use emacs as my editor of choice, though I've never really become a super-expert in it, and I recommend it warmly.

What I advise is to make a list of basic keyboard commands and look it up whenever you're doing something; in my experience, you should memorize them effectively very soon. What I would initially include into the list are basic file commands (opening, saving, navigation, revert-buffer), copy/paste, find/search/replace, and etags commands (if you're programming). If you want, you can post your list, and I can tell you what I think should be added to it. (I still occasionally find out about some amazingly useful feature I hadn't known.)

Also, the default setup for emacs can be ugly and inconvenient, so the first step should be to customize your .emacs configuration file. You can find lots of good examples if you just google for them, and modify one as you like. By the way, if you can, install emacs 23, which supports magnificent anti-aliased fonts.

Comment author: komponisto 16 September 2010 04:23:56AM *  11 points [-]

I should clarify that I was specifically referring to the interesting placement of that superscript 2. :-)

EDIT: Though actually, this is probably the perfect opportunity to wonder if the reason people join this community is that it's probably the easiest high-IQ group to join in the world: you don't have to pass a test or earn a degree; all you have to do is write intelligent blog comments.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 16 September 2010 04:31:25AM *  10 points [-]

Oh, then it was a misunderstanding. I thought you were (like me) amused by the poll result suggesting that the intelligence of the average person here is in the upper 99.865-th percentile.

(Just to get the feel for that number, belonging to the same percentile of income distribution in the U.S. would mean roughly a million dollars a year.)

Comment author: komponisto 16 September 2010 03:51:41AM 10 points [-]

According to the survey, the average IQ on this site is around 145^2

I can't possibly have been the only one to have been amused by this.

(Well, doesn't Clippy claim to be a superintelligence?)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 16 September 2010 04:13:20AM *  15 points [-]

According to the survey, the average IQ on this site is around 145

I can't possibly have been the only one to have been amused by this.

The really disturbing possibility is that average people hanging out here might actually be of the sort that solves IQ tests extremely successfully, with scores over 140, but whose real-life accomplishments are far below what these scores might suggest. In other words, that there might be a selection effect for the sort of people that Scott Adams encountered when he joined Mensa:

I decided to take an I.Q. test administered by Mensa, the organization of geniuses. If you score in the top 2% of people who take that same test, you get to call yourself a “genius” and optionally join the group. I squeaked in and immediately joined so I could hang out with the other geniuses and do genius things. I even volunteered to host some meetings at my apartment.

Then, the horror.

It turns out that the people who join Mensa and attend meetings are, on average, not successful titans of industry. They are instead – and I say this with great affection – huge losers. I was making $735 per month and I was like frickin’ Goldfinger in this crowd. We had a guy who was some sort of poet who hoped to one day start “writing some of them down.” We had people who were literally too smart to hold a job. The rest of the group dressed too much like street people to ever get past security for a job interview. And everyone was always available for meetings on weekend nights.

Comment author: Jonathan_Graehl 16 September 2010 12:25:41AM *  4 points [-]

I'm unsure how much alcohol I should drink.

I'm perfectly happy abstaining. And I know that my memory and computer programming abilities are temporarily impaired by even one drink.

But there's fairly persuasive evidence that several drinks daily causes old people to live longer. With the notable exception of social isolation (people tend to drink more when they're socializing), just about everything I can imagine was controlled for.

Background: Growing epidemiological evidence indicates that moderate alcohol consumption is associated with reduced total mortality among middle-aged and older adults. However, the salutary effect of moderate drinking may be overestimated owing to confounding factors. Abstainers may include former problem drinkers with existing health problems and may be atypical compared to drinkers in terms of sociodemographic and social-behavioral factors. The purpose of this study was to examine the association between alcohol consumption and all-cause mortality over 20 years among 1,824 older adults, controlling for a wide range of potential confounding factors associated with abstention. Methods: The sample at baseline included 1,824 individuals between the ages of 55 and 65. The database at baseline included information on daily alcohol consumption, sociodemographic factors, former problem drinking status, health factors, and social-behavioral factors. Abstention was defined as abstaining from alcohol at baseline. Death across a 20-year follow-up period was confirmed primarily by death certificate.

Results: Controlling only for age and gender, compared to moderate drinkers, abstainers had a more than 2 times increased mortality risk, heavy drinkers had 70% increased risk, and light drinkers had 23% increased risk. A model controlling for former problem drinking status, existing health problems, and key sociodemographic and social-behavioral factors, as well as for age and gender, substantially reduced the mortality effect for abstainers compared to moderate drinkers. However, even after adjusting for all covariates, abstainers and heavy drinkers continued to show increased mortality risks of 51 and 45%, respectively, compared to moderate drinkers.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 16 September 2010 03:36:49AM *  5 points [-]

Another thing that should be taken into account -- though, as far as I know, it's not discussed explicitly by any serious research into the subject -- is that with many people who drink, being a total abstainer can be a great obstacle to building trust .

From what I've observed, drinkers are apt to be prejudiced against abstainers in social situations, treating them as prissy and judgmental types in front of whom one should be extremely cautious before divulging any potentially compromising opinions and information. I myself usually have this attitude when I first meet people in parties and similar places, and I think it is on the whole a useful heuristic, though I will quickly override it as soon as I get more information about the person. (There are several people who are abstainers and nevertheless enjoy the highest level of trust from me.) I obviously have no systematic data, but it does seem like lots of people employ the same heuristic, though many would never admit it explicitly.

Comment author: patrissimo 15 September 2010 05:26:24AM 12 points [-]

I'm productive, and I've been paid > $100/hr for my work (at Google, before moving to the non-profit sector), and could have multiple offers to do that again in multiple fields anytime I wanted.

I loved parts of my work, sure, but there were also large parts of it that I had to forcibly direct my attention to. The best tasks to be the most productive are rarely the most fun. And in a world of compelling entertainment, reading the latest blogs, books, watching TV, surfing the web, are always fighting for people's attention. Mine at least. To direct my attention to productive activities, to my consciously chosen goals and the best tasks to achieve them, is hard Work.

Yes, there are moments of flow, moments we love, moments that draw our attention. And the more of those, the better we've chosen our work. But I think you have a huge selection bias - it may be that the most productive people are the ones who enjoy a coincidence between what they do and what draws their attention, but I doubt that very many jobs offer that overlap or that we can employ very many people that way. Hence, for most people, the way to be more productive is to get better at directing their attention.

As another angle, I completely love my current employment role - running an organization trying to build startup countries on the ocean. I love the mission I work on, I love the people I work with, I am one of those incredibly fortunate people who is doing what they love. But the tasks I need to accomplish each day to work towards my audacious and inspiring goal? Yawn. Bleh. I think that's just because inspiring goals often require boring subgoals and tasks, not because I haven't picked the right job.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 15 September 2010 07:21:37PM *  6 points [-]

patrissimo:

But the tasks I need to accomplish each day to work towards my audacious and inspiring goal? Yawn. Bleh. I think that's just because inspiring goals often require boring subgoals and tasks, not because I haven't picked the right job.

You are indeed lucky to have such inspiring goals. For many people in modern workplaces, the trouble is that they not only have no such exalted motivating goals, but they don't even have any clear sense of what exactly their work is supposed to achieve -- or worse, they often clearly see that the tedious tasks they must perform are completely pointless and useless in the overall scheme of things. I mean the sort of thing which is the basic running theme of Dilbert.

This can have such soul-crushing effects that it's hard to find motivation even for living, let alone productivity. The real challenge is how to force yourself to be productive (or "productive"?) in ways necessary to prosper in such an environment if you're condemned to it, as increasing numbers of people are.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 15 September 2010 06:56:45PM *  0 points [-]

Was this perchance motivated by the unpleasantness that developed in a recent thread? In any case, the point (3) in the article you link to seems highly pertinent in that context, and I would venture to say, the point (5) also.

Comment author: wedrifid 15 September 2010 08:03:56AM *  1 point [-]

As for gender, well, I'd better not go into that topic. I'll just point out that people have been writing about these matters since the dawn of history, and it's very naive (though sadly common nowadays) to believe that only our modern age has managed to achieve accurate insight and non-evil attitudes about them.

Dawn of history? Now I'm imagining uncovering writing on the wall of caves: "Why women make better hunters" and expressing indignation at under-representation of females in cave paintings of battles.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 15 September 2010 04:14:00PM 0 points [-]

What Constant said. I meant "history" in the narrow technical sense of the word, i.e. the period since the invention of writing.

Comment author: CronoDAS 15 September 2010 02:49:07AM 0 points [-]

Mercy:

The range of held opinions on the construction of gender, criminal punishment and both the nature and the contents of history is much broader than one hundred years ago.

Frankly, I disagree with that statement so deeply that I'm at a loss how to even begin my response to it. Either we're using radically different measures of breadth, or one (or both?) of us has had a grossly inadequate and unrepresentative exposure to the thought of each of these epochs.

Two hundred years ago, then?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 15 September 2010 06:09:49AM *  3 points [-]

Two hundred years ago, the institutions were very different, and there was much less total intellectual output than a century ago, so it's much harder to do a fair comparison because it's less clear what counts as mainstream and significant.

However, the claim is still flat false at least when it comes to criminal punishment. In fact, in the history of the Western world, the period of roughly two hundred years ago was probably the very pinnacle of the diversity of views on legal punishment. On the one extreme, one could still find prominent advocates of brutal torturous execution methods like the breaking wheel (which were occasionally used in some parts of Europe well into the 19th century), and on the other, out-and-out death penalty abolitionists. (For example, the Grand Duchy of Tuscany abolished the death penalty altogether in 1786, and it was abolished almost completely in Russia around the mid-18th century.) One could also find all sorts of in-between views on all sides, of course. Admittedly, one would be hard-pressed to find someone advocating a prison system of the sort that exists nowadays, but that would have been economically impossible back in those far poorer times (modern prisons cost tens of thousands of dollars per prisoner-year, not even counting the cost of building them).

Depending on what exactly is meant by "the nature and the contents of history," one could certainly point out many interesting perspectives that could be found 200 years ago, but not today anymore. That, however, is a very complex question. As for gender, well, I'd better not go into that topic. I'll just point out that people have been writing about these matters since the dawn of history, and it's very naive (though sadly common nowadays) to believe that only our modern age has managed to achieve accurate insight and non-evil attitudes about them.

Comment author: jacob_cannell 15 September 2010 01:03:15AM 1 point [-]

What's the name of the bias of judging messages based on the messenger?

I'm sure someone has discussed that here before .. the source heuristic? attribution/authority bias?

I suspect part of my problem is that everyone I've personally met who advocated the paleo diet was also into homeopathy and crystal healing, and didn't actually have any idea what paleolithic humans really ate.

Interesting. Most of the new age types I have met are into vegetarianism.

I discovered the paleolithic diet in the late 90's through this wonderful website devoted to it which I can no longer find. It presented a very convincing scientific case.

Humans evolved as opportunistic omnivores. Our bodies can run efficiently on a wide variety of diets. But nonetheless they are tuned to a certain range of conditions, and as you stray from that range random failures accumulate.

We changed suddenly in the shift to agriculture, and the archeological record shows that our bodies suffered - the move from meat rich paleolithic hunter-gatherer diets to neolithic agricultural diets is associated with a marked decrease in average height and overall ill-health. If I remember correctly, the average male european height was around 6'2"" 10k yrs ago, declined by half a foot in the neolithic age, and still has not fully recovered.

The evidence is also more specific. In every case where we have good specific evidence for biochemical problems in the diet, those problems are caused by dietary novelties. Examples: glycemic load, omega fatty acid profiles, potassium/sodium levels, nutrient load, etc - all of these are solved by the paleolithic diet.

So the real question is now that we have discovered all of these issues with the modern diet, how many other issues remain that we have yet to discover?

two of the biggest changes to my mind would be a dramatic increase in starch consumption and an even larger increase in cooked versus raw food. However, I haven't seen evidence that either of those is specifically a negative change, whereas increase in sugar consumption has been conclusively shown to be a big dietary evil

Starch turns into sugar near immediately - your saliva can almost do the job itself, but the transformation completes quickly in the stomach. You should look at a piece of bread and instead see a mound of sugar. Actually, the bread is more sugarey than table sugar - it converts more quickly into pure glucose from what I recall.

Starch is the staple of the neolithic agricultural revolution. Cheap energy for the masses. It works, and typical humans as of today already have adapted significantly, but not nearly as much as we should. These cheap fuels lessen our lifespan. Some specific humans have not had nearly as much time to adapt - some native american tribes in particular - and they react in a spectacularly poor fashion on modern diets.

You also mention cooking, but this is not a new neolithic change. There is some debate, but general consensus is that cooking has been around for much longer than 10k yrs, and we have had more time to adapt to it. Nonetheless, overcooked food has specific problems - mainly carcinogens.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 15 September 2010 01:44:08AM *  2 points [-]

jacob_cannell:

We changed suddenly in the shift to agriculture, and the archeological record shows that our bodies suffered - the move from meat rich paleolithic hunter-gatherer diets to neolithic agricultural diets is associated with a marked decrease in average height and overall ill-health. If I remember correctly, the average male european height was around 6'2"" 10k yrs ago, declined by half a foot in the neolithic age, and still has not fully recovered.

I've seen this claim many times from a bunch of people, but never accompanied by references to literature. Do you know what exact work it is based on, and how controversial it is in expert circles?

Comment author: Mercy 15 September 2010 12:22:21AM *  0 points [-]

Well I can see that in certain areas, but it depends on where you look. The range of held opinions on the construction of gender, criminal punishment and both the nature and the contents of history is much broader than one hundred years ago. The range of opinions on the morality of war is far narrower.

In any case, I meant mainstream in the sense that top 40 is mainstream, not in the sense that music is mainstream. Perhaps orthodoxy would be a better word? In fashion there is usually a single current orthodoxy about how people should dress, so it's easy to identify these circles of heterodoxy and reactionism. Other issues show multiple competing orthodoxies, each of which appears contrary to the other.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 15 September 2010 01:33:32AM *  6 points [-]

Mercy:

The range of held opinions on the construction of gender, criminal punishment and both the nature and the contents of history is much broader than one hundred years ago.

Frankly, I disagree with that statement so deeply that I'm at a loss how to even begin my response to it. Either we're using radically different measures of breadth, or one (or both?) of us has had a grossly inadequate and unrepresentative exposure to the thought of each of these epochs.

Yes, certain ideas that were in the minority back then have been greatly popularized and elaborated in the meantime, and one could arguably even find an occasional original perspective developed since then. However, it seems evident to me that by any reasonable measure, this effect has been completely overshadowed by the sheer range of perspectives that have been ostracized from the respectable mainstream during the same period, or even vanished altogether.

In fashion there is usually a single current orthodoxy about how people should dress, so it's easy to identify these circles of heterodoxy and reactionism. Other issues show multiple competing orthodoxies, each of which appears contrary to the other.

But in the matters of opinion, there is also a clearly defined -- and, as I've argued, nowadays quite narrow -- range of orthodoxy, and it's common knowledge which opinions will be perceived as contrarian and controversial (if they push the envelope) or extremist and altogether disreputable (if they reach completely outside of it). I honestly don't see on what basis you could possibly argue that the orthodoxy of fashion is nowadays stricter and tighter than the orthodoxy of opinion.

Comment author: Mercy 14 September 2010 12:50:58PM 3 points [-]

I'm a little confused, what purpose does this distinction serve? That people like to define their opinions as a rebellion against received opinion isn't novel. What you seem to be saying is: defining yourself against an opinion which is seen as contrarian sends a reliably different social signal to defining yourself against an opinion which is mainstream, is that a fair assessment? Because this only works if there is a singular, visible mainstream, which is obviously available in fashion but rare in the realm of ideas.

Moreover, if order-of-contrariness doesn't convey information, I can't see any situation in which one it would be helpful to indicate a positions order, where it wouldn't be just as easy and far more informative to point out the specific chain of it's controversy.

In any case I take some issue with a bunch of your example.

Firstly on feminism the obvious mainstream controversy/metacontroversy dynamic for misogyny is between second and third wave feminism in academia, and between "all sex is rape" and "pole dancing is empowering/Madonna is a feminist icon" in the media. Picking an obscure internet phenomenon closer to the starting point is blatant cherry picking.

Similarly the Bad Samaritans/New Development argument has a lot more currency than the aid is the problem one, but again that's further from both positions. For that matter the same applies to liberterianism and it's real Laius, socialism.

The number of global warming skeptics who jumped straight from "it's not happening" to "well we didn't do it" to "well we can't do anything about it without doing more harm than good" should also, combined with the overlap in arguments between self identified MRAs and younger misogynists of the "straight white christian men are the most oppressed minority" variety, give us a bit of pause. If there's any use to identifying meta contrarian positions, it has to be in distinguishing between genuine attempts to correct falsehoods made in overeager argument with the old mainstream, and sophisticated apologetics for previously exploded positions.

On second thought, convincing as I find the Stern report, enough economists argued against reducing carbon emissions on cost-benefit grounds from the beginning that the meta position deserves honest consideration. I'd like to propose instead deism as the canonical example for bad faith apologia in meta-contrarianist drag, and third wave feminism for the honest position. Is this suitably uncontroversial?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 14 September 2010 07:13:12PM *  6 points [-]

Mercy:

Because this only works if there is a singular, visible mainstream, which is obviously available in fashion but rare in the realm of ideas.

However, it seems to me that such mainstream does exist. Compared to the overall range of ideas that have been held throughout the history of humanity, and even the overall range of ideas that I believe people could hold without being crazy or monstrous, the range acceptable in today's mainstream discourse looks awfully narrow to me. It also seems to me very narrow by historical standards -- for example, when I look at the 19th century books I've read, I see an immensely greater diversity of ideas than one can see from the modern authors that occupy a comparable mainstream range. (This of course doesn't apply to hard sciences, in which the accumulation of knowledge has a monotonous upward trend.)

Of course, like every human society, ours is also shaken by passionate controversies. However, most of those that I observe in practice are between currents that are overall very similar from a broader perspective.

Comment author: loqi 14 September 2010 05:19:41PM 16 points [-]

Whenever holding a position makes you feel superior and is fun to talk about, that's a good sign that the position is not just practical, but signaling related.

Readers be warned: Internalizing this insight may result in catastrophic loss of interest in politics.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 14 September 2010 06:44:38PM *  10 points [-]

Perhaps for some people -- but on the other hand, it creates an even higher intellectual challenge to achieve accurate understanding. Understanding hard and complicated things in math and science is extremely challenging, but ultimately, you still have fully reliable trusted authorities to turn to when you're lost, and you know they won't lie and bullshit you. In politics and heavily politicized fields in general, there is no such safety net; you are completely on your own.

Comment author: HughRistik 13 September 2010 04:06:44AM *  11 points [-]

Second, and more important, for a typical woman, the attractiveness of men she can get for non-serious temporary relationships is significantly higher than the attractiveness of her realistic options for permanent commitment. (This also holds far more so than the reverse.) It follows that when a woman with a variegated relationship history finally settles down, it will likely be with a man whose attractiveness is significantly lower than those she's been involved with in the past.

Excellent point; I was thinking along similar lines in this comment.

I think part of the reason that I found komponisto's original comment in the thread to be less offensive than others was because it instantly reminded me of the hypothesis you describe, which is a potential way of rationalizing his comment.

The argument goes something like this: For many gender-typical heterosexual women, the guys who are the most sexually exciting may not always be the best relationship partners. This could be partly be because the men who are highly attractive to women are also highly attractive to other women, and have so much options that it's difficult for particular women to get them in a relationship. Men have lower standards for short-term partners than for long-term partners. It could also be because, for some women, there is a tradeoff between the traits that make a guy a good long-term partner, and the traits that make him sexually exciting. For example, certain masculine traits like dominance are sexually exciting to some women, but may nevertheless be frustrating to deal with in an actual relationship.

The argument proceeds by suggesting that since the most sexually exciting guys are the worst relationship prospects (for some women), everyone could be better off if women also "gave a chance" to slightly less attractive men who could be better relationship prospects. Women should decide what they want in men by taking into account more than just sex appeal, the argument goes, and the result would be that women don't restrict their dating to only the most sexually exciting guys around at the time.

Now, I call this "the argument" because I'm not sold on it myself. The fact is that people, especially young people, like excitement. I'm not really interested in saying that women should go for guys who bore them, even if those guys might be more stable. Yet I think that this argument should be one that we can entertain; it's a rationalization of komponisto's original argument, and it takes into account women's interests. Furthermore, to the extent that there is conflict between different elements of women's preferences (e.g. desire for excitement vs. desire for a long-term relationship), women may be free to decide which elements of their preferences are most important, and which they should act on.

The other reason that I'm skeptical of asking women to change is that it's not really their fault that there can be such a tradeoff between sexual attractiveness and long-term potential in males. To some degree, that tradeoff is inevitable because it's logically impossible for men to be dominant and non-dominant at the same time, and it's empirically difficult to find men who have high level of both stereotypically masculine and feminine traits. Yet some of that tradeoff is cultural: male socialization seems to put men on "tracks" of either a drab "nice guy" long-term mating strategy, or a more exciting "bad boy" short-term mating strategy. The attractiveness of a lot of men in the former category is artificially deflated by harmful cultural forces.

It's not women's fault, if a lot of the time, the only choices they are faced with is "sexually exciting badboy who will get tired of me in a month," and "boring, sweet nerdy guy who I'm only marginally attracted to." This is a tough menu for women to face, and I don't think the choice they should make is obvious. It would be better for everyone if the second guy had a bit more of an edge, making him a credible object of female desire and credible contender to the badboy. Thanks to the seduction community, that guy can now get more of an edge.

(I propose that female attraction as a function of masculinity is non-linear for some women: it's more like a bell-curve or a threshold function. Some women always want more masculinity in men; others are happy with a certain amount. Unfortunately, the amount of masculinity that most women want is more than a lot of the guys who would make good long-term mates have. This could steer women towards dating guys who are masculinity-overkill and poor long-term mates, since those are the only guys above the threshold of attractiveness.)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 14 September 2010 06:09:23AM *  7 points [-]

HughRistik:

(I propose that female attraction as a function of masculinity is non-linear for some women: it's more like a bell-curve or a threshold function. Some women always want more masculinity in men; others are happy with a certain amount. Unfortunately, the amount of masculinity that most women want is more than a lot of the guys who would make good long-term mates have. This could steer women towards dating guys who are masculinity-overkill and poor long-term mates, since those are the only guys above the threshold of attractiveness.)

I absolutely agree with this observation. The saddest thing is that most of the "nice" guys could ramp up their masculinity with some reasonable effort, and without compromising any of the existing aspects of their personality that they value. This would make things much happier both for them and for women, who are nowadays indeed facing a severe shortage of men that are both good long-term prospects and above some reasonable threshold of masculinity. Yet it's virtually impossible to open this topic in public, let alone present any concrete advice on how to actually achieve this goal, without triggering all sorts of politically correct alarms.

Comment author: liberalbiorealist 13 September 2010 09:55:27PM 0 points [-]

While you may find appeals to arguments from the regression to the mean to be "horrendously bad", I can only report that, so far as I have been able to make out, the logical legitimacy of such arguments is pretty much taken for granted among the disputants on both sides of the IQ nature/nurture controversy.

The first link you point to, which seems most directly to address the issue of regression to the mean, in turn points to papers which were written about 30 years ago or more, without, it seems, anyone in the dispute taking them seriously.

Don't you think that that would suggest that there's something deficient in the argument that use of regression to the mean in this context is a logical fallacy?

Here's the basic problem with claiming that regression to the mean in the context of, say, human traits is simply some mathematical artifact: it does nothing to explain WHY there should be a regression to the mean.

Yes, not only do the average IQs (or heights) of children regress to the mean from the average IQs of their parents; the opposite is also true -- the average IQs (or heights) of parents regress to the mean from the average IQs of their children. Does that mean that there is no causal relation established by regression to the mean effects? No, absolutely not. It only establishes that the direction of a causal arrow can't be determined from the fact of regression to the mean alone. But we know the direction of that arrow, if the cause is genetic (or environmental, presumably): it goes from parents to children, not the other way around. When we understand this, we can also explain why we see regression to the mean in the other direction as well; the same underlying set of causes are working, though, again, the direction of the causal arrow is opposite.

The fact of regression to the mean strongly argues that there is SOME underlying causal mechanism (be it genetic or environmental or a combination) that explains that fact. Why is it that the children of high IQ parents regress partly to the mean, but not all the way?

Regression to the mean in traits in both directions, from children to parents and vice versa, can be explained by luck -- those parents or children who have greater IQs or greater heights are, on average, luckier than average; they are, in particular, luckier than their own children or parents, respectively. But what are they luckier AT? What have they received more of? If one says, genes that increase the trait in question, then a perfectly coherent explanation emerges. One might say that they've received a better environment -- but that becomes a very difficult explanation in the case of IQ, since typically quite the opposite seems to be true (parents with high IQs have on average greater incomes and generally should establish a better environment for their children than they themselves experienced.)

In short, the existence of regression to the mean in the expression of traits across generations presents an important fact -- one that one might not a priori expect. Something must explain that fact. Do you seriously think that that explanatory problem simply goes away by declaring that appeals to regression to the mean constitute a "logical fallacy"?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 14 September 2010 03:50:23AM *  6 points [-]

liberalbiorealist:

While you may find appeals to arguments from the regression to the mean to be "horrendously bad", I can only report that, so far as I have been able to make out, the logical legitimacy of such arguments is pretty much taken for granted among the disputants on both sides of the IQ nature/nurture controversy.

The first link you point to, which seems most directly to address the issue of regression to the mean, in turn points to papers which were written about 30 years ago or more, without, it seems, anyone in the dispute taking them seriously.

I pointed out these papers because among the literature I’ve read on the topic, they present the best discussions and explanations of this issue. They are definitely not the last thing that’s ever been written on the subject. And while Mackenzie’s paper is indeed (yet undeservedly!) forgotten and obscure, Furby’s has been cited widely throughout the last four decades (just google for its title).

Furthermore, the logical validity of the regression argument is by no means “taken for granted” on both sides. I recommend that you read James Flynn’s 1980 book Race, IQ, and Jensen (dated, but still well worth reading), which presents a refutation of it by a prominent participant in the controversy. (It’s on pages 64-67 -- you might be able to find it on Google Books preview.) Another refutation, written by Nathan Brody, can be found in the 2003 volume The Scientific Study of General Intelligence: a Tribute to Arthur Jensen, edited by Helmut Nyborg (pages 404-407). The regression argument has also been dismissed as invalid in numerous books and papers by Richard Nisbett and many others, with refutations of varying detail and quality.

Also, an interesting critical discussion of the quality of Jensen’s statistics in general, which also addressed the regression arguments, was featured in the fall 2001 issue of the journal Chance. (Jensen himself also contributed.)

On the whole, unfortunately, a rather stupid situation has persisted since the seventies on this issue. Jensen and the other hereditarians stubbornly keep insisting on the same decades-old regression arguments, and their critics reply with more or less the same refutations. Neither side has made any further advance. However, while the anti-hereditarians can be blamed only for not coming up with more readable, clear, and in-depth counter-arguments, the hereditarians are, in my view, much more to blame because they keep bringing up the same invalid argument over and over.

(I have to add that on the whole, I have a lot of respect for Jensen as an intellectual figure, and I’m puzzled by his behavior when it comes to this particular issue. I should also stress that here I’m stating my opinion only on the specific issue of regression-based arguments, not about any other disputes that are relevant for this controversy.)

Here's the basic problem with claiming that regression to the mean in the context of, say, human traits is simply some mathematical artifact: it does nothing to explain WHY there should be a regression to the mean. [...] In short, the existence of regression to the mean in the expression of traits across generations presents an important fact -- one that one might not a priori expect. Something must explain that fact. Do you seriously think that that explanatory problem simply goes away by declaring that appeals to regression to the mean constitute a "logical fallacy"?

Honestly, with all due respect, I think you lack the necessary knowledge of statistics to reason about this issue correctly. Regression to the mean is not some unusual phenomenon that calls for a special explanation when observed. On the contrary, it is a mathematical necessity that happens whenever you have two imperfectly correlated variables (under some very generous mathematical assumptions, to be precise). For a rudimentary intuitive view, see the already discussed article by Neuroskeptic, and for detailed explanations, check out the above cited references.

In your post, you take the hopelessly muddled argument from Rushton and Jensen’s 2005 paper -- which is, incidentally, restated in their 2009 rebuttal of Nisbett’s subsequent criticism of it, thus completing another round of the decades long non-debate I described above. You then proceed to make an even bigger muddle out of it. If you insist, I can post a more detailed criticism, but if you intend to debate these topics publicly, I would advise you to acquire a greater familiarity with the relevant literature and the pertinent topics in statistics. Reading through the above listed references should give you an idea of where the problems with your argument are.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 13 September 2010 08:12:15PM *  12 points [-]

multifoliaterose:

I think it's important for those interested in the question of whether developing world aid is effective to look to those who can point to formal studies about the effectiveness of African aid rather than basing their judgments on quotes from individuals whose opinions may very well have been heavily skewed by selection bias and/or driven by ideological considerations which have nothing to do with the available evidence.

Trouble is, most of these studies are far from immaculate when it comes to the ideological or even career interests of their authors. In areas of research whose conclusions cannot be separated from their political and ideological implications, there is no rational reason to believe that the mainstream academic opinion is on the right track at all.

For example, you quote Jeffrey Sachs as someone whose expert authority is supposed to be a strong blow against Shikwati. But what do you expect from someone who has the career track and affiliations like Sachs when faced with such arguments? To say openly that his life work for which he's reaped status, fame, and power might have been, to a significant degree, a pernicious scam?

It reminds me of the dialogue from "Blackadder" when Edmund starts getting skeptical about his (16th century) doctor who insists that leeches are a cure-all:

Doctor: You know the leech comes to us on the highest authority?
Edmund: Yes. I know that. Dr. Hoffmann of Stuttgart, isn't it?
Doctor: That's right, the great Hoffmann!
Edmund: Owner of the largest leech farm in Europe.
Doctor: Yes!

Comment author: Apprentice 13 September 2010 01:48:47PM *  2 points [-]

Do you think Africans must be inherently inferior to Europeans?

I don't think Africans are inferior to Europeans and I doubt anyone reading this site would subscribe to that opinion. On the other hand I've noticed that many people around here feel that it is likely that there are some cognitive differences between human population groups and that it is likely that those have a partially genetic basis (for a readable and not overly one-sided version of this argument see e.g. here).

It's possible to imagine that cognitive differences between population groups would be important to consider in any project such as improving the lives of Africans and it's possible that this factor is currently mostly left out of consideration. Maybe this is a factor in the aid-skepticism of some of our colleagues here so maybe it would do some good to address this head-on.

I'm personally agnostic on a lot of questions here and feel a bit overwhelmed by all the factors involved. My wife and I pay for the education of a child in Africa. I hope that does some good but I can't claim any certainty on the question.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 13 September 2010 04:55:56PM *  4 points [-]

Apprentice:

(for a readable and not overly one-sided version of this argument see e.g. here).

That article you linked to is horrendously bad. This guy starts talking about multiple lines of evidence for the hereditarian hypothesis, cites a prominent paper surveying these lines, and then proclaims that the best and most decisive evidence is provided by the regression-to-the-mean phenomena. Which is in reality one gigantic logical fallacy, and quite possibly the weakest and most flawed argument ever set forth by Jensen and other prominent hereditarians. He then proceeds to spin his misunderstanding of this already catastrophically bad argument into an even more elaborate web of fallacies.

If you're interested in this topic, here are some links to recent LW discussions where you'll find a bunch of much better references. The first one specifically deals with regression to the mean:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/2nz/less_wrong_open_thread_september_2010/2jpi http://lesswrong.com/lw/2eu/open_thread_july_2010/28v5

Comment author: lmnop 13 September 2010 02:22:55AM *  0 points [-]

However, the idea that the general standards of discussion here represent a threatening and hostile environment for women, which is supposedly the main reason why they're few in number, seems to me completely disconnected from reality.

Not the general standards of discussion, no. But the standards of discussion for some of the speculation on sex relations, especially when related to the PUA subculture, seem to create an unpleasant environment for women who are otherwise quite happy with the general standards of discussion. Therefore, it seems reasonable to hypothesize that without that specific subset of the discussion, the site as a whole would be more attractive to women.

The question is whether the usual standards of discourse practiced here are harsh and insensitive enough to qualify as "unwelcoming to hostile." It seems quite clear to me that only extraordinarily fearful, brittle, or paranoid personalities could honestly answer yes to this.

It's fairly hyperbolic to say that only an "extraordinarily fearful, brittle, or paranoid person" could answer yes to the question of whether this site is an unwelcoming to hostile environment at times. Forget hostile, you can't see why the label "unwelcoming" could be used by a reasonable-- or at least not extraordinarily fearful, brittle, and paranoid-- person to describe some subsets of discussion here?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 13 September 2010 05:51:52AM *  4 points [-]

lmnop:

But the standards of discussion for some of the speculation on sex relations, especially when related to the PUA subculture, seem to create an unpleasant environment for women who are otherwise quite happy with the general standards of discussion. Therefore, it seems reasonable to hypothesize that without that specific subset of the discussion, the site as a whole would be more attractive to women.

There are two ways in which I could interpret this comment.

If you're saying that some topics are inherently insensitive and unpleasant, in that a rational no-holds-barred inquiry into them will likely yield disturbing conclusions that are apt to inflame passions and hurt people's feelings, and they should therefore be avoided because they poison the atmosphere on the entire forum due to the unavoidable human passions and weaknesses, I will agree with the former and disagree with the latter. (And I'll grant that it's overall a reasonable and defensible position.)

However, if you're saying that the way these topics have been discussed here should, on the whole, be considered excessively insensitive, and that an ideally rational, objective, and open-minded discussion of these matters would produce arguments and conclusions that are more warm, fuzzy, and politically correct, then I disagree radically. Aside from a few rare outliers, the discussions here have, if anything, erred on the side of being too cautious, sensitive, and silent about ugly truths.

It's fairly hyperbolic to say that only an "extraordinarily fearful, brittle, or paranoid person" could answer yes to the question of whether this site is an unwelcoming to hostile environment at times. Forget hostile, you can't see why the label "unwelcoming" could be used by a reasonable-- or at least not extraordinarily fearful, brittle, and paranoid-- person to describe some subsets of discussion here?

Well, just observe all the innumerable places, both online and offline, in which the standards of discourse are far more insensitive than anything that ever happens here, and which still attract far more female participants than this website -- and not some particularly tough-skinned ones either. Just from the usual human standards, I think it's fair to conclude that people who find enough unwelcoming elements here to be driven away are ipso facto showing that they are unusually sensitive specimens of humanity.

Comment author: HughRistik 12 September 2010 11:10:22PM 9 points [-]

This seems like an excellent reason for men to object to PUA: it focuses mainly on one night stands and short term relationships,

I've posted some thoughts on the orientation of PUAs to relationships. Although many PUAs do focus on short term relationships, most of what they are doing would be the same even for long-term relationships.

As far as I can tell, limiting factor of most PUAs in attracting women for either short-term or long-term relationships is that they are insufficiently masculine, high-status, and exciting. At least, with young women, who may well be skewed towards short-term mating (contra the stereotypical assumption that women always want relationships).

Young men are often accused of being "led by their dicks" when choosing mates. I think there is something analogous going on with young women. Even though in the abstract they may want relationships, they also want highly sexually attractive guys. And the most sexually attractive guy out there for many women isn't necessarily the guy who would make a good long-term relationship partner.

So if you are a young guy and you want a relationship with a young woman, you have to deal with competition from guys running a flashy short-term mating strategy. For a woman to notice you and be interested in getting to know you well enough to even think of you as a long-term mate, you have to outshine the local badboys. If you try to present yourself as stable, romantic, long-term mate from the start, you will be consistently overlooked.

Of course, not all women are following this type of mating strategy where most of their attention goes to the flashiest males, who they then try to "convert" into long-term mates. In fact, I'm willing to bet that there is at least a reasonable minority of women who only go for long-term mates. But it's common enough that men need to be aware of it. It pays for young men to have the kind of flashy presentation that PUAs teach, regardless of whether they are looking for short-term or long-term relationships.

which may reduce the ease and likelihood of pair bonding for the woman, later in life

I've seen this idea before, but I wonder if we actually have any empirical evidence that it is true that short-term mating reduces the likelihood of pair bonding for women later in life. My gut reaction is that this may be true for some female phenotypes, but not for others.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 13 September 2010 02:52:22AM 13 points [-]

HughRistik:

I've seen this idea before, but I wonder if we actually have any empirical evidence that it is true that short-term mating reduces the likelihood of pair bonding for women later in life. My gut reaction is that this may be true for some female phenotypes, but not for others.

I have my own pet theory about this, extrapolated from real-life observations and a number of other clues, which are not very strong individually, but seem to add up to a pretty strong web of evidence.

To put it as succinctly as possible, the problem stems from two not very pretty, but nevertheless real facts. First, the attractiveness of individual men to women has an extremely high statistical dispersion, even more so than vice versa. (In other words, the difference between men from different percentiles in women's eyes will be significantly greater than the difference between women in analogous percentiles in men's eyes.) Second, and more important, for a typical woman, the attractiveness of men she can get for non-serious temporary relationships is significantly higher than the attractiveness of her realistic options for permanent commitment. (This also holds far more so than the reverse.) It follows that when a woman with a variegated relationship history finally settles down, it will likely be with a man whose attractiveness is significantly lower than those she's been involved with in the past. It's not hard to see why this is a recipe for trouble, and clearly the implications are somewhat reactionary in nature.

On the other hand, if a woman settles down with a man who outclasses all those she'd been involved with earlier, her ability to bond with him probably won't be compromised. Trouble is, this is obviously increasingly unlikely as their number is greater.

Comment author: lmnop 13 September 2010 12:55:14AM 1 point [-]

You write as if women were some unspeakably fearful, brittle, and paranoid creatures who undergo apoplectic shocks at the slightest whisper that interferes with their delicate sensibilities. Frankly, if I were a woman, I would take offense at that. You're basically proclaiming women congenitally incapable of rationally addressing claims they find unpleasant, instinctively reacting with a shock-and-offense emotional ploy instead.

I think people generally dislike and avoid spending time in environments they perceive as anywhere on the scale from unwelcoming to hostile. That's not a trait that makes someone fearful, brittle, paranoid, or delicate, and I'm confused as to why you'd think I was implying any such thing-- quite the opposite.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 13 September 2010 02:06:20AM *  2 points [-]

lmnop:

I think people generally dislike and avoid spending time in environments they perceive as anywhere on the scale from unwelcoming to hostile. That's not a trait that makes someone fearful, brittle, paranoid, or delicate, and I'm confused as to why you'd think I was implying any such thing-- quite the opposite.

The question is whether the usual standards of discourse practiced here are harsh and insensitive enough to qualify as "unwelcoming to hostile." It seems quite clear to me that only extraordinarily fearful, brittle, or paranoid personalities could honestly answer yes to this. (Here I mean "honestly" as opposed to the already mentioned discourse-destroying tactic where one actively seeks flimsy pretexts for sanctimonious indignation instead of engaging the substance of the argument.)

Again, this is not meant as an attack on everyone who has ever expressed indignation about some particular statement posted here, and in the present context, I don't want to express judgments about any such individual incident, whether in this thread or any other. Even among very smart and cultured people, occasional episodes of careless and stupid behavior are unavoidable, and in any discussion forum, people will sometimes be faced with valid reasons to feel angry and offended. However, the idea that the general standards of discussion here represent a threatening and hostile environment for women, which is supposedly the main reason why they're few in number, seems to me completely disconnected from reality.

Comment author: [deleted] 12 September 2010 09:30:48PM 7 points [-]

Vladimir, I got my mind changed about religion, in large part by LessWrong. I learned here not to be afraid of truth. That message would not have gotten across as clearly if there were not a dominant tone of warmth and compassion on this site.

Whatever is true, is true. I'm not saying we shouldn't seek it out. I'm not saying we should fear an awful truth or hush it up.

I'm saying we go about things differently from how Roissy goes about things, and that's helpful. You described women as being tough enough to take a much more offensive tone -- I'm saying that an offensive tone isn't helpful. There is such a thing as honesty without snark.

No, it wasn't your comment that reads like a personal attack. Alicorn made a previous comment when she said that asking her to change her sexual preferences made her feel less safe. I don't think we should be using this site to frighten people. You do not reason with people by arousing those emotions.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 12 September 2010 10:11:45PM *  8 points [-]

SarahC:

I'm saying we go about things differently from how Roissy goes about things, and that's helpful. You described women as being tough enough to take a much more offensive tone -- I'm saying that an offensive tone isn't helpful. There is such a thing as honesty without snark.

This is where our misunderstanding probably lies. My mention of Roissy was an argumentum a fortiori, meant to disprove the hypothesis that the tone of sex-related discussions here is so insensitive that it drives great masses of women away, by pointing out that there are places whose tone is incomparably more insensitive, and yet they have comment sections with far more women participating. I wasn't advocating the introduction of Roissyesque style as the standard of discourse here; there is indeed a time and place for everything.

That said, it should be noted that the quality of discourse can be ruined not only by people who write with an insensitive tone, but also by people who amp up their sensitivity to eleven, and as soon as certain topics are opened, frantically look for a pretext to plead insufferable shock and offense. Honestly, would you say that this phenomenon has been altogether absent from the controversies on this site you've seen?

(Again, please read this only as a statement about generalities, not an implicit personal attack on whoever might come to mind.)

Comment author: [deleted] 12 September 2010 08:26:26PM *  7 points [-]

Ok, we've got three (declared) women on this thread. Alicorn and Nancy seem to be (roughly) within the world of contemporary feminism -- I'm not, but then again I also don't have experience with rape or abuse. So I feel compelled to keep driving at the centrist line here.

Yes, you can shut down a dialogue all too easily by claiming to be hurt. But I don't want to discount the possibility that Alicorn actually is hurt -- in which case why do you want to hurt her? Let's not, please.

I read Roissy for a while. In one way it was a good experience: it taught me to seriously entertain views that I was previously disposed not to like. I consider that a strength. But in another way it was a bad experience: Roissy would insult classes of people in which I'm included, and my response to being belittled is to believe what I hear. That ain't good. I can see the value in overcoming my fear to enter a hostile environment and cope; I can't see the value in spending my time there indefinitely.

No, women aren't fragile. But this is simply not a tough-love, hostile environment. It isn't that kind of blog. It doesn't fit with the posts -- it certainly doesn't fit with Eliezer's writing. The norm around here seems to be that suffering and fear are real and that we ought to help people who endure such things. (Isn't that humanism in a nutshell?) There are plenty of places on the internet where people like to shock and offend. This site does something different, something less common, and perhaps more valuable. Can we keep it that way?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 12 September 2010 09:19:22PM *  6 points [-]

SarahC:

But this is simply not a tough-love, hostile environment. It isn't that kind of blog. It doesn't fit with the posts -- it certainly doesn't fit with Eliezer's writing. The norm around here seems to be that suffering and fear are real and that we ought to help people who endure such things. (Isn't that humanism in a nutshell?) There are plenty of places on the internet where people like to shock and offend. This site does something different, something less common, and perhaps more valuable. Can we keep it that way?

Here I must point to another highly pertinent comment of mine:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/2l8/existential_risk_and_public_relations/2g3z

You write as if a rational discussion must end up in conclusions that are pleasant, calming, and reassuring, and if some claims in a discussion disturb and offend, they cannot simply follow from a straightforward and open-minded inquiry into a sensitive topic, and there must be some malice involved. But this is clearly not so. Just imagine how billions of religious folks on this planet would react if you threw the anti-religious diatribes regularly written here, by Eliezer Yudkowsky as well as many others, into their faces.

Now, you can argue that in some areas of inquiry, the truth is so awful and inflammatory that it's better to stay away from them because it keeps the website a better place to discuss other interesting things. However, if you're going to argue that, then you must admit that some people's idiosyncratic sensitivities and propensities for offense should be privileged over others. Mind you, I think that it is a defensible position, but it's absolutely fallacious to advocate such limitations while denying this fact.

Yes, you can shut down a dialogue all too easily by claiming to be hurt. But I don't want to discount the possibility that Alicorn actually is hurt -- in which case why do you want to hurt her? Let's not, please.

Could you please be more specific? Are you saying that my above comment reads like a personal attack, or that some general claim I advanced is hurtful? I honestly didn't mean to take a jab at any particular person, not in that comment, nor anywhere else.

Comment author: lmnop 12 September 2010 06:22:08PM *  2 points [-]

"Sex doesn't seem to be the distinguishing factor on whether a given participant is able to usefully engage on the subject, especially once the selection effect of 'people who like lesswrong type discussions' is applied. It is a political vs epistemic divide, not a male vs female one."

And yet the current norms of discussion are ones that leave a large proportion of the women here fighting through some measure of fear and discomfort to post-- but not the men. This saps cognitive energy and limits how much they can contribute. You may want to consider why this is, and whether there are any minimal changes you would consider making in order to make both genders feel safe enough to post freely.

"Strive to only make utilitarian calculations that take into account both men's and women's best interests" is a good place to start.

This discussion has also given me a lot of insight into why the proportion of women on this site is so atypically small even for computer programming crowds. Some that like lesswrong-type discussions may find dealing with the PUA-related talk here too mentally and emotionally draining for the site to be a net positive in experience. I've changed my mind and now also support moving all PUA-related discussions to another site, if for different reasons than yours.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 12 September 2010 08:12:35PM *  7 points [-]

lmnop:

And yet the current norms of discussion are ones that leave a large proportion of the women here fighting through some measure of fear and discomfort to post-- but not the men.

That's not a realistic appraisal of the situation. Generally speaking, when it comes to sensitive topics that cannot be discussed openly and objectively without arousing ideological passions, appeasing the parties who claim to be shocked and offended can only lead to shutting down the discussion altogether, or reducing it to a pious recital of politically correct platitudes. It's a classic Schellingian conflict situation: by yielding to this strategy today instead of drawing a firm line, you only incentivize its further use the next time around.

That said, there are of course occasional situations here where people blurt out something stupid that their interlocutor might reasonably get angry at. But the idea that the general spirit of discussion of these topics here is somehow creating a hostile environment for women is just outlandish.

This discussion has also given me a lot of insight into why the proportion of women on this site is so atypically small even for computer programming crowds.

You write as if women were some unspeakably fearful, brittle, and paranoid creatures who undergo apoplectic shocks at the slightest whisper that interferes with their delicate sensibilities. Frankly, if I were a woman, I would take offense at that. You're basically proclaiming women congenitally incapable of rationally addressing claims they find unpleasant, instinctively reacting with a shock-and-offense emotional ploy instead.

In any case, if you believe that an online community has to bend over backwards to accommodate its womenfolk's sensitivities lest they run away in terror, how do you explain the fact that you'll find far more women at Roissy's blog, whose author goes out of his way to shock and offend in ways that nobody here would ever even think of putting in writing? Just a glance at his comment sections is enough to see that women actually aren't scared away that easily.

(ETA: fixed a typo.)

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 12 September 2010 03:43:38AM 9 points [-]

A sidetrack: I think men's physical strength is a minor factor compared to their ability to organize for violence. If the organizational ability were reversed-- if men who seriously displeased women were mobbed by 4 or 5 armed and organized women and didn't have male back-up, the world would be very different.

This doesn't mean I want that world, but I find it interesting that males seem to almost reflexively organize for violence, and females pretty much never do. Information about girl gangs appreciated if I'm missing something.


"Niceness training" has some real problems-- it's being afraid to express strong desires which might be in conflict with other people's.

Kindness training-- encouraging people to actually treat each other well and having some skills for doing so-- would be a whole different thing, and a world where it was common is hard for me to imagine. It would be a world with little or no status enforcement.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 12 September 2010 09:24:58AM *  5 points [-]

NancyLebovitz:

A sidetrack: I think men's physical strength is a minor factor compared to their ability to organize for violence. If the organizational ability were reversed-- if men who seriously displeased women were mobbed by 4 or 5 armed and organized women and didn't have male back-up, the world would be very different.

I'm honestly baffled by what you might have in mind here. These days, in most of the First World, and especially the Anglosphere, there is virtually no organized violence except for the government security forces and the organized crime that's rampant among the underclass. Even the most rudimentary forms of it that were once extremely common are nowadays rare to nonexistent, and for non-underclass men it's a completely alien concept. (When was the last time you read about a mass bar fight, or some impromptu vigilante action against street criminals in your corner of the world?)

What would be, according to you, the situations where men's aptness for organized violence is relevant for the relations between the sexes in the contemporary West?

Comment author: Violet 12 September 2010 07:52:04AM *  4 points [-]

Many "alpha" behaviours can be creepy.

Someone being submissive is not creepy.

This as a personal note, not as a general truth.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 12 September 2010 08:50:14AM *  8 points [-]

Violet:

Many "alpha" behaviours can be creepy.

Some of the very pinnacles of creepiness are achieved by men who attempt to pull off difficult and daring high-status behaviors but fall short of doing it successfully. I don't know if this is what you had in mind with the scare quotes, but with this interpretation, your comment is very accurate.

I remember there was an old post at Overcoming Bias discussing this sort of situation, where a man's failed attempt at a high-status display backfires and raises an awful red flag that he's a clueless sort of guy who doesn't know his proper place and will probably self-destruct for that reason. Unfortunately, I can't remember the title and I don't have the link archived.

Comment author: [deleted] 11 September 2010 03:56:02PM 4 points [-]

Sure, no, I don't have a problem with disappointment.

It does seem that men have more of a problem with amorous disappointment than women do. That definitely is "something wrong" and I'm not on board with women who basically think that men are in the wrong whenever they express desire.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 12 September 2010 08:28:46AM *  8 points [-]

SarahC:

It does seem that men have more of a problem with amorous disappointment than women do.

I disagree. I've been in situations where girls were determined to seduce me, and I kept rejecting their increasingly overt and desperate advances. They'd typically end up getting visibly annoyed, and there were also some ugly scenes of frustrated anger on their part. Similar things also happened sometimes when I would (mostly unintentionally) give a false hope to girls who were below my standards, though admittedly with much less overt drama compared to the former sort of situations.

Of course, such situations are less common than the inverse, and even more importantly, since women are typically physically weaker, men won't feel intimidated and threatened by their flipping out. These were just amusing youthful adventures for me, but I can easily imagine inverse scenarios being awfully scary for women. However, the idea that women somehow handle it more calmly and rationally when they're faced with the terrible feeling of being put down by a disappointing rejection is completely false.

That said, there are some significant differences in practice. Men are expected to take a more proactive role in approaching and initiating things, so by sheer necessity, they more often end up plunging into defeats based on unjustified expectations. Moreover, men and women tend to react very differently towards various kinds of signals of aloofness and disinterestedness in the early phases of meeting and dating. However, discussing these issues fully would mean getting too deep into technicalities -- the important point is that it's unjustified to present men as somehow worse overall in this regard.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 11 September 2010 02:52:03PM 7 points [-]

A job applicant who seems likely to resent being turned down will appear creepy to potential employers.

There is apparently no greater female nightmare scenario than mating with a less-than-optimally-attractive male. The Darwinian reasons why this should be the case are too obvious to be worth stating; but it should be equally obvious that such behavior is less than rational in our modern era of contraception: sex simply doesn't have the same dangers that it did in the ancestral environment.

Men do the same sort of thing. Really. Hunt around a little for examples of fat-bashing.

The only gender difference I can see is that a significant proportion of men [1] are apt to verbally attack unattractive women just for existing, while women are more apt to wait for a pass to be made by an unattractive man.

Is there anything in PUA about what sets off the "creepy guy-- I don't want to be anywhere near him" response as distinct from mere "not sexually interested"? I'm not talking about "less than optimally attractive", and your phrasing it that way strikes me as dishonest arguing. The vast majority of women have children with less than optimally attractive men.

[1] It may well be under 5% of men who do that sort of thing-- it's still apt to be quite a buzz-kill for women on the receiving end of it.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 12 September 2010 07:29:33AM *  5 points [-]

NancyLebovitz:

The only gender difference I can see is that a significant proportion of men [1] are apt to verbally attack unattractive women just for existing, while women are more apt to wait for a pass to be made by an unattractive man.

This is true if you judge people's speech and reactions by the usual standards of discourse in polite society, but not if you take into account their actual hurtfulness and the actual level of repugnance and scorn being manifested.

Men are indeed apt to appraise women's attractiveness explicitly in crude and vulgar terms, much more so than vice versa. However, the ways in which women talk about unattractive men might sound gentler and far more polite, but it's naive to think that unattractive men don't get the message, and that they don't get hurt just as much as unattractive women who get called by various explicit bad names. Moreover, whenever I hear girls damning some unattractive guy with faint praise, I always feel like it would be more honest if they just scorned and trashed him explicitly, considering the status they assign to him for all practical purposes.

Another thing is that even when stated in the most explicit and crude terms, men's usual complaints and negative appraisals about women tend to sound harsher and more vulgar than the other way around. It just happens that the words typically involved in the former have a much more politically incorrect and inflammatory impact, even though the latter are not any less harsh and damning by any reasonable standard.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 11 September 2010 05:56:21PM *  5 points [-]

I'd say the worst habit of thought promoted by computer games is that if you do something disastrously foolish or clumsy, you can conveniently restart from a recently saved position. Clearly, that doesn't help one develop a good attitude towards the possibility of blunders in real life. (Though I should add that I haven't played any computer games in almost a decade, and I don't know if the basic concepts have changed since then.)

Comment author: [deleted] 11 September 2010 11:45:07AM 3 points [-]

Controlling for variables. Does this work for me because I have PhD? Perhaps this doesn't work for me because I'm too tall. Maybe this only works because its an interesting counter signal. Maybe copying the exact dress style of Mystery isn't a good idea for me.

As to cultural transfers. Winning friends in say rural Russia is a different endeavour than trying to influence a group of Cape Town teenage Goths.

Would a PUA - PU be able to find the equivalent of some of the principles of game that are nearly universal? Or would it just be a catalogue of culture specific hacks?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 11 September 2010 05:31:49PM *  5 points [-]

Konkvistador:

Would a PUA - PU be able to find the equivalent of some of the principles of game that are nearly universal? Or would it just be a catalogue of culture specific hacks?

Observe the reactions that Hollywood movie stars get around the world. Can you think of an example where some Hollywood actor was perceived by women in some foreign culture as an unattractive loser based on the same on-screen behaviors that made him into a sex symbol in the U.S.?

Comment author: Morendil 01 September 2010 01:23:13PM 6 points [-]

The journalistic version:

[T]hose who abstain from alcohol tend to be from lower socioeconomic classes, since drinking can be expensive. And people of lower socioeconomic status have more life stressors [...] But even after controlling for nearly all imaginable variables - socioeconomic status, level of physical activity, number of close friends, quality of social support and so on - the researchers (a six-member team led by psychologist Charles Holahan of the University of Texas at Austin) found that over a 20-year period, mortality rates were highest for those who had never been drinkers, second-highest for heavy drinkers and lowest for moderate drinkers.

The abstract from the actual study (on "Late-Life Alcohol Consumption and 20-Year Mortality"):

Controlling only for age and gender, compared to moderate drinkers, abstainers had a more than 2 times increased mortality risk, heavy drinkers had 70% increased risk, and light drinkers had 23% increased risk. A model controlling for former problem drinking status, existing health problems, and key sociodemographic and social-behavioral factors, as well as for age and gender, substantially reduced the mortality effect for abstainers compared to moderate drinkers. However, even after adjusting for all covariates, abstainers and heavy drinkers continued to show increased mortality risks of 51 and 45%, respectively, compared to moderate drinkers. Findings are consistent with an interpretation that the survival effect for moderate drinking compared to abstention among older adults reflects 2 processes. First, the effect of confounding factors associated with alcohol abstention is considerable. However, even after taking account of traditional and nontraditional covariates, moderate alcohol consumption continued to show a beneficial effect in predicting mortality risk.

(Maybe the overlooked confounding factor is "moderation" by itself, and people who have a more relaxed, middle-of-the-road attitude towards life's pleasures tend to live longer?)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 02 September 2010 08:50:57PM *  1 point [-]

The discussion of the same paper on Overcoming Bias has reminded me of another striking correlation I read about recently:
http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/07/beer-makes-bud-wiser.html

It seems that for whatever reason, abstinence does correlate with lower performance on at least some tests of mental ability. The question is whether the controls in the study cover all the variables through which these lower abilities might have manifested themselves in practice; to me it seems quite plausible that the answer could be no.

Comment author: Morendil 01 September 2010 01:23:13PM 6 points [-]

The journalistic version:

[T]hose who abstain from alcohol tend to be from lower socioeconomic classes, since drinking can be expensive. And people of lower socioeconomic status have more life stressors [...] But even after controlling for nearly all imaginable variables - socioeconomic status, level of physical activity, number of close friends, quality of social support and so on - the researchers (a six-member team led by psychologist Charles Holahan of the University of Texas at Austin) found that over a 20-year period, mortality rates were highest for those who had never been drinkers, second-highest for heavy drinkers and lowest for moderate drinkers.

The abstract from the actual study (on "Late-Life Alcohol Consumption and 20-Year Mortality"):

Controlling only for age and gender, compared to moderate drinkers, abstainers had a more than 2 times increased mortality risk, heavy drinkers had 70% increased risk, and light drinkers had 23% increased risk. A model controlling for former problem drinking status, existing health problems, and key sociodemographic and social-behavioral factors, as well as for age and gender, substantially reduced the mortality effect for abstainers compared to moderate drinkers. However, even after adjusting for all covariates, abstainers and heavy drinkers continued to show increased mortality risks of 51 and 45%, respectively, compared to moderate drinkers. Findings are consistent with an interpretation that the survival effect for moderate drinking compared to abstention among older adults reflects 2 processes. First, the effect of confounding factors associated with alcohol abstention is considerable. However, even after taking account of traditional and nontraditional covariates, moderate alcohol consumption continued to show a beneficial effect in predicting mortality risk.

(Maybe the overlooked confounding factor is "moderation" by itself, and people who have a more relaxed, middle-of-the-road attitude towards life's pleasures tend to live longer?)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 02 September 2010 05:49:40AM *  4 points [-]

The study looks at people over 55 years of age. It is possible that there is some sort of selection effect going on -- maybe decades of heavy drinking will weed out all but the most alcohol-resistant individuals, so that those who are still drinking heavily at 55-60 without ever having been harmed by it are mostly immune to the doses they're taking. From what I see, the study controls for past "problem drinking" (which they don't define precisely), but not for people who drank heavily without developing a drinking problem, but couldn't handle it any more after some point and decided themselves to cut back.

Also, it should be noted that papers of this sort use pretty conservative definitions of "heavy drinking." In this paper, it's defined as more than 42 grams of alcohol per day, which amounts to about a liter of beer or three small glasses of wine. While this level of drinking would surely be risky for people who are exceptionally alcohol-intolerant or prone to alcoholism, lots of people can handle it without any problems at all. It would be interesting to see a similar study that would make a finer distinction between different levels of "heavy" drinking.

Comment author: Kaj_Sotala 01 September 2010 04:46:23PM 15 points [-]

Neuroskeptic's Help, I'm Being Regressed to the Mean is the clearest explanation of regression to the mean that I've seen so far.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 02 September 2010 04:00:14AM *  2 points [-]

When I tried making sense of this topic in the context of the controversies over IQ heritability, the best reference I found was this old paper:

Brian Mackenzie, Fallacious use of regression effects in the I.Q. controversy, Australian Psychologist 15(3):369-384, 1980

Unfortunately, the paper failed to achieve any significant impact, probably because it was published in a low-key journal long before Google, and it's now languishing in complete obscurity. I considered contacting the author to ask if it could be put for open access online -- it would be definitely worth it -- but I was unable to find any contact information; it seems like he retired long ago.

There is also another paper with a pretty good exposition of this problem, which seems to be a minor classic, and is still cited occasionally:

Lita Furby, Interpreting regression toward the mean in developmental research, Developmental Psychology, 8(2):172-179, 1973

Comment author: JoshuaZ 29 August 2010 03:10:09PM 0 points [-]

I was interpreting speed of light in this context to mean that there's a maximum speed in general otherwise the claim becomes trivially false. In that regard, the claim isn't true and one could make a universe that was essentially Newtonian, had some sort of particle or wave that functioned like light that didn't move instantaneously but could move at different speeds. (Actually now that I've said that I have to wonder if the post I was replying to meant that locality implied that light always had a finite speed which is true.) I suspect that you can get a general result about a maximum speed if you insist on something slightly stronger than locality, by analogy to the distinction between continuous functions and uniformly continuous functions but I haven't thought out the details.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 29 August 2010 07:07:52PM 0 points [-]

Oh, I see. Thanks for the explanation.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 29 August 2010 12:29:39AM 2 points [-]

Physics is local. The speed of light is a derivative of that general principle.

I'm not sure I follow this. A purely Newtonian universe with no gravity (to keep things simple) would have completely local laws and no speed of light limit.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 29 August 2010 03:12:42AM 1 point [-]

When you say "[a] purely Newtonian universe with no gravity," do you mean a universe in which light doesn't exist at all as a trivial counterexample to the above claim? Or do you actually have in mind some more complex point?

Comment author: PhilGoetz 28 August 2010 12:14:22AM 4 points [-]

One idea in my essay is that it's easier to look at the structure, and see what type of relationship it's compatible with, than to evaluate how exploitative the relationship is. Feudalism's relationships were claimed to be mutually beneficial. You could spend a lot of time arguing whether that was the case; or you could just look at the structure, and say, "Hmm, evidence against."

Comment author: Vladimir_M 28 August 2010 08:17:50AM *  2 points [-]

Evidence against what, exactly? My point is that compared to the typical conflicting relationships between living things studied by biologists, which can often be accurately described in terms of the standard patterns of predator/prey, parasite/host, etc., human relationships are usually too complex to make correct analogies with such simple patterns. To take a prominent example, simplistic biological analogies between human societies and non-human species have traditionally been a rich source of mind-killing political propaganda -- just think of various occasions when some identifiable group was called "parasitic" by their political enemies.

Therefore, if you want to analyze feudalism or some other historical social order in terms of analogies with non-human species, you should explain why you believe that the analogies are applicable. I'm not dismissing your basic idea as fundamentally unsound -- but I do believe that humans represent a very large evolutionary step over other species, enough to make many universal rules about non-human organisms inapplicable to humans, or applicable only under complex conditions and assumptions. In particular, it seems to me that while the notions of "exploitation" versus "mutual benefit" are fairly easy to define for (most?) non-human species, the way they should be generalized to human societies is not at all obvious.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 27 August 2010 11:04:51PM *  4 points [-]

Thinking a bit more about your government-related examples, it seems like one problem is that you don't specify how exactly the notion of "exploiting" translates from the animal world into human relations. Those forms of exploitation that are a clear analogy of animal predatory behavior (e.g. robbery and plunder) are normally illegal in any organized human society and done openly only by rogue criminals. When they're done by organized and persistent structures, rather than outlaw individuals, they're typically given a pretense of a mutually beneficial relationship (e.g. extortionists claiming to sell "protection").

Now, the question is: since the social arrangements that appear exploitative by some criteria will normally be backed by at least some theoretical pretense of mutual benefit, how can we discern to what extent such pretenses are false in each particular case? Moreover, since it's unlikely that any human relations will be purely exploitative or mutualistic in any meaningful sense, how to devise a reasonable measure by which we can rate concrete arrangements on this scale, without any unjustified subjective judgments of whose situation is better or worse? In any case, it seems to me that the approach taken in your "Government" section is too simplistic to be useful.

Comment author: PhilGoetz 27 August 2010 09:50:44PM 0 points [-]

Feudalism is hierarchical. Vladimir is talking about the high level of autonomy of each boss in the hierarchy. Even kings did not have the absolute power we usually think of kings as having; the Holy Roman Empire being an extreme example of this, in which IIRC the Emperor was usually less powerful than any of his immediate subordinates, and served more as a balancing force or referee than as a supreme ruler.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 27 August 2010 10:35:09PM 0 points [-]

To make things even more complicated, besides their imperial title, Holy Roman emperors typically had a whole bunch of titles over different lands within the Empire (and sometimes even outside of it), whose significance in terms of actual control ranged from purely theoretical to very real. Their ability to assert their imperial authority across the Empire heavily depended, among other things, on the ability to draw resources from the specific lands they controlled more tightly.

Comment author: [deleted] 27 August 2010 09:28:46PM 0 points [-]

Granted that the Catholic Church hierarchy is not feudalistic. But this suggests the question: during the height of European feudalism, the Catholic Church itself was - what? Rigidly hierarchical even then? Or did it in some way partake of the feudal lack of hierarchy and center?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 27 August 2010 10:10:13PM *  0 points [-]

The question of Church governance and its relation to the secular authority was the number one hot-button political issue during the European Middle Ages, over which many intellectual, political, as well as military battles were fought. It's a vast and fascinating topic that spans several centuries of complicated history, with changing fortunes on all sides; to get a basic taste of it, this article on the Investiture Controversy is decent.

These controversies exploded again during the Reformation and the subsequent religious upheavals and wars that engulfed Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries, and they haven't died down completely to the present day. But as a simplification (perhaps excessive), one could say that the present tightly disciplined form of Catholic Church governance developed during the Counter-Reformation period.

(It should also be noted that some local Catholic churches, most notably the Eastern ones, have much more autonomy for peculiar reasons of local history. Formally, this is known as the sui juris status.)

Comment author: Jayson_Virissimo 27 August 2010 07:28:25PM *  0 points [-]

What is a "feudal empire"? Can you give an example?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 27 August 2010 07:55:09PM *  5 points [-]

The most accurate meaning of this term would be a situation where numerous local lords are powerful and autonomous, but there is one among them who commands disproportionately large resources and is capable of raising overwhelmingly powerful military forces, either directly from his own personal domains or from his loyal vassals.

In this situation, any lord who defies the monarch openly can be subdued by sheer military force, so if the monarch successfully advertises his military power and his commitment to lash out whenever provoked, there can be a stable equilibrium where local lords find it in their best interest to be loyal vassals, profess allegiance, and pay their tribute in a timely manner -- and otherwise be left alone to rule their fiefs. Another factor that can strengthen this equilibrium is if the monarch's military power provides protection against an external threat that is too powerful for the lords to handle individually; in such situations, the monarch can be more of a coalition leader than overlord.

Clearly, such an equilibrium is unstable for many reasons. External military threats can disappear, a strong monarch can be succeeded by a weak one who won't be able to insist on his supremacy credibly, local lords can become powerful to the point where defiance seems tempting, a neighboring ruler can offer a better deal for those who switch allegiance to him, several lords can form a coalition too powerful to subdue, and so on. The classic example is the history of the Frankish Empire and the Holy Roman Empire. Occasional exceptionally capable and powerful rulers were able to assert strong personal authority, but their heirs would regularly fail to uphold it.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 27 August 2010 06:46:38PM *  12 points [-]

PhilGoetz:

The Catholic church has a feudalistic organization, and is perhaps not coincidentally richer than any Protestant church, probably even per capita - except for the Mormons, with assets of about $6000/member, whose organizational structure I know little about (read this if interested).

This is a completely inaccurate use of the term "feudalistic." The rigid hierarchy of the Catholic Church is extremely dissimilar to the European medieval social order that's commonly called "feudal," in which local lords had a level of autonomy and autarky unimaginable by modern standards.

A Catholic priest who defies his bishop or other superior will lose his position promptly, and the same will happen to a bishop who defies the pope. Control and discipline are enforced tightly at each level, and the hierarchy is staffed by men from lower levels who get promoted and appointed by the central authority (except for the elective pope, of course, and with some rare peculiar semi-autonomous local institutions due to accidents of history). In contrast, a feudal lord ruled his fief for life as his own property, and left it to his heirs after death -- while his overlord, or even king, had no control whatsoever over his day-to-day affairs, and could only demand the regular tribute. Even in cases of open defiance, it was by no means certain whether the king would be able to get his way. This fragmented world of extreme local autonomy and autarky was the polar opposite of the modern tightly disciplined Catholic hierarchy.

Generally speaking, "feudalism" is one of those terms that are often thrown around casually and without any regard for historical accuracy, to the point where they've become nearly meaningless (kind of like "fascism"). Whenever you feel tempted to use it for the purpose of making historical parallels, you should stop and think carefully whether it makes sense.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 27 August 2010 04:14:10AM 16 points [-]

(7) If you have a fatal disease that can only be cured by wearing a bracelet or necklace under your clothing, and anyone who receives an honest explanation of what the item is will think you're weird, do you wear the bracelet or necklace?

Answering yes to (7) means that you shouldn't refrain from cryonics for fear of being thought weird.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 27 August 2010 05:27:46PM *  6 points [-]

Is it really so easy to hide it from all the relevant people, including close friends and relatives, let alone significant others (who, according to what I've read about the topic, usually are the most powerful obstacle)?

Also, I'm not very knowledgeable about this sort of thing, but it seems to me like doing it completely in secret could endanger the success of the procedure after your death. Imagine if a bereaved family and/or spouse suddenly find out that their beloved deceased has requested this terrible and obscene thing instead of a proper funeral, which not only shocks them, but also raises the frightening possibility that once the word spreads, they'll also be tainted with this awful association in people's minds. I wouldn't be surprised if they fight tooth and nail to prevent the cryonics people from taking possession of the body, though I don't know what realistic chances of success they might have (which probably depends on the local laws).

(I wonder if some people around here actually know of real-life stories of this kind and how they tend to play out? I'm sure at least some have happened in practice.)

Comment author: James_Miller 27 August 2010 12:56:25AM 2 points [-]

You are right about the weirdness signal, my questions don't get at this.

As for (3) wouldn't a yes response imply that you do care about the past and future versions of yourself?

When you write "but I just happen to be a sort of creature that gets upset when the future 'me' is threatened and constantly gets overcome with an irresistible urge to work against such threats at the present moment -- but this urge doesn't extend to the post-cryonics "me," so I'm rationally indifferent in that case." you seem to be saying your utility function is such that you don't care about the post-cryonics you and since one can't claim a utility function is irrational (excluding stuff like Intransitive preferences) this objection to cryonics isn't irrational.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 27 August 2010 02:11:26AM *  2 points [-]

Perhaps the best way to formulate my argument would be as follows. When someone appears to care about his "normal" future self a few years from now, but not about his future self that might come out of a cryonics revival, you can argue that this is an arbitrary and whimsical preference, since the former "self" doesn't have any significantly better claim to his identity than the latter. Now let's set aside any possible counter-arguments to that claim, and for the sake of the argument accept that this is indeed so. I see three possible consequences of accepting it:

  1. Starting to care about one's post-cryonics future self, and (assuming one's other concerns are satisfied) signing up for cryonics; this is presumably the intended goal of your argument.

  2. Ceasing to care even about one's "normal" future selves, and rejecting the very concept of personal identity and continuity. (Presumably leading to either complete resignation or to crazy impulsive behavior.)

  3. Keeping one's existing preferences and behaviors with the justification that, arbitrary and whimsical as they are, they are not more so than any other options, so you might as well not bother changing them.

Now, the question is: can you argue that (1) is more correct or rational than (2) or (3) in some meaningful way?

(Also, if someone is interested in discussions of this sort, I forgot to mention that I raised similar arguments in another recent thread.)

In response to Cryonics Questions
Comment author: Vladimir_M 27 August 2010 12:29:01AM 13 points [-]

From what I see, your questions completely ignore the crucial problem of weirdness signaling. Your question (1) should also assume that these hospitals are perceived by the general population, as well as the overwhelming majority of scientists and intellectuals, as a weird crazy cult that gives off a distinctly odd, creepy, and immoral vibe -- and by accepting the treatment, you also subscribe to a lifelong affiliation with this cult, with all its negative consequences for your relations with people. (Hopefully unnecessary disclaimer for careless readers: I am not arguing that this perception is accurate, but merely that it is an accurate description of the views presently held by people.)

As for question (3), the trouble with such arguments is that they work the other way around too. If you claim that the future "me" 20 years from now doesn't have any more special claim to my identity than whatever comes out of cryonics in more distant future, this can be used to argue that I should start identifying with the latter -- but it can also be used to argue that I should stop identifying with the former, and simply stop caring about what happens to "me" 20 years, or one year, or a day, or even a minute from now. To which I can respond that yes, there is no rational reason to care about the fate of the future "me," but I just happen to be a sort of creature that gets upset when the future "me" is threatened and constantly gets overcome with an irresistible urge to work against such threats at the present moment -- but this urge doesn't extend to the post-cryonics "me," so I'm rationally indifferent in that case.

If you believe that this conclusion is false, how exactly would you counter it? (This objection obviously has implications for your question (6) too.)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 21 August 2010 09:46:00PM *  8 points [-]

On a related note, is anyone familiar with the following variation on the fading qualia argument? It's inspired by (and very similar to) a response to Chalmers given in the paper "Counterfactuals Cannot Count" by M. Bishop. (Unfortunately, I couldn't find an ungated version.) Chalmers's reply to Bishop is here.

The idea is as follows. Let's imagine a though experiment under the standard computationalist assumptions. Suppose you start with an electronic brain B1 consisting of a huge number of artificial neurons, and you let it run for a while from some time T1 to T2 with an input X, so that during this interval, the brain goes through a vivid conscious experience full of colors, sounds, etc. Suppose further that we're keeping a detailed log of each neuron's changes of state during the entire period. Now, if we reset the brain to the initial state it had at T1 and start it again, giving it the same input X, it should go through the exact same conscious experience.

But now imagine that we take the entire execution log and assemble a new brain B2 precisely isomorphic to B1, whose neurons are however not sensitive to their inputs. Instead, each neuron in B2 is programmed to recreate the sequence of states through which its corresponding neuron from B1 passed during the interval (T1, T2) and generate the corresponding outputs. This will result in what Chalmers calls a "wind-up" system, which the standard computationalist view (at least to my knowledge) would not consider conscious, since it completely lacks the causal structure of the original computation, and merely replays it like a video recording.

You can probably see where this is going now. Suppose we restart B1 with the same initial state from T1 and the same input X, and while it's running, we gradually replace the neurons from B1 with their "wind-up" versions from B2. At the start at T1, we have the presumably conscious B1, and at the end at T2, the presumably unconscious B2 -- but the transition between the two is gradual just like in the original fading qualia argument. Thus, there must be some sort of "fading qualia" process going on after all, unless either B1 is not conscious to begin with, or B2 is conscious after all. (The latter however gets us into the problem that every physical system implements a "wind-up" version of every computation if only some numbers from arbitrary physical measurements are interpreted suitably.)

I don't find Chalmers's reply satisfactory. In particular, it seems to me that the above argument is damaging for significant parts of his original fading qualia thought experiment where he explains why he finds the possibility of fading qualia implausible. It is however possible that I've misunderstood either the original paper or his brief reply to Bishop, so I'd definitely like to see him address this point in more detail.

In response to Book Recommendations
Comment author: SilasBarta 16 August 2010 10:17:38PM *  0 points [-]

Someone mentioned a book about computation machinery. I thought it was in this discussion, but I couldn't find it here and it's near impossible to google here.

The person who mentioned it said that it explains the history of building computers and gives you a very deep understanding of how they implement computation, and its interface with the software inputs.

This is something I really wish I understood better, so if anyone knows a book like this, please let me know what it is. Or, if you know of any good resource on this topic, please post it.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 16 August 2010 11:25:09PM 2 points [-]

If you want to study computer architecture in general, the standard (and very good) textbook is Computer Architecture by Hennessy & Patterson. It's very readable, well organized, and not too thick. Another good textbook that covers a somewhat broader range of topics at a more elementary level is Computer Organization by Hamacher et al.; also check out Tanenbaum's Structured Computer Organization.

If you're interested in more lower-level details about digital logic and circuits, try Fundamentals of Digital Logic by Vranesic & Brown (the book conveniently exists in two different editions, with examples and problem sets given in VHDL and Verilog, respectively). Regarding the hardware-software interface, you'll learn a lot from the mentioned architecture texts, but for more higher-level details, you'll need an operating systems book; unfortunately I'm not familiar enough with those to make recommendations.

None of these books are particularly heavy on history, but they should enable you to place the modern technologies in their historical context. If I remember correctly, Tanenbaum's book talks about history the most.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 16 August 2010 06:13:37AM 3 points [-]

The one that's right out in public is the way people keep saying that there's evidence [1] that one glass of wine per day is healthier than not drinking, but that doesn't mean anyone should start drinking.

[1] The evidence might not be as sound as it looks. People who have one drink per day presumably aren't alcoholics and are extremely unlikely to be ex-alcoholics, so that's a healthier cohort than the whole population even if one drink per day doesn't do anything to improve health.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 16 August 2010 07:27:41AM *  4 points [-]

Alcohol is probably the worst example of a health issue where all sorts of people -- including numerous official "experts" with lofty titles and credentials -- obsessively insist on one or another set of recommendations that are supposed to be valid for everyone, while completely ignoring the enormous relevant variation between individuals. Consequently, the claims commonly heard in public about this topic are almost pure nonsense.

In reality, depending on your genotype, a glass of wine a day can have very different effects. If you're exceptionally alcohol-intolerant, it may cause acute poisoning, and if you're exceptionally prone to alcoholism, it's a good idea to stay off booze completely. On the other hand, for some people it's perfectly safe to drink several liters of beer or wine (or a whole bottle of hard liquor) every day -- they can do it for decades without ever appearing visibly drunk, and live to ripe old age until something entirely unrelated kills them. Most people are somewhere in-between, of course, but there is definitely no such thing as a universally valid limit for safe drinking. (Not to even get into the complex and non-obvious lifestyle factors that further complicate individual reactions to various levels of drinking.)

Considering all this enormous individual variation, it's absurdly silly to give any universal recommendations about whether a certain level of drinking is on the net positive or negative. It's as stupid as if someone tried to come up with a recommended shoe size for everyone without taking into account individual differences in foot size. (And to make things exceptionally un-PC and thus difficult to discuss meaningfully in public, alcohol tolerance appears to have been a subject of very recent evolution, and therefore correlates significantly with ethnicity. In this regard, it's similar to lactose tolerance.)

Comment author: JoshuaZ 16 August 2010 01:07:42AM 1 point [-]

You don't seem to realize that claims like the ones in the post in question are a common sort of claim to make people vulnerable to neuroses develop further problems. Regardless whether or not the claims are at all reasonable, repeatedly referencing them this way is likely to cause further psychological harm. Please stop.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 16 August 2010 04:27:11AM *  20 points [-]

JoshuaZ:

You don't seem to realize that claims like the ones in the post in question are a common sort of claim to make people vulnerable to neuroses develop further problems. Regardless whether or not the claims are at all reasonable, repeatedly referencing them this way is likely to cause further psychological harm.

However, it seems that in general, the mere fact that certain statements may cause psychological harm to some people is not considered a sufficient ground for banning or even just discouraging such statements here. For example, I am sure that many religious people would find certain views often expressed here shocking and deeply disturbing, and I have no doubt that many of them could be driven into serious psychological crises by exposure to such arguments, especially if they're stated so clearly and poignantly that they're difficult to brush off or rationalize away. Or, to take another example, it's very hard to scare me with hypotheticals, but the post "The Strangest Thing An AI Could Tell You" and the subsequent thread came pretty close; I'm sure that at least a few readers of this blog didn't sleep well if they happened to read that right before bedtime.

So, what exact sorts of potential psychological harm constitute sufficient grounds for proclaiming a topic undesirable? Is there some official policy about this that I've failed to acquaint myself with?

Comment author: JoshuaZ 15 August 2010 11:44:12PM 15 points [-]

From what I can gather suicide bombers and the like are pretty normal people. Part of what makes normal people normal is that they're relatively easy to influence.

Well, suicide bombers are more likely to have engineering degrees than the general public. There's also some evidence that engineers are surprisingly likely to be creationists. I don't think engineers are evil mutants, but it does suggest that there are certain modes of thinking that are likely to have bad results. To repeat fairly standard speculation in this regard, engineers aren't taught critical thinking and are taught to not tolerate uncertainty. This is not a good combination.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 16 August 2010 12:40:49AM *  4 points [-]

JoshuaZ:

To repeat fairly standard speculation in this regard, engineers aren't taught critical thinking and are taught to not tolerate uncertainty.

I would be really curious to see the evidence you have for this latter claim. Could you give some concrete examples from engineering education or actual practice where, according to you, intolerance of uncertainty is taken to unsound extremes?

As for "critical thinking," well, that's a highly subjective category. Where you see a scandalous failure of critical thinking, someone else might see a relatively insignificant and excusable human error, and vice versa, even if you're both in complete agreement that the belief in question is factually false.

But in any case, could you point out an example of some actual educational program that teaches critical thinking in ways that engineers supposedly miss? I honestly can't think of what exactly you might have in mind here.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 15 August 2010 06:58:39PM *  46 points [-]

I am a relative newbie commenter here, and my interest in this site has so far been limited to using it as a fun forum where it's possible to discuss all kinds of sundry topics with exceptionally smart people. However, I have read a large part of the background sequences, and I'm familiar with the main issues of concern here, so even though it might sound impertinent coming from someone without any status in this community, I can't resist commenting on this article.

To put it bluntly, I think the main point of the article is, if anything, an understatement. Let me speak from personal experience. From the perspective of this community, I am a sort of person who should be exceptionally easy to get interested and won over to its cause, considering both my intellectual background and my extreme openness to contrarian viewpoints and skepticism towards the official academic respectability as a criteron of truth and intellectual soundness. Yet, to be honest, even though I find a lot of the writing and discussion here extremely interesting, and the writings of Yudkowsky (in addition to others such as Bostrom, Hanson, etc.) have convinced me that technology-related existential risks should be taken much more seriously than they presently are, I still keep encountering things in this community that set off various red flags, which are undoubtedly taken by many people as a sign of weirdness and crackpottery, and thus alienate huge numbers of potential quality audience.

Probably the worst such example I've seen was the recent disturbance in which Roko was subjected to abuse that made him leave. When I read the subsequent discussions, it surprised me that virtually nobody here appears to be aware what an extreme PR disaster it was. Honestly, for someone unfamiliar with this website who has read about that episode, it would be irrational not to conclude that there's some loony cult thing going on here, unless he's also presented with enormous amounts of evidence to the contrary in the form of a selection of the best stuff that this site has to offer. After these events, I myself wondered whether I want to be associated with an outlet where such things happen, even just as an occasional commenter. (And not to even mention that Roko's departure is an enormous PR loss in its own right, in that he was one of the few people here who know how to write in a way that's interesting and appealing to people who aren't hard-core insiders.)

Even besides this major PR fail, I see many statements and arguments here that may be true, or at least not outright unreasonable, but should definitely be worded more cautiously and diplomatically if they're given openly for the whole world to see. I'm not going to get into details of concrete examples -- in particular, I do not concur unconditionally with any of the specific complaints from the above article -- but I really can't help but conclude that lots of people here, including some of the most prominent individuals, seem oblivious as to how broader audiences, even all kinds of very smart, knowledgeable, and open-minded people, will perceive what they write and say. If you want to have a closed inner circle where specific background knowledge and attitudes can be presumed, that's fine -- but if you set up a large website attracting lots of visitors and participants to propagate your ideas, you have to follow sound PR principles, or otherwise its effect may well end up being counter-productive.

Comment author: JanetK 13 August 2010 05:51:12PM 6 points [-]

I would not question what you are taking seriously and it seems fairly typical of the LW group.

On the other hand, I am surprised that climate change is rarely or never mentioned on LW. The lost of biodiversity and the rate of extinction - ditto. We are going through a biological crisis. It is bad enough that a 'world economic collapse' might even be a blessing in the long term.

You do not mention the neuroscience revolution but I am sure I have noticed some of the LW group taking it seriously.

This may be the place to mention cryonics without starting another riot. It is boring to me and I do not take it seriously - but I have reasons and I am not judging others who are not in my situation. (1) I had cancer when I was very young, in the olden days when all most everyone diedt. I waited for years for it to reappear. I got used to my mortality. Now I am 70 and quite comfortable with death within the next decade or two. (2) I am very poor, living in a small pension. I could not pay for it if I wanted to. (3) I don't believe that being brought back to life is a technical question only. I think that future generations will not actually value the preserved bodies because they will not value what these people know or can do. They may want some of the famous people alive today but they will not value someone as ordinary as myself. (4) I do not want to be without a body as some disembodied brain or be in a damaged body. I doubt that I would be happy as an immortal.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 13 August 2010 09:04:25PM *  13 points [-]

JanetK:

The lost of biodiversity and the rate of extinction - ditto. We are going through a biological crisis. It is bad enough that a 'world economic collapse' might even be a blessing in the long term.

Setting aside the more complex issue of climate change for the moment, I'd like to comment specifically on this part. Frankly, it has always seemed to me that alarmism of this sort is based on widespread popular false beliefs and ideological delusions, and that people here are simply too knowledgeable and rational to fall for it.

When it comes to the "loss of biodiversity," I have never seen any coherent argument why the extinction of various species that nobody cares about is such a bad thing. What exact disaster is supposed to befall us if various exotic and obscure animals and plants that nobody cares about are exterminated? If a particular species is useful for some concrete purpose, then someone with deep enough pockets can easily be found who will invest into breeding it for profit. If not, who cares?

Regarding the preservation of wild nature in general, it seems to me that the modern fashionable views are based on some awfully biased and ignorant assumptions. People nowadays imagine that wild nature is some delicate and vulnerable system that will collapse like a house of cards as soon as humans touch it. Whereas in reality, wild nature is not only extremely resilient, but also tends to grow and spread extremely fast, and humans in fact have to constantly invest huge amounts of labor just to prevent it from reconquering the spaces they have cleared up to build civilization.

Comment author: komponisto 13 August 2010 03:16:54AM *  0 points [-]

I'm not sure it's a good idea to restrict the use of "intonation" to describing pitch patterns that don't convey syntactic information. I suppose if one did that, one would have to simply say "pitch" for what we are talking about here, unless there's another term available.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 13 August 2010 03:45:58AM 0 points [-]

Come to think of it, you're right. It make sense to define "intonation" in purely phonetic terms (i.e. as pitch variation), and in that sense, it's certainly present here. It is possible that I got a mistaken idea about the common technical meaning of this term in my amateurish forays into these subjects.

Comment author: komponisto 13 August 2010 01:39:42AM 0 points [-]

"Grammatical stress" isn't a technical term, as far as I know. In any event, the phenomenon we're discussing here is the grammatical function of a word being communicated by the intonation pattern (as well as, probably, the speed pattern) of the sentence in which the word occurs.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 13 August 2010 02:16:47AM *  0 points [-]

komponisto:

"Grammatical stress" isn't a technical term, as far as I know.

I am not a linguist, but I've see the term "grammatical stress" used to denote situations where the stress of a word is determined by its syntactic context, and where a difference in stress may imply a different syntactic structure of the sentence. This is in contrast to lexical stress, which is a context-independent property of each word, and intonation, whose variation doesn't affect the syntactic structure, but merely changes things at the level of pragmatics.

Now that I've googled around a bit, I see that these terms aren't really standardized, and authors who use them typically make sure to include their favored definitions to avoid confusion. If you use "intonation" also for what I call "grammatical stress" above, then fair enough. (And for all I know, such usage might indeed be more common.)

Still, I think the contrast I have in mind is worth pointing out. In the above example, the difference in stress implies a different syntactic structure -- "have" can either be a complete verb phrase, or just an auxiliary verb referring to an antecedent (i.e. a verb phrase ellipsis). This is different from situations where changing intonation affects only pragmatics.

Comment author: komponisto 12 August 2010 03:01:10PM 1 point [-]

Yes, there is a parsing of "have" as "possess", but this is (a) precluded by inflection,

You picked a particularly bad context in which to confuse inflection with intonation (one of my greatest pet peeves).

Comment author: Vladimir_M 13 August 2010 01:13:51AM 0 points [-]

If we're going to be really precise, wouldn't the difference here be a matter of grammatical stress rather than intonation?

Comment author: b1shop 12 August 2010 10:15:24PM 1 point [-]

I'm fairly certain there is no god, and there's no marginal benefit to learning more about the philosophy of religion.

No matter how much or little I think about politics, the chances of me being the marginal vote are negligible. There are better uses for my time than that mind-killer.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 12 August 2010 10:27:41PM *  15 points [-]

b1shop:

No matter how much or little I think about politics, the chances of me being the marginal vote are negligible. There are better uses for my time than that mind-killer.

That's true as far as voting goes, but politics is about much more than voting. It is rational to ignore politics only assuming that the situation will remain stable and tolerable where you live. If more interesting times come to pass, then the ability to recognize early signs of trouble and plan accordingly will be extremely valuable (which I can confirm from personal experience). Now of course, you may believe that this is highly unlikely, but to have any certainty about it, you must have a certain level of knowledge about politics and keep track of political developments to at least some minimal extent. So in any case, complete cessation of thinking about politics cannot be rational.

Comment author: jimrandomh 12 August 2010 04:22:54PM *  11 points [-]

As CronoDAS has pointed out, the field of nutrition science has a long history of releasing bad studies leading to conclusions that were later proven false. Here are some of the stupid things which researchers have done, which have lead to bad dietary advice:

  1. Inferring what's good or bad for humans from its effect on lab rats
  2. Studying a diet's effect on one particular disease, then using it to argue for its effects on overall health
  3. Conducting a controlled study, losing half the sample to dropouts and non-compliance, and pretending that the group that dropped out did so for a reason other than because the diet was hurting them
  4. Measuring weight loss, but failing to distinguish between loss of fat and loss of muscle.

I believe Taubes is correct, and that the idea that low-fat diets are healthy is due to errors 3 and 4. What convinced me was hearing a bodybuilder talk about fat and muscle weight as separate things, and connecting that observation to the "rebound effect" - that is, the observation that people who lose weight on low-fat diets tend to gain it back plus extra. My interpretation of this is that some of the weight they lose is muscle, not fat, and this lowers their metabolism. This makes sense because maintaining muscle requires protein, and low-fat diets are usually also low-protein diets; the most common protein-rich foods, meat and eggs, are also high in fat.

This also explains why vegetarians don't have the same problem with low-fat diets: they're specifically instructed to be careful about their protein intake.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 12 August 2010 04:54:02PM *  8 points [-]

jimrandomh:

Here are some of the stupid things which researchers have done, which have lead to bad dietary advice: [...]

You forgot:

(5) Conducting a more or less decent controlled study, and then releasing a popular version of the results to be carried by the press and proselytized by various quasi-experts, busybodies, politicians, and bureaucrats, in which a tendency observed merely as a statistical phenomenon in the given sample is presented as a universal rule applicable to each single human individual.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 12 August 2010 04:39:31PM *  7 points [-]

One problem with all these debates about nutrition and exercise is that they mostly don't take into account individual differences. How exactly your body will react to a certain regime of diet and exercise, and which regimes are compatible with reaching and maintaining your optimal weight while feeling good and healthy -- the correct answers to these questions depend very strongly on your genotype, and possibly also on a number of entirely non-obvious and unknown environmental and lifestyle factors. (And to make things especially un-PC, the relevant genetic factors seem to correlate strongly with ethnic origin, since they've evolved significantly during the last few thousand years. This has been proven conclusively only for a few things like lactose tolerance, but it seems quite plausible that analogous group differences exist for other nutrients too.)

Therefore, except for a few simple observations like e.g. that you need some vitamin C to avoid scurvy, promoting certain diet guidelines as universally valid for all humans can't be other than nonsense. It's similar to those silly government propaganda campaigns about "safe" drinking limits that supposedly hold for everyone, whereas in reality, some people can drink a bottle of whiskey a day and nevertheless live long and productive lives (and never even appear visibly drunk), while others would be killed sooner or later by a fraction of that -- and yet others suffer from complete alcohol intolerance and get sick even from a single drink. Similarly, I have no doubt that some people exist for whom carbohydrates are as bad as Taubes says, but I also have no doubt that for many others, his claims are exaggerated to the point of nonsense, and I strongly suspect that the latter group includes a great majority of individuals in at least some ethnic groups.

As the bottom line, until scientists gain a much better understanding of the genetic and other factors involved, there really is no good way to go except self-experimentation. The only time I got into such a bad shape that I had to lose weight, I managed to devise a regime that enabled me to lose a pound a week with only a small expense of willpower, which was however completely unlike anything I've ever read from any side in the diet/exercise controversies -- and I doubt it would work for very many other people.

Comment author: [deleted] 12 August 2010 12:31:41AM 2 points [-]

Probably not. A sensible person ought to be willing to suffer for a few very important things... but very few. So a very disreputable belief ought to also, in some way, also be very important to be worth believing. In practice, when a contentious issue also seems not very important (or not very relevant to me) I don't bother investigating it much -- it's not worth becoming disreputable for.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Five-minute rationality techniques
Comment author: Vladimir_M 12 August 2010 12:58:29AM *  5 points [-]

This, however, means that your above comment is in need of some strong disclaimers. Unless of course it's directed at someone who lives in a society in which all highly disreputable beliefs happen to be false and outright implausible from an unbiased perspective. (But would you bet that this is the case for any realistic human society?)

Comment author: [deleted] 11 August 2010 11:43:15AM 10 points [-]

Oh, I have the same thing. I do have some nearly disreputable views, and I have accidentally hurt people's feelings by airing them. (Pretty mild stuff: "Walmart's not so bad" and "Physical resurrection doesn't make sense.") Now I'm pretty much housebroken, although I worry like wedrifid that it shows in my facial expressions.

But. Would any of you really trade being well-informed for the convenience of not having to hold your tongue? I know I wouldn't.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Five-minute rationality techniques
Comment author: Vladimir_M 11 August 2010 10:03:13PM *  6 points [-]

SarahC:

Would any of you really trade being well-informed for the convenience of not having to hold your tongue? I know I wouldn't.

I'm curious whether you'd extend that principle to arbitrarily extreme hypothetical situations.

Imagine the most disreputable factual belief you can think of, and then suppose (for the sake of the argument) that there is in fact some strong evidence in favor of this or some equally disreputable view, which is however ignored or dismissed by all respectable people. Furthermore, suppose that if you find out about it and update your beliefs accordingly, this knowledge will not give you any practical benefit, but merely place you in a situation where your honest beliefs are closer to truth, yet extremely disreputable.

Mind you, we're not talking about your views merely causing some irritation or provoking heated arguments. We're talking about a situation where in most social and all professional situations, you are unable to look at people's faces without thinking that they would consider you an abominable monster unfit for civilized society if they knew your true honest thoughts. You have to live with the fact that people around you (except perhaps for a few close friends and confidants) respect you and are willing to work and socialize with you only insofar as they are misled about what you really believe and what you truly are.

Would you really prefer this outcome to staying blissfully ignorant?

Comment author: Oligopsony 11 August 2010 02:11:03PM 0 points [-]

Carl, and upon looking it up it's Schmitt. So the lack of erudition is all mine.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 11 August 2010 04:04:59PM *  1 point [-]

Yes, I've heard of Schmitt. Paul Gottfried, who is one of my favorite contemporary political theorists, wrote a book about him. I plan to read at least some of Schmitt's original work before reading what Gottfried has to say about him, but I haven't gotten to it yet. Do you have any particular recommendations?

If you want to read some political philosophy that's really out there by modern standards, try Joseph de Maistre. His staunch Catholicism will probably be off-putting to many people here, but a truly unbiased reader should understand that modern political writers are smuggling just as many unwarranted metaphysical assumptions into their work, except in much more devious ways. Also, although some of his arguments have been objectively falsified in the meantime, others have struck me as spot-on from the modern perspective of Darwinian insight into human nature and the humanity's practical political experiences from the last two centuries. (His brother Xavier is a minor classic of French literature, whom I warmly recommend for some fun reading.)

Comment author: Oligopsony 10 August 2010 02:33:49AM 4 points [-]

It's probably good to have a mix. I get something distinct from reading people like Roissy or Sailer, whose basic values are totally divorced from my own. I get something else from Eliezer or Will Wilkinson, who derive different policy preferences from values that are similar to mine.

There's something liberating about evil analysis, and I think it's that it's audaciousness allows you to put down mental blinders that would be on guard againstmore plausible threats to your ideological integrity. And a nice thing about values changing over time is that the classics are full of this stuff. Reading, say, Schmidt is like reading political philosophy from Mars, and that's something you should experience regularly. Any similar recommendations?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 11 August 2010 05:55:48AM 0 points [-]

Oligopsony:

Reading, say, Schmidt is like reading political philosophy from Mars, and that's something you should experience regularly.

Please pardon my evident lack of erudition, but which Schmidt do you have in mind?

Comment author: [deleted] 10 August 2010 12:24:31PM 9 points [-]

The most important thing I learned from this site:

If you suspect something is factually true, don't be afraid to believe it. It can't hurt you.

That's simple. Not easy to implement, but easy to express.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Five-minute rationality techniques
Comment author: Vladimir_M 11 August 2010 05:36:53AM *  5 points [-]

SarahC:

If you suspect something is factually true, don't be afraid to believe it. It can't hurt you.

This is true only assuming that all beliefs that you suspect might be factually true are respectable. Espousing disreputable beliefs -- and sometimes merely being suspected of harboring them -- can hurt you very badly regardless of how good evidence you have for them. Even if you manage to hide your dangerous thoughts perfectly, there is still the problem that duplicity is very unpleasant for most people, if anything because it requires constant caution and self-discipline to watch your mouth.

Of course, this is irrelevant if there are absolutely no beliefs that a rational person might suspect to be true and that are at the same time disreputable to the point where expressing them might have bad repercussions. However, that's not what I observe in practice. Speaking as someone who happens to believe that some not very respectable views are factually true, or at least plausible, sometimes I can't help but envy people whose opinions are all respectable enough that they can relax and speak their mind openly in all situations.

(I raised the same point on OB a while ago.)

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 10 August 2010 04:03:34PM 10 points [-]

A couple of viewquakes at my end.

I was really pleased when the Soviet Union went down-- I thought people there would self-organize and things would get a lot better.

This didn't happen.

I'm still more libertarian than anything else, but I've come to believe that libertarianism doesn't include a sense of process. It's a theory of static conditions, and doesn't have enough about how people actually get to doing things.

The economic crisis of 2007 was another viewquake for me. I literally went around for a couple of months muttering about how I had no idea it (the economy) was so fragile. A real estate bust was predictable, but I had no idea a real estate bust could take so much with it. Of course, neither did a bunch of other people who were much better paid and educated to understand such things, but I don't find that entirely consoling.

This gets back to libertarianism and process, I think. Protections against fraud don't just happen. They need to be maintained, whether by government or otherwise.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 11 August 2010 04:55:17AM *  8 points [-]

NancyLebovitz:

The economic crisis of 2007 was another viewquake for me. I literally went around for a couple of months muttering about how I had no idea it (the economy) was so fragile. A real estate bust was predictable, but I had no idea a real estate bust could take so much with it.

That depends on what exactly you mean by "the economy" being fragile. Most of it is actually extremely resilient to all sorts of disasters and destructive policies; if it weren't so, the modern civilization would have collapsed long ago. However, one critically unstable part is the present financial system, which is indeed an awful house of cards inherently prone to catastrophic collapses. Shocks such as the bursting of the housing bubble get their destructive potential exactly because their effect is amplified by the inherent instabilities of the financial system.

Moldbug's article "Maturity Transformation Considered Harmful" is probably the best explanation of the root causes of this problem that I've seen.

Comment author: Blueberry 28 July 2010 09:17:30PM *  4 points [-]

My point was that go and chess are not actually understood. We don't actually know how they're played. There are hacks that allow programs to get good at those games without actually understanding the patterns involved, but recognizing the patterns involved is what humans actually find interesting about the games.

To clarify, "understanding chess" is a interesting problem. It turns out that "writing a program to be very good at chess" isn't, because it can be solved by brute force in an uninteresting way.

Another example: suppose computer program X and computer program Y are both capable of writing great novels, and human reviewers can't tell the difference between X's novels, Y's novels, and a human's. However, X uses statistical analysis at the word and sentence level to fill in a hard-coded "novel template," whereas Y creates characters, simulates their personality and emotions, and simulates interactions between them. Both have solved the (uninteresting) problem of writing great novels, but Y has solved the (interesting) problem of understanding how people write novels.

(ETA: I suspect that program X wouldn't actually be able to write great novels, and I suspect that writing great novels is therefore actually an interesting problem, but I could be wrong. People used to think that about chess.)

What's happened in AI research is that Y (which is actually AI) is too difficult, so people successfully solve problems the way program X (which is not AI) does. But don't let this confuse you into thinking that AI has been successful.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 28 July 2010 09:44:01PM *  18 points [-]

Blueberry:

My point was that go and chess are not actually understood. We don't actually know how they're played. There are hacks that allow programs to get good at those games without actually understanding the patterns involved, but recognizing the patterns involved is what humans actually find interesting about the games.

That's not really true. In the last two decades or so, there has been lots of progress in reverse-engineering of how chess masters think and incorporating that knowledge into chess engines. Of course, in some cases such knowledge is basically useless, so it's not pursued much. For example, there's no point in teaching computers the heuristics that humans use to recognize immediate tactical combinations where a brute force search would be impossible for humans, but a computer can perform it in a millisecond.

However, when it comes to long-term positional strategy, brute-force search is useless, no matter how fast, and until the mid-1990s, top grandmasters could still reliably beat computers by avoiding tactics and pursuing long-term strategic advantage. That's not possible any more, since computers actually can think strategically now. (This outcome was disappointing in a sense, since it basically turned out that the human grandmasters' extraordinary strategic abilities are much more due to recognizing a multitude of patterns learned from experience than flashes of brilliant insight.)

Even the relative importance of brute-force search capabilities has declined greatly. To take one example, the Deep Blue engines that famously matched Kasparov's ability in 1996 and 1997 relied on specialized hardware that enabled them to evaluate something like 100-200 million positions per second, while a few years later, the Fritz and Junior engines successfully drew against him even though their search capabilities were smaller by two orders of magnitude. In 2006, the world champion Kramnik was soundly defeated by an engine evaluating mere 8 million positions per second, which would have been unthinkable a decade earlier.

Comment author: JenniferRM 28 July 2010 05:12:49AM 0 points [-]

Well, here's a fun URL for you then -- "Reassessing the Theory of Comparative Advantage" by one R.E. Prasch: http://www.econ.tcu.edu/harvey/5443/prasch.pdf I don't agree with everything in the paper, but it's definitely a sobering look at the actual state of the comparative advantage arguments.

It took me about a week to find the minutes to read this and process it, but once I was done, it felt like one of those cases where there was some new and relevant things in it, but the new stuff wasn't relevant and the relevant stuff wasn't new.

To be clear, all I'm saying is "there's is something to comparative advantage worth learning from which seems to bear out the more general 'zero sum bias' idea" and your position seems to be a much stronger (and due to over-reaching, false) claim that comparative advantage is some kind of silly intellectual fashion among pointy headed intellectuals that should never even be mentioned without heaping portions of warning and quibble on the side. As though a little dose would be poisonous rather than give people a taste for learning more, and the meal wouldn't be that nutritious even by the end.

If this is the ground you're defending, and that's the ground I'm defending, I really think you're simply wrong.

The core insight here is not whether free trade among many many people is always pareto efficient for every single member of the economy, but whether 2 individuals can gain via comparative advantage (which obviously they frequently can) and then whether N people can institute free trade among themselves in a way that is Kaldor-Hicks efficient.

If something benefits 20 people a quite a bit, and it benefits them more than it hurts one person who wants to veto all of their ability to trade with each other (rather than trade with the one person), then I say that the one person should look at themselves in the mirror and feel guilty. They should train for a new job (and maybe should be given a kickback from the profits for retraining) and bring on the efficiency! :-)

It is obvious that sellers of anything would prefer that they have no competition in order to get nice fat profit margins. Someone competing with them will be bad for that seller but will almost always be good for the customers. If you give someone the political power to veto economic competition, nearly everyone will... but it would be good for all of us to agree to each refrain from this because in the end, we're all someone's customers :-)

Nearly all of the content in the paper you linked to was quibbles and carping and fear mongering. There was no clear and robust explanation of why comparative advantage was simply a crock of feces that no one should ever even link to.

The paper was full of claims that "it is possible that some union workers might be hurt" without paying any attention to whether other people were reaping enormous benefits in the meantime.

And, yes, it is also worth worrying about whether some country might lose the capacity to feed itself, or to produce tanks, or to fuel tanks, if it engages in trade and ends up having one of those industries shrink to near nonexistence within its borders... I mean, that does and should stimulate a little fear for "what if" scenarios where property rights fall away in at some point and warfare breaks out. People should be honest that someone might "turn predatory" if they end up in a strong military position after economic optimization increases the aggregate levels of wealth...

But the whole point of our back and forth, from the get go, has simply been that comparative advantage is (1) non-obvious, (2) strongly intellectually resisted by some people in a way that might imply some kind of general bias, and (3) worth at least linking to without any kind of worry that its a "mere shibboleth".

Again, if you think this is weak concept that mostly has intellectual fashion to support it, please give me links to similarly fashionable concepts, because, I want to learn about them (and learn to apply them) even if you don't :-P

Comment author: Vladimir_M 28 July 2010 07:30:05AM *  2 points [-]

JenniferRM:

To be clear, all I'm saying is "there's is something to comparative advantage worth learning from which seems to bear out the more general 'zero sum bias' idea" and your position seems to be a much stronger (and due to over-reaching, false) claim that comparative advantage is some kind of silly intellectual fashion among pointy headed intellectuals that should never even be mentioned without heaping portions of warning and quibble on the side.

I actually don't see how these claims are contradictory, and in fact, I'd say they are both true. Yes, comparative advantage is a non-trivial insight that has something useful to say about certain situations that occur in the real world. However, at the same time, it is used in an entirely wrong-headed way by many intellectuals, as a supposedly conclusive argument for things that it simply does not imply. At worst, and sadly quite often, it is thrown around as an entirely empty-headed ideological shibboleth. The typical mention of comparative advantage you'll see in practice, even by economists, barely rises above the level of "Brawndo's got electrolytes!"

After all, what does the principle of comparative advantage say? It's equivalent to the simple mathematical observation that if a1, a2, b1, and b2 are positive real numbers such that a1/a2 < b1/b2, then for any positive d1,d2 such that b2/a2 < d1/d2 < b1/a1, we'll have d2b1 > d1a1 and d1a2 > d2b2, and this is also true in the special case when a1 > b1 and a2 > b2. (In the standard Ricardian example, the a's and b's are the coefficients of proportion between labor and production for each good in each country, under the assumption that production is a linear function of labor put into it, and d's are the amounts of labor that shift between the goods in each country when trade emerges.)

Now, as I said, there really is some non-trivial insight to be gathered here. But if you believe that this simple piece of math is enough to model what actually happens when trade is liberalized or some other bearer of absolute advantage appears on the market, always and in all possible circumstances, and if you don't see various critical unrealistic assumptions and all the numerous relevant variables that don't even get considered by the model, then with all due respect, I can only conclude that you haven't thought about it much.

Nearly all of the content in the paper you linked to was quibbles and carping and fear mongering. There was no clear and robust explanation of why comparative advantage was simply a crock of feces that no one should ever even link to.

Imagine an engineer designing a house, and using the Pythagorean theorem several times in the statics calculations. When some people ask him whether he's really sure that the triangles in question are right-angled, and point out that some of them look suspiciously obtuse or acute, he brushes this off as "quibbles" -- and when they point out that the roof might collapse on their heads if he makes a mistake, he accuses them of "fear-mongering." I think this is a fair analogy for your above comment.

Prasch's paper clearly enumerates several assumptions that are an essential part of the theory of comparative advantage, and questions whether they hold in reality. Some of these criticisms may well be flawed, and in fact I'd say some of them indeed are. But if only some of them are correct, it is enough to make the theory inapplicable in at least some real-world situations. When a theory that is supposed to provide real-world guidance is criticized, the critics don't need to provide robust and systematic alternatives. What you call "quibbles" are more than enough.

If something benefits 20 people a quite a bit, and it benefits them more than it hurts one person who wants to veto all of their ability to trade with each other (rather than trade with the one person), then I say that the one person should look at themselves in the mirror and feel guilty. They should train for a new job (and maybe should be given a kickback from the profits for retraining) and bring on the efficiency! :-)

You seem to be falling into what I like to call the neoliberal fallacy. You are speaking as if we were one step away from a global economic-textbook-model libertarian utopia, with only those pesky trade barriers separating us from it. Yeah, if we were in such a position, I'd also say, to hell with them. But in reality, the situation is far more complex in many ways that even the most sophisticated economic models, let alone simplistic comparative-advantage arguments, are utterly incapable of taking into account. Therefore, some humility and recognition of the law of unintended consequences would definitely be in order.

And to underly the other crucial point again: even if the assumptions of the comparative advantage theory are true, and the trade will lead to a Kaldor-Hicks improvement, this can still mean that 19 out of 20 people get screwed over in any given country. To show that this won't happen, you cannot just invoke comparative advantage.

Comment author: cousin_it 27 July 2010 05:04:26PM 9 points [-]

Related posts: Yvain's Would Your Real Preferences Please Stand up?, Hanson's Resolving Your Hypocrisy. Robin thinks the conscious part should make peace with the unconscious part, Yvain thinks the conscious part should win.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 27 July 2010 10:28:27PM *  3 points [-]

Another pertinent post: Which Parts are "Me"?

Comment author: Roko 22 July 2010 11:03:27PM 0 points [-]

Sure. Actually, I'd be interested if you had any academic references on the details of signalling theory, especially issues like counter-signalling

Comment author: Vladimir_M 23 July 2010 06:29:39AM *  1 point [-]

Regarding counter-signaling, I remember the "Too Cool for School" paper that was linked from Marginal Revolution a few years ago, along with the subsequent "False Modesty" paper that shares a co-author. These seem to be the standard references about the topic.

But more importantly, I don't think academic insight in this area gathered so far is particularly worthwhile. Before getting into complex mathematical models can be really fruitful, we first need an informal common-sense overview of the situation, in order to know where to look for situations that provide suitable material for more solid theories. Unfortunately, in this regard, even the most insightful people have made only baby steps so far.

Comment author: multifoliaterose 22 July 2010 05:35:38AM *  5 points [-]

•I don't think that it's clear that you need more evidence than GiveWell is capable of providing to believe that GiveWell's top rated charities have an expected impact comparable to what they ostensibly do. As far as I know, there's no evidence that health interventions of the type that VillageReach and StopTB have any systemic negative side effects. I don't see anything in the interview with Shikwati that points to the idea that such interventions can be expected to have negative side effects. Do you?

•See this GiveWell research message board post for GiveWell founder Holden's current position on Malthusian problems. In regard to the possibility of aid giving rise to disastrously bad government, I see no reason to expect that the sort of work that VillageReach and StopTB do is more likely to give rise to disastrously bad government than it is to prevent disastrously bad government. If you have reasons for believing that VillageReach and StopTB systematically promote Malthusian problems or disastrously bad governments I would be interested hearing them.

•I agree that Peter Singer and his colleagues are often absurd. His analysis often fails to take into account features of human psychology. I find him unpleasantly arrogant. That being said, I give him major credit for making some effort to improve society by writing "The Life You Can Save," even though his effort is suboptimal on account of being off-putting to people like you.

•Again, the main point of my post is to encourage people to experiment with donating a sizable fraction of their income with a view toward maximizing their positive social impact, not to encourage people to donate to charities working on improving health in the developing world.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 23 July 2010 05:55:51AM *  2 points [-]

multifoliaterose:

As far as I know, there's no evidence that health interventions of the type that VillageReach and StopTB have any systemic negative side effects. I don't see anything in the interview with Shikwati that points to the idea that such interventions can be expected to have negative side effects. Do you?

It seems like the main point of our disagreement is that you believe that the effects of interventions in remote parts of the world can be assessed in a straightforward way using some basic common-sense criteria, while I am much more skeptical and wary of the real-world complexity and the law of unintended consequences. As a general principle, absent some extremely strong evidence to the contrary, I don't believe that even the most resourceful and well-intentioned people really know what they're doing when they try to influence things in extremely distant and alien parts of the world, even if their intervention seems so purely benevolent that you can't even think of what might possibly go wrong.

So, to answer your question, yes, I do see a multitude of possibilities for how even the most benevolent-seeming interventions can go wrong, including these ones, and I distrust any simple analysis that purports to account for their effects fully. To answer whether these possibilities correspond exactly to the specific things mentioned by Shikwati, I would need to know much more about the specific details of how these organizations work than it's possible to find out from the public information about them. In particular, when it comes to the issues of Malthusian problems and abetting bad government, I don't find your replies satisfactory. The mechanisms of these problems are clear and straightforward, and they've been observed many times historically up to the present day. To be convinced that some intervention is worth supporting, I need to see strong evidence to the contrary, for these issues as well as numerous others. They are the ones asking for my money, after all.

If someone claims to have an airtight case that a certain intervention in a distant part of the world really is worth supporting, the burden of proof is on them. And yes, they have an awfully high bar to clear, but given the sordid history of well-intentioned interventions among distant strangers throughout the last century or so, it's impossible not to be either naive or strongly skeptical.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 21 July 2010 01:04:18PM 2 points [-]

I'm not convinced that the far-mode/near-mode distinction is well-defined. I do however think that Victorian Great Britain did a very good job listening to their scientists, better than Great Britain or the United States does today. And I do think that both Darwin and Babbage were listened to quite a bit.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 23 July 2010 02:58:42AM *  8 points [-]

JoshuaZ:

I do however think that Victorian Great Britain did a very good job listening to their scientists, better than Great Britain or the United States does today.

The trouble nowadays is not that governments are not listening to scientists (in the sense of people officially and publicly recognized as such), but that the increased prominence of science in public affairs has subjected the very notion of "science" to a severe case of Goodhart's law. In other words, the fact that if something officially passes for "science," governments listen to it and are willing to pay for it has led to an awful debasement of the very concept of science in modern times.

Once governments started listening to scientists, it was only a matter of time before talented charlatans and bullshit-artists would figure out that they can sell their ideas to governments by presenting them in the form of plausible-looking pseudoscience. It seems to me that many areas have been completely overtaken by this sort of thing, and the fact that their output is being labeled as "scientific" and used to drive government policy is a major problem that poses frightful threats for the future.

Comment author: Roko 22 July 2010 09:57:18PM *  1 point [-]

This seems like a nitpick: it is orthogonal to the point at issue.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 22 July 2010 10:50:37PM 0 points [-]

I was't attacking the point at issue. It just seemed worth pointing out as a digression.

Comment author: Roko 22 July 2010 07:19:28PM *  2 points [-]

Sure, but you can also achieve the same signalling-of-wealth value by using 50% of your wealth to buy Ferraris, Gold watches and designer suits.

Is there any relevant difference between signalling wealth by charitable donation versus conspicuous consumption? I think so: from the female genes' point of view, conspicuous consumption signals selfishness, the desire to look after your own, whereas the charity signals sucker-ness -- the desire to help others who are not reciprocating.

This is the altruist's burden: if you help society at large, you create the counterpoint public choice problem to the special interests problem in politics. You harm a concentrated interest (friends, partner, children) in order to reward a diffuse interest (helping each of billions of people infinitesimally).

The concentrated interest then retaliates, because by standard public choice theory it has an incentive to do so, but the diffuse interest just ignores you.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 22 July 2010 09:16:09PM *  3 points [-]

Roko:

I think so: from the female genes' point of view, conspicuous consumption signals selfishness, the desire to look after your own, whereas the charity signals sucker-ness -- the desire to help others who are not reciprocating.

It's much more complicated than that. By improper conspicuous consumption, you can easily end up signaling that you're a sucker. Even worse, you'll signal that you're the sort of sucker who's easy to separate from his money. You can probably imagine the possible consequences of that botched signal.

Generally speaking, effective conspicuous consumption is very difficult to pull off. This of course doesn't apply to the level of conspicuous consumption that you're expected to undertake to avoid coming off as a weirdo given your position in society, but anything beyond that is dangerously apt to backfire in a multitude of ways.

Comment author: cousin_it 22 July 2010 06:27:25PM *  9 points [-]

Heresy alert: Eliezer seems to be better at writing than he is at AI theory. Maybe he should write a big piece of SF about unfriendly and friendly AI to make these concepts as popular as Skynet or the Matrix. A textbook on rationality won't have as much impact.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 22 July 2010 08:53:00PM 3 points [-]

cousin_it:

Maybe he should write a big piece of SF about unfriendly and friendly AI to make these concepts as popular as Skynet or the Matrix.

I don't think this would be a good strategy. In the general public, including the overwhelming part of the intelligentsia, SF associations are not exactly apt to induce intellectual respect and serious attention.

Comment author: Roko 21 July 2010 08:50:47PM 3 points [-]

So if I ever need to defeat you, forget the Kryptonite, just brandish a copy of "the life you can save"?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 22 July 2010 02:21:01AM 4 points [-]

Nah, that wouldn't deter me. In the interest of my own intellectual improvement, I have developed the ability to read through arbitrarily obnoxious stuff, much like medical students develop the ability to overcome the normal disgust of dissection and handling corpses.

Comment author: multifoliaterose 21 July 2010 09:34:10PM *  1 point [-]

(a) I agree that Singer sometimes exhibits spherical-cow utilitarianism that has nothing to do with real human moral instincts. I also agree that his views are in some ways naive.

(b) The issue of negative unintended consequences connected with developing aid world is a serious one.

(c) If you have a good argument that "it's illusory to believe that it can be avoided by some simple precautions such as those advocated by GiveWell" then I'm interested in hearing it. But at the moment your implicit criticism of the efficacy of donating to GiveWell's top recommended international aid charities appears to be totally ungrounded.

(d) Whether or not international aid is a good cause has little bearing on whether or not people should be giving more of their money away. The "saving a life" imagery is best understood metaphorically. There may be causes that are much more cost-effective from the point of view of maximizing positive social impact than giving to improve international health. People who believe that developing world aid is not cost-effective should consider donating a sizable fraction of their income to an organization that supports a cause that they prefer, or placing a sizable fraction of their income in a donor advised fund for future charitable use.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 22 July 2010 02:07:21AM *  5 points [-]

multifoliaterose:

If you have a good argument that "it's illusory to believe that it can be avoided by some simple precautions such as those advocated by GiveWell" then I'm interested in hearing it. But at the moment your implicit criticism of the efficacy of donating to GiveWell's top recommended international aid charities appears to be totally ungrounded.

Maybe I should state my claim more clearly. What I mean is that while criteria such as those used by GiveWell can eliminate certain modes of failure in aid projects, they are by no means sufficient to eliminate the possibility of numerous other non-obvious failure modes -- and given the actual historical record of various humanitarian aid programs, it seems pretty obvious to me that such failures are a rule rather than exceptions. I would say that this constitutes enough evidence to shift the burden of proof on those who argue in favor of supporting such projects.

Note that even if it's proven beyond reasonable doubt that a certain program has saved so many lives, it is by no means a guarantee that its overall long-term consequences are positive by any standard. For example, reducing mortality among people who are stuck in a Malthusian equilibrium in a way that doesn't force them out of this equilibrium will only increase the amount of suffering in the medium-to-long run, which can be alleviated only by ever increasing amounts of aid, creating a diabolical positive feedback process that results in an ever greater dependence -- possibly making it even more difficult for them to escape the Malthusian condition. Or, to take another example, aiding the subjects of a disastrously bad government will increase its stability and grip on power in a way that may easily allow it to make an even worse subsequent mess. Such scenarious, and various other equally depressing ones, have happened on innumerably many occasions in modern history, and keep on happening.

On the whole, when someone claims that some project will improve the lot of distant strangers that are outside of your regular sphere of attention and comprehension, you need an awful lot of evidence to be reasonably sure that these claims are true -- certainly way more evidence than even GiveWell is capable of providing, even if they really are the best source of information on these matters.

There may be causes that are much more cost-effective from the point of view of maximizing positive social impact than giving to improve international health. People who believe that developing world aid is not cost-effective should consider donating a sizable fraction of their income to an organization that supports a cause that they prefer, or placing a sizable fraction of their income in a donor advised fund for future charitable use.

I have no particular argument with this, as long as such attitudes are not based on the absurd Singerian idea that distant anonymous strangers have an equal claim on my altruism as people stuck in some accidental trouble right in front of me. An essential part of human nature is that people care more about family and friends than about strangers, and more about strangers that are closer by various criteria than about more distant ones -- and there is absolutely nothing wrong with this by any reasonable standard, regardless of how much Singer and his ilk smugly chastise normal people for not falling in line with their ideology.

Comment author: Roko 21 July 2010 07:22:16PM *  2 points [-]

it is merely a reflection of his spherical-cow utilitarianism that has nothing at all to do with the actual human moral instincts -- or any other actual aspect of humanity, for that matter

Perhaps that is a little harsh.

The advantage of efficiently caring about other people in your community is that it is efficient. Our countries would be better if people were at least efficient in the way they cared for each other. For example, I'd trade people not calling 911 if I were hurt for those same people spending an hour a week reading about cognitive biases or each donating $30 to SENS.

The same holds for the world at large, though the inefficiencies introduced by different races and cultures trying to cooperate makes me distrustful of international aid.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 21 July 2010 07:37:33PM *  1 point [-]

Roko:

Perhaps that is a little harsh.

To be precise, I said that specifically about Singer's philosophy, of which I really don't think anything good (I'm generally allergic to utilitarianism, and I find Singer's variant especially noxious). I'm not saying all his conclusions are as outlandish as the philosophy he uses to derive them; some things he says can still be reasonable in a stopped-clock sort of way.

The same holds for the world at large, though the inefficiencies introduced by different races and cultures trying to cooperate makes me distrustful of international aid.

I'd say that the problems of unintended consequences go far beyond inefficiency losses, and even beyond the complaints voiced by Shikwati in that article I linked. But that's a complex topic in its own right.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 21 July 2010 07:14:31PM *  4 points [-]

multifoliaterose:

[Following Singer's kid-in-a-pond parable: ] Most people value the well-being of human strangers. This is at least in part a terminal value, not an instrumental value. So why don't people give more money away with a view toward maximizing positive social impact?

That's not a precise way of putting it. There is a huge difference in how people view strangers that happen to be physically close at the moment, especially if they are perceived to belong to the same community in some sense, versus distant strangers that are out of sight.

You are expected to exert a reasonable effort to help strangers in dire trouble that you encounter physically. This includes, say, giving directions to someone who is lost, calling 911 if you find someone lying wounded, or pulling a drowning kid out of a pond. This social norm is, to my knowledge, a human universal. Its overall effects are positive by all reasonable standards, and it is entirely rational to suspect people who break it of serious personality defects. Life is immensely safer and more pleasant for everyone if you can expect random people around you to watch your back and care about you to some reasonable degree.

In contrast, people as a rule don't care at all about distant, out of sight strangers. Yes, they will often donate to charity in the name of helping them, but the reasons for such donations have little or nothing to do with the actual psychological mechanisms of care for fellow humans. Moreover, while attempts to help immediately present strangers almost always actually help them, the case for remote charity is much more moot. The law of unintended consequences is harsh and merciless whenever large-scale interventions in human affairs are undertaken, and it's illusory to believe that it can be avoided by some simple precautions such as those advocated by GiveWell. Whether or not people like James Shikwati are exaggerating their case, it is even more foolish and dishonest to dismiss them out of hand.

So, on the whole, when it comes to helping strangers, I readily admit that I feel a strong obligation to help strangers in cases of the first kind, and expect the same from others, while I'm largely indifferent and skeptical towards aid to distant foreigners. This is simply what human beings are like, and denying it is empty posturing -- there is practically no one who actually considers his obligations towards all strangers the same, or vice versa, no matter what the distance. When Singer conflates these cases, it is merely a reflection of his spherical-cow utilitarianism that has nothing at all to do with the real human moral instincts -- or any other actual aspect of humanity, for that matter. He is just proselytizing his own eccentric quasi-religious belief system.

Comment author: Soki 20 July 2010 06:22:48PM 1 point [-]

Helium-3 could be mined from the moon. It would be a good fusion fuel, but it is rare on earth so it makes sense to get it from space.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 20 July 2010 07:32:23PM *  2 points [-]

Now that's interesting! I didn't know that the prospects for helium-3 fusion are allegedly that good. Still, given the previous history of controlled fusion research, I'm inclined to be skeptical. Do you know of any critical references about the present 3He fusion research? All the references I've seen from a casual googling appear to be pretty optmistic about it.

Comment author: Roko 20 July 2010 01:44:25PM 1 point [-]

Lastly, I should mention Asteroid Mining. Consider the asteroid Eros:

In the 2,900 cubic kms of Eros, there is more aluminium, gold, silver, zinc and other base and precious metals than have ever been excavated in history or indeed, could ever be excavated from the upper layers of the Earth's crust.

You suddenly begin to see that entrepreneurs like Elon Musk could be the force that pushes us into a space economy.

Brian Wang thinks that there is $100 trillion (10^14) worth of platinum and gold alone there. Of course the price would begin to fall once you had made your first few hundred billion.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 20 July 2010 05:49:56PM *  5 points [-]

Are there actually any materials on Earth that are so rare and precious (and perhaps in danger of running out in the foreseeable future) that it would make sense to mine them from space?

By the way, the claim about aluminum sounds highly implausible to me. Aluminum accounts for about 8% of the Earth's crust by weight, and even if most of it is difficult to access, I would expect that more than the amount present on Eros would be extractable with methods much easier than any conceivable sort of asteroid mining.

Comment author: JenniferRM 20 July 2010 07:24:52AM 2 points [-]

I'm in total agreement that there are "spherical cow" problems with comparative advantage, like the fact that there will be retooling costs if things change and that economies of scale are important complicating factors... and... the physical world is just complicated... so yes to that :-)

But unless I'm mistaken, you're going overboard by pairing "more realistic assumptions" with outcomes that are bleak to the point of absurdity.

Why didn't horses benefit from comparative advantage when motor vehicles were invented, but instead got slaughtered massively? Well, they did exercise their comparative advantage at the end -- it just happened that their comparative advantage was to be killed for meat and hides, even if the overall outcome was a great increase in wealth. Similarly, when a new party with a strong absolute advantage over you appears on the market, there is no bottom for how low you personally can sink in the new equilibrium, no matter how much the total wealth produced goes up.

Horses were property. They didn't have property rights over anything, not even property rights over their own bodies to prevent a predatory species (humans) from using their body parts in more efficient ways when it suited us. Horses didn't have the ability to negotiate or trade so they are not the kind of entities which are capable of personally leveraging comparative advantage. Moreover, they don't have a deep and generic capacity to learn new skills the way humans do, so their "economic function" was fixed. Finally, cars aren't economic agents either.

The horse example didn't add real world complexity to the standard Ricardian examples, it subtracted complexity and filled it in with the specter of people being analogically "carted off to the glue factory"!

Where is the dispassionate reason? Where is the evidence? This seems more like predator-prey ecological modeling than economics >.<

Based on experience, to make a meta claim like "something people usually think is X is actually not-X" you need to be able to think clearly about the object level and then think clearly about the mechanisms by which people normally understand the object level. You must defend "not-X" while simultaneously explaining "X and its incorrect justifications". The best way I know to do this sort of thing is to talk about the real world in excruciating detail and provide links for the education of the audience and to allow verification of facts reported by third parties. The "incorrect justifications" normally fall out pretty clearly once the object level is understood.

In this case I will simply cite Krugman's essay (with a title that's a play on Dennet's "Darwin's Dangerous Idea) "Ricardo's Difficult Idea". Krugman tries to explore why so many smart people are so dumb about comparative advantage. One possibility he raises is that a major part of problem is that people invent objections that take some time to debunk, so he raises three major objections and debunks them for those who do have the patience.

I saw one thing that jumped out as a reference to clear reasoning and evidence:

In particular, the fact of capital mobility can wreck the usual simple model of comparative advantage completely.

An hour of googling based on this hint was educational, but the best connection I could find was to the Heckscher–Ohlin model of international trade, where different capital accumulations were identified as a potential endogenous source of comparative advantage, if capital adhered within countries (as heavy machinery tends to do, for example). The model itself seems to have serious problems and in any case, I don't see the connection to any kind of broader point that makes zero-sum assumptions more plausible.

I'm not a trained economist, but the more I study this the more it looks to me like comparative advantage may be a good example of a "non-zero sum truth" that many people systematically misunderstand in a zero sum direction. I feel relatively comfortable deploying "knee-jerk invocations of 'comparative advantage' as a trump card" if that leads to URLs that have the kinds of evidence and reasoning I'm finding in an attempt to understand it better.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 20 July 2010 08:58:41AM *  13 points [-]

JenniferRM:

But unless I'm mistaken, you're going overboard by pairing "more realistic assumptions" with outcomes that are bleak to the point of absurdity.

The point is that unlike what one commonly hears from the proponents of free trade, including many economists, comparative advantage by itself does not prove that everyone, or even a great majority, will end up better off -- since it says absolutely nothing about how the wealth produced in the new equilibrium will be distributed. Moreover, when the spherical cow assumptions are relaxed in some arguably realistic ways, not even the conclusion that the total produced wealth will increase is certain.

Mind you, I am not making an argument against free trade here, but merely pointing out that the theory of comparative advantage is typically used as a nearly thought-free shibboleth, not a sound argument. It simply cannot prove what its fans commonly claim it does. To make a valid argument for a free-trade position on any realistic economic issue, much more is necessary.

That essay by Krugman you linked is a typical example. It sounds as if a mathematician complained that people are incapable of grasping the Pythagorean theorem, smugly scolding them for their lack of understanding, while casually assuming that it applies to every triangle, not just the right-angled ones.

Horses were property. They didn't have property rights over anything, not even property rights over their own bodies to prevent a predatory species (humans) from using their body parts in more efficient ways when it suited us. Horses didn't have the ability to negotiate or trade so they are not the kind of entities which are capable of personally leveraging comparative advantage. Moreover, they don't have a deep and generic capacity to learn new skills the way humans do, so their "economic function" was fixed.

Horses are an extreme example that elucidates the basic problem. In the new equilibrium after the appearance of motor vehicles, most horses were no longer capable of earning their subsistence even by practicing their best comparative advantage. Even if they had been able to trade and negotiate, it wouldn't have helped them at all, and if they had been protected by law from slaughter, it still means that they would have starved to death unless someone decided to keep them alive out of charity. Note that all this holds regardless of the fact that the total amount of wealth produced went up tremendously.

Of course, humans are more flexible than horses, and even the most unskilled human labor nowadays can earn more than subsistence in all but the most messed up parts of the world. But even if they can't realistically fall below subsistence, this still doesn't mean that large numbers of people can't be badly hurt by losing their absolute advantage. Now, who would lose and gain what under various scenarios is a complex question, and it may be that free trade is brilliantly vindicated in practice -- but again, this is a question that demands further argument, and a mere invocation of comparative advantage can't even begin to answer it.

(Not to mention the issue of what will happen if machines start reaching human-level intelligence and other skills at some point. This would put increasing numbers of humans precisely in the position of horses. On this topic, one often hears awfully naive optimistic arguments based on comparative advantage.)

I'm not a trained economist, but the more I study this the more it looks to me like comparative advantage may be a good example of a "non-zero sum truth" that many people systematically misunderstand in a zero sum direction.

That may well be true for the general population. However, I'd say that among economists and many other elements of the intelligentsia, the prevailing bias is actually in the opposite direction -- noticing that some important things actually are close to zero-sum under certain realistic assumptions will commonly provoke scorn instead of rational argument. And their opinions matter much more than what common folks believe.

I feel relatively comfortable deploying "knee-jerk invocations of 'comparative advantage' as a trump card" if that leads to URLs that have the kinds of evidence and reasoning I'm finding in an attempt to understand it better.

Well, here's a fun URL for you then -- "Reassessing the Theory of Comparative Advantage" by one R.E. Prasch:
http://www.econ.tcu.edu/harvey/5443/prasch.pdf

I don't agree with everything in the paper, but it's definitely a sobering look at the actual state of the comparative advantage arguments.

Comment author: JenniferRM 20 July 2010 12:39:12AM 7 points [-]

I suspect, but am not sure, that your "real world" assessment is biased in almost exactly the way multifoliaterose is hypothesizing that most people are biased.

When someone is rationally willing/able to work for lower wages (assuming they aren't be forced into it by expensive systems of repression) it creates what economists call a comparative advantage which is an opportunity for mutually beneficial cooperation. All the people who would have done the drudge work for wages that are low (but not that low) can switch to whatever their new comparative advantages are with more total wealth produced in aggregate, which can be traded back around.

Academics have noticed for years that comparative advantage is a real phenomenon, but also that it is not widely understood and is frequently denied even when explained. This seems a likely candidate for the kind of bias that multifoliaterose is writing about.

If I had any quibbles with the article, it would be that (1) the object level was ignored in favor of mere "topic introduction", (2) while drawing support from evolutionary hand waving rather than citation to strong experimental evidence, with (3) the assumption that it certainly is bias (rather than a reasonably accurate model of the world).

I would have liked to have read about the subject itself and thereby learned something, rather than reading about the tragedy of the developing world and why evolutionary hand waving is valuable. A good place to look for grounded material on the subject might be the literature that grew out of George M. Mason's classic work on "peasant culture". His 1965 paper Peasant Society and the Image of Limited Good included this summary in the introduction:

I will outline what I believe to be the dominant theme in the cognitive orientation of classic peasant societies,* show how characteristic peasant behavior seems to flow from this orientation, and attempt to show that this behavior—however incompatible with national economic growth—is not only highly rational in the context of the cognition that determines it, but that for the maintenance of peasant society in its classic form, it is indispensable.[4] The kinds of behavior that have been suggested as adversely influencing economic growth are, among many, the "luck" syndrome, a "fatalistic" outlook, inter- and intra-familial quarrels, difficulties in cooperation, extraordinary ritual expenses by poor people and the problems these expenses pose for capital accumulation, and the apparent lack of what the psychologist McClelland (1961) has called "need for Achievement." I will suggest that peasant participation in national development can be hastened not by stimulating a psychological process, the need for achievement, but by creating economic and other opportunities that will encourage the peasant to abandon his traditional and increasingly unrealistic cognitive orientation for a new one that reflects the realities of the modern world.

I know that there exists almost 50 years of academic literature downstream of this statement, but I know little about its data, controversies, or leading authors. If someone was looking for academic results from which to borrow content (to popularize the material as "relevant to personal rationality" the way Kahneman & Tversky are being popularized by Eliezer) this might be a good place to look :-)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 20 July 2010 03:33:05AM *  10 points [-]

JenniferRM:

Academics have noticed for years that comparative advantage is a real phenomenon, but also that it is not widely understood and is frequently denied even when explained.

That's true, but on the other hand, economists often present the theory of comparative advantage in a way that's either disingenuous or shows their own lack of deeper understanding of what it actually says. What they usually omit -- either out of ignorance or for ideological reasons -- is that the principle of comparative advantage is fully compatible with various realistic scenarios where great masses of people get completely screwed over by the emergence of trade involving a new party that enjoys absolute advantage over them.

This is true even when all the assumptions necessary to derive the principle of comparative advantage hold. However, to make things even worse, its derivation involves some highly questionable spherical-cow assumptions, and the question of what can happen when these are relaxed in various realistic ways is rarely asked. In particular, the fact of capital mobility can wreck the usual simple model of comparative advantage completely.

Now, you say:

All the people who would have done the drudge work for wages that are low (but not that low) can switch to whatever their new comparative advantages are with more total wealth produced in aggregate, which can be traded back around.

See, here you're assuming that with their new comparative advantage, these people will be in a tolerable position. But in reality, what they're capable of earning by practicing their new comparative advantage in the new equilibrium can be arbitrarily bad -- in principle, it can even be below subsistence.

For the clearest example, take horses instead of people. Why didn't horses benefit from comparative advantage when motor vehicles were invented, but instead got slaughtered massively? Well, they did exercise their comparative advantage at the end -- it just happened that their comparative advantage was to be killed for meat and hides, even if the overall outcome was a great increase in wealth. Similarly, when a new party with a strong absolute advantage over you appears on the market, there is no bottom for how low you personally can sink in the new equilibrium, no matter how much the total wealth produced goes up.

Of course, the outcome for various groups of people may end up being good or bad in any particular concrete case in practice, and one can argue that the bad outcomes are rare, inconsequential, and ultimately a price that should be paid for the benefits of free trade. But this requires much more sophisticated and specific arguments than the usual knee-jerk invocations of "comparative advantage" as a trump card.

Comment author: Matt_Simpson 18 July 2010 05:08:56AM 1 point [-]

I thought about this post for awhile - partially because I've just been too busy for LW the past few days - and I'm still pretty skeptical. I general, I think you're right - people don't closely read much of anything, or interpret much literally. I've seen enough economic experiments to know that subject rarely have even a basic grasp of the rules coming into the experiment, and only when the experiment begins and they start trying things out do they understand the environment we put them in.

However, in the heuristics and biases experiments what subjects are reading is only a couple of sentences long. In my exerpience, people tend to only skim when what they're reading is long or complicated. So I find it fairly hard to believe that most people aren't reading something like the Linda problem close enough to understand it - especially undergraduates at high end universities and trained doctors.

OTOH, I'm open to any evidence you have

Comment author: Vladimir_M 18 July 2010 09:16:40AM *  2 points [-]

Matt_Simpson:

In my experience, people tend to only skim when what they're reading is long or complicated. So I find it fairly hard to believe that most people aren't reading something like the Linda problem close enough to understand it - especially undergraduates at high end universities and trained doctors.

My thinking about this topic is strongly influenced by my experiences from situations where I was in charge of organizing something, but without any formal authority over the people involved, with things based on an honor system and voluntary enthusiasm. In such situations, when I send off an email with instructions, I often find it a non-trivial problem to word things in a such a way that I'll have peace of mind that it will be properly understood by all recipients.

In my experience, even very smart people with a technical or scientific background who normally display great intelligence and precision of thought in the course of their work will often skim and misunderstand questions and instructions worded in a precise but unnatural way, unless they have an incentive to make the effort to read the message with extra care and accuracy (e.g. if it's coming from someone whose authority they fear). Maybe some bad experiences from the past have made me excessively cautious in this regard, but if I caught myself writing an email worded the same way as the doctors' question by T&K and directed at people who won't be inclined to treat it with special care -- no matter how smart, except perhaps if they're mathematicians -- I would definitely rewrite it before sending.

Comment author: rhollerith_dot_com 16 July 2010 06:03:35PM *  6 points [-]

There have been many non-democratic political arrangements in human history other than dictatorships.

Good point. For example, if you squint hard enough, the choosing of a council or legislature through lots as was done for a time in the Venetian state, is "democratic" in that everyone in some broad class (the people eligible to be chosen at random) had an equal chance to participate in the government, but would not meet with the approval of most modern advocates of democracy, even though IMHO it is worth trying again.

The Venetians understood that some of the people chosen by lot would be obviously incompent at governing, so their procedure alternated phases in which a group was chosen by lot with phases in which the group that is the output of the previous phase vote to determine the makeup of the input to the next phase with the idea that the voting phases would weed out those who were obviously incompetent. So, though there was voting, it was done only by the relatively tiny number of people who had been selected by lot -- and (if we ignore information about specific individuals) they had the same chance of becoming a legislator as the people they were voting on.

IMHO probably the worst effect of Western civilization's current overoptimism about democracy will be to inhibit experiments in forms of non-democratic government that would not have been possible before information technology (including the internet) became broadly disseminated. (Of course such experiments should be small in scale till they have built up a substantial track record.)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 16 July 2010 06:51:47PM *  17 points [-]

rhollerith_dot_com:

IMHO probably the worst effect of Western civilization's current overoptimism about democracy will be to inhibit experiments in forms of non-democratic government that would not have been possible before information technology (including the internet) became broadly disseminated.

I beg to differ. The worst effect is that throughout recent history, democratic ideas have regularly been foisted upon peoples and places where the introduction of democratic politics was a perfect recipe for utter disaster. I won't even try to quantify the total amount of carnage, destruction, and misery caused this way, but it's certainly well above the scale of those political mass crimes and atrocities that serve as the usual benchmarks of awfulness nowadays. Of course, all this normally gets explained away with frantic no-true-Scotsman responses whenever unpleasant questions are raised along these lines.

For full disclosure, I should add that I care particularly strongly about this because I was personally affected by one historical disaster that was brought about this way, namely the events in former Yugoslavia. Regardless of what one thinks about who bears what part of the blame for what happened there, one thing that's absolutely impossible to deny is that all the key players enjoyed democratic support confirmed by free elections.

Comment author: Roko 16 July 2010 10:57:36AM 0 points [-]

when the stakes are high, it is not so much that people start thinking more accurately -- though this will happen to some extent, and for some people dramatically so

So this actually contradicts the paper that Eliezer cited, or at least seems to, yet it seems to ring true. Not only does the hypothesis that incentive reduces bias seem convincing to you and I, but it also forms a whole Chapter of Caplan's book "The Myth of the Rational Voter".

I think I'm going to split the prize between this comment and Eliezer Yudkowsky's one. Feel free to PM me and claim your prize.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 16 July 2010 06:31:43PM 3 points [-]

Roko:

So this [that people become more cautious when the stakes are high] actually contradicts the paper that Eliezer cited, or at least seems to, yet it seems to ring true.

There is no contradiction. This paper shows that when stakes increase, people start thinking somewhat more accurately, but not drastically so -- which is exactly what I wrote above.

What these researchers did was not the sort of thing that triggers people's caution/normality/status-quo heuristics that I had in mind. They put people in a situation where they stood only to gain free money, and were forced to choose between several options, each with a guaranteed non-negative outcome. A study that would actually test my claims would observe people in a situation where they could lose a significant amount of their own money by accepting a bad deal based on biased reasoning.

Of course, this actually happens sometimes, for example with people who ruin themselves by compulsive gambling. But these are rare exceptions, not instances of all-pervasive systematic biases.

Feel free to PM me and claim your prize.

I don't have a Paypal account, but you can buy me a beer next time I'm over in the U.K. :-)

Comment author: Matt_Simpson 16 July 2010 01:04:56AM 0 points [-]

This question and the subsequent one about its interpretation were worded in a way that takes a considerable mental effort to parse correctly, and is extremely unnatural for non-mathematicians, even highly educated ones like doctors.

Do you mean this one (from Conjunction Controversy):

A 55-year-old woman had pulmonary embolism documented angiographically 10 days after a cholecstectomy. Please rank order the following in terms of the probability that they will be among the conditions experienced by the patient (use 1 for the most likely and 6 for the least likely). Naturally, the patient could experience more than one of these conditions.

  • Dyspnea and hemiparesis
  • Calf pain
  • Pleuritic chest pain
  • Syncope and tachycardia
  • Hemiparesis
  • Hemoptysis

In what way is this question difficult for a doctor to parse? Give the subjects a little credit here.

Also note this about the Linda problem (also from Conjunction Controversy):

How do you know that subjects did not interpret "Linda is a bank teller" to mean "Linda is a bank teller and is not active in the feminist movement"? For one thing, dear readers, I offer the observation that most bank tellers, even the ones who participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations in college, are probably not active in the feminist movement. So, even so, Teller should rank above Teller & Feminist.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 16 July 2010 02:09:35AM *  3 points [-]

Matt_Simpson:

Do you mean this one (from Conjunction Controversy): [...]

Yes, that's the one.

In what way is this question difficult for a doctor to parse? Give the subjects a little credit here.

In my experience, outside of some very exceptional situations like e.g. in-depth discussions of complex technical subjects, the overwhelming majority of people, including highly educated people, simply don't operate under the assumption that language should be understood in a logically precise and strict way. The standard human modus operandi is to skim the text in a very superficial manner and interpret it according to intuitive hunches and casual associations, guided by some strong preconceptions about what the writer is likely to be trying to say -- and it's up to you to structure your text so that it will be correctly understood with such an approach, or at least to give a clear and prominent warning that it should be read painstakingly in an unnaturally careful and literal way.

Some people are in the habit of always reading in a precise and literal way (stereotypically, mathematicians tend to be like that). I am also like that, and I'm sure many people here are too. But this is simply not the way the great majority of people function -- including many people whose work includes complex and precise formal reasoning, but who don't carry over this mode of thinking into the rest of their lives. In particular, from what I've seen, doctors typically don't practice rigid formal reasoning much, and it's definitely not reasonable to expect them to make such an effort in a situation where they lack any concrete incentive to do so.

Comment author: Matt_Simpson 15 July 2010 05:09:02PM *  2 points [-]

see this comment.

also:

(i.e. people casually misinterpreting "A" as "A & non-B" when it's contrasted with "A & B")

This is covered in Tversky and Khaneman, 1983. Also in conjunction controversy

Comment author: Vladimir_M 16 July 2010 12:51:13AM *  0 points [-]

Matt_Simpson:

This [people casually misinterpreting "A" as "A & non-B" when it's contrasted with "A & B"] is covered in Tversky and Khaneman, 1983.

You mean the medical question? I'm not at all impressed with that one. This question and the subsequent one about its interpretation were worded in a way that takes a considerable mental effort to parse correctly, and is extremely unnatural for non-mathematicians, even highly educated ones like doctors. What I would guess happened was that the respondents skimmed the question without coming anywhere near the level of understanding that T&K assume in their interpretation of the results.

Again, when thinking about these experiments, one must imagine realistic people in a realistic setting, who are extremely unlikely to be willing to grapple with semantic subtleties that go beyond what they'll gather with effortless casual skimming of the questions and offhand answers given without much thought.

Comment author: MichaelVassar 15 July 2010 05:17:33PM 24 points [-]

I flat-out disagree that power corrupts as the phrase is usually understood, but that's a topic worthy of rational discussion (just not now with me).

The claim that there has never been a truly benevolent dictator though, that's simply a religious assertion, a key point of faith in the American democratic religion and no more worthy of discussion than whether the Earth is old, at least for usual meanings of the word 'benevolent' and for meanings of 'dictator' which avoid the no true Scotsman fallacy. There have been benevolent democratically elected leaders in the usual sense too. How confident do you think you should be that the latter are more common than the former though? Why?

I'm seriously inclined to down-vote the whole comment community on this one except for Peter, though I won't, for their failure to challenge such an overt assertion of such an absurd claim. How many people would have jumped in against the claim that without belief in god there can be no morality or public order, that the moral behavior of secular people is just a habit or hold-over from Christian times, and that thus that all secular societies are doomed? To me it's about equally credible.

BTW, just from the 20th century there are people from Ataturk to FDR to Lee Kuan Yew to Deng Chou Ping. More generally, more or less The Entire History of the World especially East Asia are counter-examples.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 15 July 2010 06:20:54PM *  8 points [-]

MichaelVassar:

I'm seriously inclined to down-vote the whole comment community on this one except for Peter, though I won't, for their failure to challenge such an overt assertion of such an absurd claim.

I was tempted to challenge it, but I decided that it's not worth to open such an emotionally charged can of worms.

The claim that there has never been a truly benevolent dictator though, that's simply a religious assertion, a key point of faith in the American democratic religion and no more worthy of discussion than whether the Earth is old, at least for usual meanings of the word 'benevolent' and for meanings of 'dictator' which avoid the no true Scotsman fallacy. There have been benevolent democratically elected leaders in the usual sense too. How confident do you think you should be that the latter are more common than the former though? Why?

These are some good remarks and questions, but I'd say you're committing a fallacy when you contrast dictators with democratically elected leaders as if it were some sort of dichotomy, or even a typically occurring contrast. There have been many non-democratic political arrangements in human history other than dictatorships. Moreover, it's not at all clear that dictatorships and democracies should be viewed as disjoint phenomena. Unless we insist on a No-True-Scotsman definition of democracy, many dictatorships, including quite nasty ones, have been fundamentally democratic in the sense of basing their power on majority popular support.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 15 July 2010 05:51:49PM *  8 points [-]

Well, if someone knows about systematic biases that don't go away with incentivization, they're probably too busy making money off that insight to comment here!

In practice, when the stakes are high, it is not so much that people start thinking more accurately -- though this will happen to some extent, and for some people dramatically so -- but rather that they become more cautious.

If you take ordinary folks into the lab and ask them questions they don't care about, it's easy to get them to commit all sorts of logical errors. However, if you approach them with a serious deal where some bias identified in the lab would lead them to accept unfavorable terms with real consequences, they won't trust their unreliable judgments, and instead they'll ask for third-party advice and see what the normal and usual way to handle such a situation is. If no such guidance is available, they'll fall back on the status quo heuristic. People hate to admit their intellectual limitations explicitly, but they're good at recognizing them instinctively before they get themselves into trouble by relying on their faulty reasoning too much.

This is why for all the systematic biases discussed here, it's extremely hard to actually exploit these biases in practice to make money. It also explains how market bubbles and Ponzi schemes can lead to such awful collective insanity: as the snowball keeps rolling and growing, people see others massively falling for the scam, and conclude that it must be a safe and sound option if all these other normal and respectable folks are doing it. The caution/normality/status quo heuristics break down in this situation.

Comment author: ciphergoth 15 July 2010 10:30:56AM 3 points [-]

You should read Conjunction Controversy (Or, How They Nail It Down) before proposing these sort of things.

In particular, if you haven't already, please read Extensional Versus Intuitive Reasoning: The Conjunction Fallacy in Probability Judgment in full - it contains details of 22 different experiments designed to address problems like this.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 15 July 2010 04:55:13PM *  2 points [-]

These articles talk only about the conjunction fallacy. Maybe it wasn't clear enough from the context, but my above reply was to a comment about the anchoring bias, and was meant to comment on that specific finding.

But in any case, I have no doubt that these results are reproducible in the lab. What I'm interested in is how much of these patterns we can see in the real world and where exactly they tend to manifest themselves. Surely you will agree that findings about the behavior of captive undergraduates and other usual sorts of lab subjects should be generalized to human life in general only with some caution.

Moreover, if clear patterns of bias are found to occur in highly artificial experimental setups, it still doesn't mean that they are actually relevant in real-life situations. What I'd like to see are not endless lab replications of these findings, but instead examples of relevant real-life decisions where these particular biases have been identified.

Given these considerations, I think that article by Eliezer Yudkowsky shows a bit more enthusiasm for these results than is actually warranted.

Comment author: mattnewport 15 July 2010 04:46:51AM 0 points [-]

I believe this has been discussed in the context of the Efficient Market Hypothesis. I view it as something akin to the feud between Islam and Christianity.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 15 July 2010 06:33:27AM 0 points [-]

mattnewport:

I view it as something akin to the feud between Islam and Christianity.

I'm unable to grasp the analogy -- could you elaborate on that?

Comment author: Douglas_Knight 14 July 2010 06:19:10PM 2 points [-]

Discrimination by class is definitely not a morally sensitive issue nowadays the way sex or race is. On the contrary, success in life is nowadays measured mostly by one's ability to distance and insulate oneself from the lower classes

Without disagreeing much with your comment, I have to point out that this is a non sequitur. Moral sensitivity has nothing to do with (ordinary) actions. Among countries where the second sentence is true, there are both ones where the first is true and ones where the first is false. I don't know so much about countries where the second sentence is false.

As to religion, in places where people care about it enough to discriminate, changing it will probably alienate one's family, so it is very costly to change, although technically possible. Also, in many places, religion is a codeword for ethnic groups, so it can't be changed (eg, Catholics in US 1850-1950).

Comment author: Vladimir_M 15 July 2010 06:00:05AM *  3 points [-]

You're right that my comment was imprecise, in that I didn't specify to which societies it applies. I had in mind the modern Western societies, and especially the English-speaking countries. In other places, things can indeed be very different with regards to all the mentioned issues.

However, regarding your comment:

Moral sensitivity has nothing to do with (ordinary) actions.

That's not really true. People are indeed apt to enthusiastically extol moral principles in the abstract while at the same them violating them whenever compliance would be too costly. However, even when such violations are rampant, these acts are still different from those that don't involve any such hypocritical violations, or those that violate only weaker and less significant principles.

And in practice, when we observe people's acts and attitudes that involve their feeling of superiority over lower classes and their desire to distance themselves from them, it looks quite different from analogous behaviors with respect to e.g. race or sex. The latter sorts of statements and acts normally involve far more caution, evasion, obfuscation, and rationalization. To take a concrete example, few people would see any problem with recommending a house by saying that it's located in "a nice middle-class neighborhood" -- but imagine the shocked reactions if someone praised it by talking about the ethnic/racial composition of the neighborhood loudly and explicitly, even if the former description might in practice serve as (among other things) a codeword for the latter.

Comment author: AnlamK 15 July 2010 02:49:53AM *  1 point [-]

Well, to clarify, here's an example from here :

To illustrate, in a study conduced by Tversky and Kahneman (1974), a random number was generated by spinning a wheel. Participants were then asked to specify whether this random number was higher or lower than was the percentage of nations that are located in Africa--referred to as a comparative question. Finally, participants were instructed to estimate the percentage of nations that are located in Africa-an absolute question. Participants who had received a high random number were more inclined to overestimate the percentage of nations that are located in Africa. The anchor, as represented by the random number, biased their final estimate.

Here, the biased thinking isn't a result of thinking in terms of abstract probabilities as opposed to concrete frequencies.

I'm sympathetic to the points G makes. It's just that K&T's results don't always depend on information presented as probabilities.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 15 July 2010 04:40:14AM *  3 points [-]

I must wonder whether, and to what extent, these results would replicate in a real-world situation where the question is perceived as truly important by the parties concerned.

When discussing research like this, people often imagine the subjects fully applying themselves, as if they were on an important exam or in a business situation where big money is involved. However, to get a more realistic picture, you should imagine yourself in a situation where someone is asking you obscure TV quiz-style questions about things that you don't care about in the slightest, bored to death, being there only because of some miserable incentive like getting a course credit or a few dollars of pocket money. I can easily imagine people in such a situation giving casual answers without any actual thought involved, based on random clues from the environment -- just like you might use e.g. today's date as an inspiration for choosing lottery numbers.

Therefore, the important question is: has anyone made similar observations in a situation where the subjects had a strong incentive to really give their best when thinking about the answers? If not, I think one should view these results with a strong dose of skepticism.

Comment author: Roko 15 July 2010 01:37:40AM 0 points [-]

It seems to me that many, if not most people need a clear schedule of productive work around which they can organize their lives, and lacking it become completely disoriented and self-destructive.

I think that that would just be another service or product that people purchased. Be it in the form of cognitive enhancement, voluntary projects or hobbies, etc. In fact lottery winners simply suffer from not being numerous enough to support a lottery-winner rehabilitation industry.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 15 July 2010 03:59:12AM *  1 point [-]

I agree that such optimistic scenarios are possible; my gloomy comments aren't meant to prophesy certain doom, but rather to shake what I perceive as an unwarrantably high level of optimism and lack of consideration for certain ugly but nevertheless real possibilities.

Still, one problem I think is particularly underestimated in discussions of this sort is how badly the law of unintended consequences can bite whenever it comes to the practical outcomes of large-scale social changes and interventions. This could be especially relevant in future scenarios where the consequences of the disappearing demand for human labor are remedied with handouts and redistribution. Even if we assume that such programs will be successfully embarked upon (which is by no means certain), it is a non-trivial question what other conditions will have to be satisfied for the results to be pretty, given the existing experiences with somewhat analogous situations.

Comment author: AlephNeil 15 July 2010 02:00:44AM *  9 points [-]

Here's my take on 'Linda'. Don't know if anyone else has made the same or nearly the same point, but anyway I'll try to be brief:

Let E be the background information about Linda, and imagine two scenarios:

  1. We know E and someone comes up to us and tells us statement A, that Linda is a bank teller.
  2. We know E and someone comes up to us and tells us statement B, that Linda is a bank teller who is active in the feminist movement.

Now obviously P(A | E) is greater than or equal to P(B | E). However, I think it's quite reasonable for P(A | E + "someone told us A") to be less than P(B | E + "someone told us B"), because if someone merely tells us A, we don't have any particularly good reason to believe them, but if someone tells us B then it seems likely that they know this particular Linda, that they're thinking of the right person, and that they know she's a bank teller.

However, the 'frequentist version' of the Linda experiment cannot possibly be (mis?)-interpreted in this way, because we're fixing the statements A and B and considering a whole bunch of people who are obviously unrelated to the processes by which the statements were formed.

(Perhaps there's an analogous point to be made about your second example: Someone being tested at all is likely to be someone for whom there are independent reasons why they might have the disease (perhaps they exhibited some of the symptoms, got worried and went to see their doctor.)

But surely the experiment must have specified that the person being tested for the disease was picked at random from the population?)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 15 July 2010 03:44:54AM *  5 points [-]

AlephNeil:

However, I think it's quite reasonable for P(A | E + "someone told us A") to be less than P(B | E + "someone told us B"), because if someone merely tells us A, we don't have any particularly good reason to believe them, but if someone tells us B then it seems likely that they know this particular Linda, that they're thinking of the right person, and that they know she's a bank teller.

I just skimmed through the 1983 Tversky & Kahneman paper, and the same thing occurred to me. Given the pragmatics of human natural language communication, I would say that T&K (and the people who have been subsequently citing them) are making too much of these cases. I'm not at all surprised that the rate of "fallacious" answers plummets when the question is asked in a way that suggests that it should be understood in an unnaturally literal way, free of pragmatics -- and I'd expect that even the remaining fallacious answers are mostly due to casual misunderstandings of the question, again caused by pragmatics (i.e. people casually misinterpreting "A" as "A & non-B" when it's contrasted with "A & B").

The other examples of the conjunction fallacy cited by T&K also don't sound very impressive to me when examined more closely. The US-USSR diplomatic break question sounds interesting until you realize that the probabilities actually assigned were so tiny that they can't be reasonably interpreted as anything but saying that the event is within the realm of the possible, but extremely unlikely. The increase due to conjunction fallacy seems to me well within the noise -- I mean, what rational sense does it make to even talk about the numerical values of probabilities such as 0.0047 and 0.0014 with regards to a question like this one? The same holds for the other questions cited in the same section.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 15 July 2010 02:13:30AM *  4 points [-]

This post is very much in accordance with my experience. I've never been able to develop any non-frequentist intuitions about probability, and even simple problems sometimes confuse me until I translate them into explicit frequentist terms. However, once I have the reference classes clearly defined and sketched, I have no difficulty following complex arguments and solving reasonably hard problems in probability. (This includes the numerous supposed paradoxes that disappear as soon as the problem is stated in clear frequentist terms.)

Moreover, I'm still at a loss to understand what meaning the numerical values of probabilities could have except for the frequentist ratios that they imply. I raised the question in a recent discussion here, but I didn't get any satisfactory answers.

Comment author: Roko 14 July 2010 11:55:58PM 0 points [-]

I'll certainly agree that poorer humans might run out of land that's all owned by a few rich humans. If the value of labor dropped to zero, then land ownership would become critically important, as it is one of the few resources that are essentially not producable, and therefore the who-owns-the-land game is zero sum.

But is land really unproducable in this scenario? Remember, we're assuming very high levels of technology. Maybe the poorer humans would all end up as seasteaders or desert dwellers?

What about the possibility of producing land underground?

What about producing land in space?

The bottom line seems to be that our society will have to change drastically in many ways, but that the demise of the need for human labor would be a good thing overall.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 15 July 2010 01:16:49AM *  2 points [-]

Roko:

But is land really unproducable in this scenario? Remember, we're assuming very high levels of technology. Maybe the poorer humans would all end up as seasteaders or desert dwellers?

What about the possibility of producing land underground?

What about producing land in space?

Given a well-organized and generous system of redistribution, the situation actually wouldn't be that bad. Despite all the silly panicking about overpopulation, the Earth is a pretty big place. To get some perspective, at the population density of Singapore, ten billion people could fit into roughly 1% of the total world land surface area. This is approximately the size of the present-day Mongolia. With the population density of Malta -- hardly a dystopian metropolis -- they'd need about 5% of the Earth's land, i.e. roughly the area of the continental U.S.

Therefore, assuming the powers-that-be would be willing to do so, in a super-high-tech regime several billion unproductive people could be supported in one or more tolerably dense enclaves at a relatively low opportunity cost. The real questions are whether the will to do so will exist, what troubles might ensue during the transition, and whether these unproductive billions will be able to form a tolerably functional society. (Of course, it is first necessary to dispel the delusion -- widely taken as a fundamental article of faith among economists -- that technological advances can never render great masses of people unemployable.)

Now, you write:

The bottom line seems to be that our society will have to change drastically in many ways, but that the demise of the need for human labor would be a good thing overall.

I'm not at all sure of that. I hate to sound elitist, but I suspect that among the common folk, a great many people would not benefit from the liberation from the need to work. Just look at how often lottery winners end up completely destroying their lives, or what happens in those social environments where living off handouts becomes the norm. It seems to me that many, if not most people need a clear schedule of productive work around which they can organize their lives, and lacking it become completely disoriented and self-destructive. The old folk wisdom that idle hands are the devil's tools has at least some truth in it.

This is one reason why I'm skeptical of redistribution as the solution, even under the assumption that it will be organized successfully.

Comment author: Roko 14 July 2010 09:27:53PM *  0 points [-]

Hang on -- before we were assuming that the Robots (ems) were consumers. Here we're assuming the opposite, that humans and only humans consume. Therefore the consumption basket can't go haywire.

Actually one way things could go wrong would be if an "elite" group of humans took the place of ems, and consumed 99.999999999999999999999% of output. So in order for things to be OK, economic disparity has to remain non-insanely-high. But even the modest taxes that we have today, plus wealth redistribution, would ensure this, and it seems that there would be stronger incentives to increase wealth redistribution than to decrease it.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 14 July 2010 10:37:41PM *  1 point [-]

Roko:

Hang on -- before we were assuming that the Robots (ems) were consumers. Here we're assuming the opposite, that humans and only humans consume. Therefore the consumption basket can't go haywire.

What counts as "consumption" is a matter of definition, not fact. Even if you book the "consumption" by machines as capital investment or intermediate goods purchases, it's still there, and if machines play an increasingly prominent role, it can significantly influence the prices of goods that humans consume. With machines that approach human levels of intelligence and take over increasingly intelligent and dexterous human jobs, this difference will become an increasingly fictional accounting convention.

Land rent is another huge issue. Observe the present situation: food and clothing are nowadays dirt cheap, and unlike in the past, starving or having to go around without a warm coat in the winter are no longer realistic dangers no matter how impoverished you get. Yet, living space is not much more affordable relative to income than in the past, and becoming homeless remains a very realistic threat. And if you look at the interest rates versus prices, you'll find that the interest on a fairly modest amount would nowadays be enough to feed and clothe yourself adequately enough to survive -- but not to afford an adequate living space. (Plus, the present situation isn't that bad because you can loiter in public spaces, but in a future of soaring land rents, these will likely become much more scarce. Humans require an awful lot of space to subsist tolerably.)

So in order for things to be OK, economic disparity has to remain non-insanely-high.

When it comes to the earnings from rent and interest, the present economic disparity is already insanely high. What makes it non-insanely-high overall is the fact that labor can be sold for a high price -- and we're discussing the scenario where this changes.

Comment author: Roko 14 July 2010 08:18:17PM 0 points [-]

Few can live for long off interest on their savings.

Why? If your savings of $50,000 start yielding 1000% returns per year, then I don't see a problem.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 14 July 2010 09:16:18PM 2 points [-]

We've been through this before. Very high returns by themselves give no guarantee that you'll be able to live off the interest on a modest amount, since the price of whatever you require for subsistence may be increasing at an even higher rate.

Comment author: WrongBot 14 July 2010 06:29:35AM 0 points [-]

The "deep moral dimension" generally applies to group memberships that aren't (perceived to be) chosen: sex, gender, race, class, sexual orientation, religion to a lesser extent.

These are the kinds of "Group X" to which I was referring. Discriminating against someone because they majored in Drama in college or believe in homeopathy are not even remotely equivalent to racism, sexism, and the like.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 14 July 2010 05:42:55PM *  6 points [-]

WrongBot:

The "deep moral dimension" generally applies to group memberships that aren't (perceived to be) chosen: sex, gender, race, class, sexual orientation, religion to a lesser extent.

This is not an accurate description of the present situation. To take the most blatant example, every country discriminates between its own citizens and foreigners, and also between foreigners from different countries (some can visit freely, while others need hard to get visas). This state of affairs is considered completely normal and uncontroversial, even though it involves a tremendous amount of discrimination based on group memberships that are a mere accident of birth.

Thus, there are clearly some additional factors involved in the moralization of other forms of discrimination, and the fascinating question is what exactly they are. The question is especially puzzling considering that religion is, in most cases, much easier to change than nationality, and yet the former makes your above list, while the latter doesn't -- so the story about choice vs. accident of birth definitely doesn't hold water.

I'm also puzzled by your mention of class. Discrimination by class is definitely not a morally sensitive issue nowadays the way sex or race is. On the contrary, success in life is nowadays measured mostly by one's ability to distance and insulate oneself from the lower classes by being able to afford living in low-class-free neighborhoods and joining higher social circles. Even when it comes to you personally, I can't imagine that you would have exactly the same reaction when approached by a homeless panhandler and by someone decent-looking.

Comment author: Mass_Driver 14 July 2010 04:44:04AM 0 points [-]

Your general point, that superficially critical thinking makes raising the sanity waterline even more difficult than it otherwise would be, is well-taken.

I don't think that could ever work. Just look at the present situation.

Isn't this, all by itself, an example of improper reasoning?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 14 July 2010 05:59:35AM *  0 points [-]

Isn't this, all by itself, an example of improper reasoning?

Yes, you are right -- we can't draw such a blanket conclusion just from observing the present situation. My choice of words wasn't very good there.

However, my conclusion is actually based on more than that, namely a more detailed consideration of both the human nature and the wider historical precedent. Unfortunately, it's a topic too complex to be discussed satisfactorily in a single comment, so I just wanted to draw attention to these unpleasant facts that are undoubtedly relevant for the point of the original post.

Comment author: WrongBot 13 July 2010 08:57:02PM 1 point [-]

I'm fine with discriminating in some ways based on intelligence of the individual, and if it does turn out that Group X is statistically less intelligent, then maybe Group X should be underrepresented in important positions. This has consequences for policy decisions.

Agreed. But I should not make decisions about individual members of Group X based on the statistical trend associated with Group X, and I doubt my (or anyone's) ability to actually not do so in cases where I have integrated the belief that the statistical trend is true.

How are you going to help a disadvantaged group if you're blinding yourself to the details of how they're disadvantaged?

The short answer is that I'm not going to. I'm not doing research on human intelligence, and I doubt I ever will. The best I can hope to do is not further disadvantage individual members of Group X by discriminating against them on the basis of statistical trends that they may not embody.

People who are doing research that relates to human intelligence in some way should probably not follow this exact line of reasoning.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 14 July 2010 05:30:17AM *  12 points [-]

WrongBot:

But I should not make decisions about individual members of Group X based on the statistical trend associated with Group X [...]

Really? I don't think it's possible to function in any realistic human society without constantly making decisions about individuals based on the statistical trends associated with various groups to which they happen to belong (a.k.a. "statistical discrimination"). Acquiring perfectly detailed information about every individual you ever interact with is simply not possible given the basic constraints faced by humans.

Of course, certain forms of statistical discrimination are viewed as an immensely important moral issue nowadays, while others are seen simply as normal common sense. It's a fascinating question how and why exactly various forms of it happen (or fail) to acquire a deep moral dimension. But in any case, a blanket condemnation of all forms of statistical discrimination is an attitude incompatible with any realistic human way of life.

In response to A Rational Identity
Comment author: Vladimir_M 13 July 2010 07:31:26AM *  15 points [-]

Kaj_Sotala:

It seems to me that if we want to actually raise the sanity waterline and make people evaluate things critically, and not just conform to different groups than is the norm, a crucial part of that is getting people to adopt an identity of critical thinking. This way, the concept of identity ceases to be something that makes rational thinking harder and starts to actively aid it.

I don't think that could ever work. Just look at the present situation. A great many people nowadays feel that "critical thinking," "open-mindedness," "questioning authority," etc. are important parts of their identity, and will take offense if you suggest otherwise. The modern culture strongly encourages such attitudes. Yet, in practice, this nearly always results in cargo-cult "critical thinking" where one is merely supposed to display the correct shibboleths, accept the prevailing respectable beliefs, and avoid like plague any actual critical thinking about the truly sacrosanct taboos, values, and moral and intellectual authorities.

The old "We are all individuals!" sketch comes to mind.

Comment author: wedrifid 11 July 2010 11:13:00AM 5 points [-]

???

"People who say stupid things are, all else being equal, more likely to say other stupid things in related areas".

Comment author: Vladimir_M 11 July 2010 06:12:59PM *  1 point [-]

That's a very vague statement, however. How exactly should one identify those expressions of stupid opinions that are relevant enough to imply that the rest of the author's work is not worth one's time?

Comment author: wedrifid 11 July 2010 08:19:19AM 1 point [-]

That's an extremely bad way to draw conclusions.

A bad way to draw conclusions. A good way to make significant updates based on inference.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 11 July 2010 09:18:28AM *  -1 points [-]

Would you be so kind as to spell out the exact sort of "update based on inference" that applies here?

Comment author: Yoreth 11 July 2010 04:25:06AM 7 points [-]

Is there any philosophy worth reading?

As far as I can tell, a great deal of "philosophy" (basically the intellectuals' wastebasket taxon) consists of wordplay, apologetics, or outright nonsense. Consequently, for any given philosophical work, my prior strongly favors not reading it because the expected benefit won't outweigh the cost. It takes a great deal of evidence to tip the balance.

For example: I've heard vague rumors that GWF Hegel concludes that the Prussian State (under which, coincidentally, he lived) was the best form of human existence. I've also heard that Descartes "proves" that God exists. Now, whether or not Hegel or Descartes may have had any valid insights, this is enough to tell me that it's not worth my time to go looking for them.

However, at the same time I'm concerned that this leads me to read things that only reinforce the beliefs I already have. And there's little point in seeking information if it doesn't change your beliefs.

It's a complicated question what purpose philosophy serves, but I wouldn't be posting here if I thought it served none. So my question is: What philosophical works and authors have you found especially valuable, for whatever reason? Perhaps the recommendations of such esteemed individuals as yourselves will carry enough evidentiary weight that I'll actually read the darned things.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 11 July 2010 07:13:00AM *  8 points [-]

Yoreth:

For example: I've heard vague rumors that GWF Hegel concludes that the Prussian State (under which, coincidentally, he lived) was the best form of human existence. I've also heard that Descartes "proves" that God exists. Now, whether or not Hegel or Descartes may have had any valid insights, this is enough to tell me that it's not worth my time to go looking for them.

That's an extremely bad way to draw conclusions. If you were living 300 years ago, you could have similarly heard that some English dude named Isaac Newton is spending enormous amounts of time scribbling obsessive speculations about Biblical apocalypse and other occult subjects -- and concluded that even if he had some valid insights about physics, it wouldn't be worth your time to go looking for them.

Comment author: lsparrish 10 July 2010 04:04:44PM 1 point [-]

This kind of stuff makes me boil with anger. Some bureacrat busybody inserts garbage about irradiation into a law at the last second, and there's nothing we can do to get it out? Is there some kind of international law against defamation? Because that is exactly what this is. And the stuff they prattle on about it taking advantage of patients in a vulnerable state is total nonsense. What they're doing -- pressuring patients into not cryopreserving -- is taking advantage, and in a particularly grotesque and unconscionable manner.

Ironically, if I were to send them a letter or call them about this stupid law they'd take it as me being a foreign busybody. This is stupid. They're the ones harming BC's global reputation by keeping such idiotic laws on the books.

/rant

Comment author: Vladimir_M 10 July 2010 05:18:26PM *  1 point [-]

Isparrish:

Some bureacrat busybody inserts garbage about irradiation into a law at the last second, and there's nothing we can do to get it out? Is there some kind of international law against defamation?

On the contrary -- as a general rule, in English-speaking countries, legislators enjoy immunity from any legal consequences of anything they say or write in the course of their work. This is known as "parliamentary privilege," and goes far beyond the free speech rights of ordinary citizens. In particular, they are free to commit libel without repercussions, as long as they speak in official capacity.

In the U.S., this is even written explicitly into the constitution ("for any speech or debate in either House, [the Senators and Representatives] shall not be questioned in any other place").

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 08 July 2010 11:34:59AM *  0 points [-]

What would appropriate policy be if we just don't know to what extent IQ is different in different groups?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 09 July 2010 08:25:49AM *  4 points [-]

Well, if you'll excuse the ugly metaphor, in this area even the positive questions are giant cans of worms lined on top of third rails, so I really have no desire to get into public discussions of normative policy issues.

Comment author: satt 08 July 2010 07:26:03PM 8 points [-]

I can't immediately think of any additional issue. It's more that I don't see the lack of well-known disjoint sets of uncorrelated cognitive modules as a fatal problem for Thomson's theory, merely weak disconfirming evidence. This is because I assign a relatively low probability to psychologists detecting tests that sample disjoint sets of modules even if they exist.

For example, I can think of a situation where psychologists & psychometricians have missed a similar phenomenon: negatively correlated cognitive tests. I know of a couple of examples which I found only because the mathematician Warren D. Smith describes them in his paper "Mathematical definition of 'intelligence' (and consequences)". The paper's about the general goal of coming up with universal definitions of and ways to measure intelligence, but in the middle of it is a polemical/sceptical summary of research into g & IQ.

Smith went through a correlation matrix for 57 tests given to 240 people, published by Thurstone in 1938, and saw that the 3 most negative of the 1596 intercorrelations were between these pairs of tests:

  • "100-word vocabulary test // Recognize pictures of hand as Right/Left" (correlation = -0.22)
  • "Find lots of synonyms of a given word // Decide whether 2 pictures of a national flag are relatively mirrored or not" (correlation = -0.16)
  • "Describe somebody in writing: score=# words used // figure recognition test: decide which numbers in a list of drawings of abstract figures are ones you saw in a previously shown list" (correlation = -0.12)

In Smith's words: "This seems too much to be a coincidence!" Smith then went to the 60-item correlation matrix for 710 schoolchildren published by Thurstone & Thurstone in 1941 and did the same, discovering that

the three most negative [correlations], with values -0.161, -0.152, and -0.138 respectively, are the pairwise correlations of the performance on the "scattered Xs" test (circle the Xs in a random scattering of letters) with these three tests: (a) Sentence completion ... (b) Reading comprehension II ... (c) Reading comprehension I ... Again, it is difficult to believe this also is a coincidence!

The existence of two pairs of negatively correlated cognitive skills leads me to increase my prior for the existence of uncorrelated cognitive skills.

Also, the way psychologists often analyze test batteries makes it harder to spot disjoint sets of uncorrelated modules. Suppose we have a 3-test battery, where test 1 samples uncorrelated modules A, B, C, D & E, test 2 samples F, G, H, I & J, and test 3 samples C, D, E, F & G. If we administer the battery to a few thousand people and extract a g from the results, as is standard practice, then by construction the resulting g is going to correlate with scores on tests 1 & 2, although we know they sample non-overlapping sets of modules. (IQ, being a weighted average of test/module scores, will also correlate with all of the tests.) A lot of psychologists would interpret that as evidence against tests 1 & 2 measuring distinct mental abilities, even though we see there's an alternative explanation.

Even if we did find an index of intelligence that didn't correlate with IQ/g, would we count it as such? Duckworth & Seligman discovered that in a sample of 164 schoolchildren, a composite measure of self-discipline predicted GPA significantly better than IQ, and self-discipline didn't correlate significantly with IQ. Does self-discipline now count as an independent intellectual ability? I'd lean towards saying it doesn't, but I doubt I could justify being dogmatic about that; it's surely a cognitive ability in the term's broadest sense.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 09 July 2010 08:12:25AM *  4 points [-]

satt:

For example, I can think of a situation where psychologists & psychometricians have missed a similar phenomenon: negatively correlated cognitive tests. I know of a couple of examples which I found only because the mathematician Warren D. Smith describes them in his paper "Mathematical definition of 'intelligence' (and consequences)".

That's an extremely interesting reference, thanks for the link! This is exactly the kind of approach that this area desperately needs: no-nonsense scrutiny by someone with a strong math background and without an ideological agenda.

David Hilbert allegedly once quipped that physics is too important to be left to physicists; the way things are, it seems to me that psychometrics should definitely not be left to psychologists. That they haven't immediately rushed to explore further these findings by Smith is an extremely damning fact about the intellectual standards in the field.

Duckworth & Seligman discovered that in a sample of 164 schoolchildren, a composite measure of self-discipline predicted GPA significantly better than IQ, and self-discipline didn't correlate significantly with IQ. Does self-discipline now count as an independent intellectual ability?

Wouldn't this closely correspond to the Big Five "conscientiousness" trait? (Which the paper apparently doesn't mention at all?!) From what I've seen, even among the biggest fans of IQ, it is generally recognized that conscientiousness is at least similarly important as general intelligence in predicting success and performance.

Comment author: satt 07 July 2010 03:44:35PM 2 points [-]

I think Shalizi isn't too far off the mark in writing "as if Thomson's theory had been ignored". Although a few psychologists & psychometricians have acknowledged Thomson's sampling model, in everyday practice it's generally ignored. There are far more papers out there that fit g-oriented factor models as a matter of course than those that try to fit a Thomson-style model. Admittedly, there is a very good reason for that — Thomson-style models would be massively underspecified on the datasets available to psychologists, so it's not practical to fit them — but that doesn't change the fact that a g-based model is the go-to choice for the everyday psychologist.

There's an interesting analogy here to Shalizi's post about IQ's heritability, now I think about it. Shalizi writes it as if psychologists and behaviour geneticists don't care about gene-environment correlation, gene-environment interaction, nonlinearities, there not really being such a thing as "the" heritability of IQ, and so on. One could object that this isn't true — there are plenty of papers out there concerned with these complexities — but on the other hand, although the textbooks pay lip service to them, researchers often resort to fitting models that ignore these speedbumps. The reason for this is the same as in the case of Thomson's model: given the data available to scientists, models that accounted for these effects would usually be ruinously underspecified. So they make do.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 08 July 2010 08:37:49AM *  4 points [-]

However, it seems to me that the fatal problem of the sampling theory is that nobody has ever managed to figure out a way to sample disjoint sets of these hypothetical uncorrelated modules. If all practically useful mental abilities and all the tests successfully predicting them always sample some particular subset of these modules, then we might as well look at that subset as a unified entity that represents the causal factor behind g, since its elements operate together as a group in all relevant cases.

Or is there some additional issue here that I'm not taking into account?

Comment author: satt 07 July 2010 02:22:12PM 3 points [-]

If there existed a book written by someone as smart and knowledgeable as Shalizi that would present a systematic, thorough, and unbiased analysis of this whole mess, I would gladly pay $1,000 for it.

There is no such book (yet), but there are two books that cover the most controversial part of the mess that I'd recommend: Race Differences in Intelligence (1975) and Race, IQ and Jensen (1980). They are both systematic, thorough, and about as unbiased as one can reasonably expect on the subject of race & IQ. On the down side, they don't really cover other aspects of the IQ controversies, and they're three decades out of date. (That said, I personally think that few studies published since 1980 bear strongly on the race & IQ issue, so the books' age doesn't matter that much.)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 08 July 2010 08:17:18AM 3 points [-]

Yes, among the books on the race-IQ controversy that I've seen, I agree that these are the closest thing to an unbiased source. However, I disagree that nothing very significant has happened in the field since their publication -- although unfortunately, taken together, these new developments have led to an even greater overall confusion. I have in mind particularly the discovery of the Flynn effect and the Minnesota adoption study, which have made it even more difficult to argue coherently either for a hereditarian or an environmentalist theory the way it was done in the seventies.

Also, even these books fail to present a satisfactory treatment of some basic questions where a competent statistician should be able to clarify things fully, but horrible confusion has nevertheless persisted for decades. Here I refer primarily to the use of the regression to the mean as a basis for hereditarian arguments. From what I've seen, Jensen is still using such arguments as a major source of support for his positions, constantly replying to the existing superficial critiques with superficial counter-arguments, and I've never seen anyone giving this issue the full attention it deserves.

Comment author: SilasBarta 07 July 2010 09:01:41PM *  2 points [-]

Information theory challenge: A few posters have mentioned here that the average entropy of a character in English is about one bit. This carries an interesting implication: you should be able to create an interface using only two of the keyboards keys, such that composing an English message requires just as many keystrokes, on average, as it takes on a regular keyboard.

To do so, you'd have to exploit all the regularities of English to offer suggestions that save the user from having to specify individual letters. Most of the entropy is in the intial charaters of a word or message, so you would probably spend more strokes on specifying those, but then make it up with some "autocomplete" feature for large portions of the message.

If that's too hard, it should be a lot easier to do a 3-input method, which only requires your message set to have an entropy of less than ~1.5 bits per character.

Just thought I'd point that out, as it might be something worth thinking about.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 07 July 2010 10:23:33PM *  0 points [-]

SilasBarta:

A few posters have mentioned here that the average entropy of a character in English is about one bit. This carries an interesting implication: you should be able to create an interface using only two of the keyboards keys, such that composing an English message requires just as many keystrokes, on average, as it takes on a regular keyboard.

One way to achieve this (though not practical for use in human use interfaces) would be to input the entire message bit by bit in some powerful lossless compression format optimized specifically for English text, and decompress it at the end of input. This way, you'd eliminate as much redundancy in your input as the compression algorithm is capable of removing.

The really interesting question, of course, is what are the limits of such technologies in practical applications. But if anyone has an original idea there, they'd likely cash in on it rather than post it here.

Comment author: Morendil 07 July 2010 06:28:53AM 3 points [-]

long post on the heritability of IQ, which is better, but still clearly slanted ideologically

OK, I'll bite. Can you point to specific parts of that post which are in error owing to ideologically motivated thinking?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 07 July 2010 07:29:34AM *  10 points [-]

Morendil:

Can you point to specific parts of that post which are in error owing to ideologically motivated thinking?

A piece of writing biased for ideological reasons doesn't even have to have any specific parts that can be shown to be in error per se. Enormous edifices of propaganda can be constructed -- and have been constructed many times in history -- based solely on the selection and arrangement of the presented facts and claims, which can all be technically true by themselves.

In areas that arouse strong ideological passions, all sorts of surveys and other works aimed at broad audiences can be expected to suffer from this sort of bias. For a non-expert reader, this problem can be recognized and overcome only by reading works written by people espousing different perspectives. That's why I recommend that people should read Shalizi's post on heritability, but also at least one more work addressing the same issues written by another very smart author who doesn't share the same ideological position. (And Sesardić's book is, to my knowledge, the best such reference about this topic.)

Instead of getting into a convoluted discussion of concrete points in Shalizi's article, I'll just conclude with the following remark. You can read Shalizi's article, conclude that it's the definitive word on the subject, and accept his view of the matter. But you can also read more widely on the topic, and see that his presentation is far from unbiased, even if you ultimately conclude that his basic points are correct. The relevant literature is easily accessible if you just have internet and library access.

In response to comment by JanetK on Assuming Nails
Comment author: knb 07 July 2010 05:18:49AM 1 point [-]

My point was not that there is evidence to support Freudian theory, it really is bunk. My point was that non-experts have a tendency to dismiss entire fields of inquiry as bogus because of single imperfect ideas within the subject.

For instance, my Women's Studies professor was flat out wrong when she said observed sex differences are purely "socially constructed". This does not, however, give one a right to say that Women's Studies can be readily dismissed by an outsider as totally worthless.

Getting "good experimental evidence" to support any macroeconomic theory is all but impossible, but that doesn't mean there is no evidence whatsoever. A good rule of thumb is that if two absolute ideologues like Paul Krugman and Milton Friedman agree about an issue, there must be pretty damn good evidence.

In response to comment by knb on Assuming Nails
Comment author: Vladimir_M 07 July 2010 06:24:15AM *  3 points [-]

knb:

A good rule of thumb is that if two absolute ideologues like Paul Krugman and Milton Friedman agree about an issue, there must be pretty damn good evidence.

I happen to agree with them about the issue of rent control, but taken as a general rule, this is absolutely fallacious. Within any belief system, leaders of different factions will often hate each other ferociously over their differences, even though from an outside perspective, they may well look almost indistinguishable. Just look at various religious and ideological disputes over incomprehensibly obscure points of doctrine.

(And yes, I do think that modern economics has some fundamentally unsound beliefs that are a matter of virtual consensus nowadays. See e.g. this discussion for some examples.)

Comment author: [deleted] 06 July 2010 07:26:05PM 2 points [-]

Your analogy is flawed, I think.

The weight of the rock pile is just what we call the sum of the weights of the rocks. It's just a definition; but the idea of general intelligence is more than a definition. If there were a real, biological thing called g, we would expect all kinds of abilities to be correlated. Intelligence would make you better at math and music and English. We would expect basically all cognitive abilities to be affected by g, because g is real -- it represents something like dendrite density, some actual intelligence-granting property.

People hypothesized that g is real because results of all kinds of cognitive tests are correlated. But what Shalizi showed is that you can generate the same correlations if you let test scores depend on three thousand uncorrelated abilities. You can get the same results as the IQ advocates even when absolutely no single factor determines different abilities.

Sure, your old g will correlate with multiple abilities -- hell, you could let g = "test score" and that would correlate with all the abilities -- but that would be meaningless. If size and location determine the price of a house, you don't declare that there is some factor that causes both large size and desirable location!

In response to comment by [deleted] on Open Thread: July 2010
Comment author: Vladimir_M 07 July 2010 05:46:27AM *  8 points [-]

SarahC:

But what Shalizi showed is that you can generate the same correlations if you let test scores depend on three thousand uncorrelated abilities. You can get the same results as the IQ advocates even when absolutely no single factor determines different abilities.

Just to be clear, this is not an original idea by Shalizi, but the well known "sampling theory" of general intelligence first proposed by Godfrey Thomson almost a century ago. Shalizi states this very clearly in the post, and credits Thomson with the idea. However, for whatever reason, he fails to mention the very extensive discussions of this theory in the existing literature, and writes as if Thomson's theory had been ignored ever since, which definitely doesn't represent the actual situation accurately.

In a recent paper by van der Maas et al., which presents an extremely interesting novel theory of correlations that give rise to g (and which Shalizi links to at one point), the authors write:

Thorndike (1927) and Thomson (1951) proposed one such alternative mechanism, namely, sampling. In this sampling theory, carrying out cognitive tasks requires the use of many lower order uncorrelated modules or neural processes (so-called bonds). They hypothesized that the samples of modules or bonds used for different cognitive tests partly overlap, causing a positive correlation between the test scores. In this view, the positive manifold is due to a measurement problem in the sense that it is very difficult to obtain independent measures of the lower order processes. Jensen (1998) and Eysenck (1987) identified three problems with this sampling theory. First, whereas some complex mental tests, as predicted by sampling theory, highly load on the g factor, some very narrowly defined tests also display high g loadings. Second, some seemingly completely unrelated tests, such as visual and memory scan tasks, are consistently highly correlated, whereas related tests, such as forward and backward digit span, are only modestly correlated. Third, in some cases brain damage leads to very specific impairments, whereas sampling theory predicts general impairments. These three facts are difficult to explain with sampling theory, which as a consequence has not gained much acceptance.1 Thus, the g explanation remains very dominant in the current literature (see Jensen, 1998, p. 107).

Note that I take no position here about whether these criticisms of the sampling theory are correct or not. However, I think this quote clearly demonstrates that an attempt to write off g by merely invoking the sampling theory is not a constructive contribution to the discussion.

I would also add that if someone managed to construct multiple tests of mental ability that would sample disjoint sets of Thomsonesque underlying abilities and thus fail to give rise to g, it would be considered a tremendous breakthrough. Yet, despite the strong incentive to achieve this, nobody who has tried so far has succeeded. This evidence is far from conclusive, but far from insignificant either.

Comment author: cousin_it 06 July 2010 06:12:26PM *  7 points [-]

I think this is one of the few cases where Shalizi is wrong. (Not an easy thing to say, as I'm a big fan of his.)

In the second part of the article he generates synthetic "test scores" of people who have three thousand independent abilities - "facets of intelligence" that apply to different problems - and demonstrates that standard factor analysis still detects a strong single g-factor explaining most of the variance between people. From that he concludes that g is a "statistical artefact" and lacks "reality". This is exactly like saying the total weight of the rockpile "lacks reality" because the weights of individual rocks are independent variables.

As for the reason why he is wrong, it's pretty clear: Shalizi is a Marxist (fo' real) and can't give an inch to those pesky racists. A sad sight, that.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 07 July 2010 04:56:36AM *  7 points [-]

cousin_it:

A sad sight, that.

Indeed. A while ago, I got intensely interested in these controversies over intelligence research, and after reading a whole pile of books and research papers, I got the impression that there is some awfully bad statistics being pushed by pretty much every side in the controversy, so at the end I was left skeptical towards all the major opposing positions (though to varying degrees). If there existed a book written by someone as smart and knowledgeable as Shalizi that would present a systematic, thorough, and unbiased analysis of this whole mess, I would gladly pay $1,000 for it. Alas, Shalizi has definitely let his ideology get the better of him this time.

He also wrote an interesting long post on the heritability of IQ, which is better, but still clearly slanted ideologically. I recommend reading it nevertheless, but to get a more accurate view of the whole issue, I recommend reading the excellent Making Sense of Heritability by Neven Sesardić alongside it.

Comment author: RichardKennaway 05 July 2010 07:28:04PM *  2 points [-]

Agreed about utilitarianism.

FRP = fantasy role-playing, i.e. Dungeons & Dragons and the like. A character sheet is a list of the attributes of the character you're playing, things like Strength=10, Wisdom=8, Charisma=16, etc. (each number obtained by rolling three dice and adding them together). There are rules about what these attributes mean (e.g. on attempting some task requiring especial Charisma, roll a 20-sided die and if the number is less than your Charisma you succeed). Then there are circumstances that will give you additional points for an attribute or take them away, e.g. wearing a certain enchanted ring might give you +2 to Charisma.

Discussions of "status" here and on OB sometimes sound like D&D geeks arguing about the rules for a Status attribute.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 06 July 2010 03:23:36AM *  6 points [-]

RichardKennaway:

Discussions of "status" here and on OB sometimes sound like D&D geeks arguing about the rules for a Status attribute.

Sometimes, yes. However, in many situations, the mere recognition that status considerations play an important role -- even if stated in the crudest possible character-sheet sort of way -- can be a tremendous first step in dispelling widespread, deeply entrenched naive and misguided views of human behavior and institutions.

Unfortunately, since a precise technical terminology for discussing the details of human status dynamic doesn't (yet?) exist, often it's very difficult to do any better.

Comment author: utilitymonster 03 July 2010 07:45:24PM *  0 points [-]

This should be important to the finite case. The probability of being the first to see 25/100 is WAY higher (x 10^25 or so) if the lake is 3/4 full of big fish than if it is 1/4 full of big fish.

But in the infinite case the probability of being first is 0 either way...

Comment author: Vladimir_M 04 July 2010 04:53:46AM *  1 point [-]

utilitymonster:

The probability of being the first to see 25/100 is WAY higher (x 10^25 or so) if the lake is 3/4 full of big fish than if it is 1/4 full of big fish.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding your phrasing here, but it sounds fallacious. If there's a deck of cards and you're in a group of 52 people who are called out in random order and told to pick one card each from the deck, the probability of being the first person to draw an ace is exactly the same (1/52) regardless of whether it's a normal deck or a deck of 52 aces (or even a deck with 3 out of 4 aces replaced by other cards). This result doesn't even depend on whether the card is removed or returned into the deck after each person's drawing; the conclusion follows purely from symmetry. The only special case is when there are zero aces, in which the event becomes impossible, with p=0.

Similarly, if the order in which the scientists get their samples is shuffled randomly, and we ignore the improbable possibility that nobody sees 25/100, then purely by symmetry, the probability that Bob happens to be the first one to see 25/100 is the same regardless of the actual frequency of the 25/100 results: p = 1/N(scientists).

Comment author: utilitymonster 03 July 2010 05:28:47PM *  8 points [-]

Here's a puzzle I've been trying to figure out. It involves observation selection effects and agreeing to disagree. It is related to a paper I am writing, so help would be appreciated. The puzzle is also interesting in itself.

Charlie tosses a fair coin to determine how to stock a pond. If heads, it gets 3/4 big fish and 1/4 small fish. If tails, the other way around. After Charlie does this, he calls Al into his office. He tells him, "Infinitely many scientists are curious about the proportion of fish in this pond. They are all good Bayesians with the same prior. They are going to randomly sample 100 fish (with replacement) each and record how many of them are big and how many are small. Since so many will sample the pond, we can be sure that for any n between 0 and 100, some scientist will observe that n of his 100 fish were big. I'm going to take the first one that sees 25 big and team him up with you, so you can compare notes." (I don't think it matters much whether infinitely many scientists do this or just 3^^^3.)

Okay. So Al goes and does his sample. He pulls out 75 big fish and becomes nearly certain that 3/4 of the fish are big. Afterwards, a guy named Bob comes to him and tells him he was sent by Charlie. Bob says he randomly sampled 100 fish, 25 of which were big. They exchange ALL of their information.

Question: How confident should each of them be that 3/4 of the fish are big?

Natural answer: Charlie should remain nearly certain that ¾ of the fish are big. He knew in advance that someone like Bob was certain to talk to him regardless of what proportion of fish were big. So he shouldn't be the least bit impressed after talking to Bob.

But what about Bob? What should he think? At first glance, you might think he should be 50/50, since 50% of the fish he knows about have been big and his access to Al's observations wasn't subject to a selection effect. But that can't be right, because then he would just be agreeing to disagree with Al! (This would be especially puzzling, since they have ALL the same information, having shared everything.) So maybe Bob should just agree with Al: he should be nearly certain that ¾ of the fish are big.

But that's a bit odd. It isn't terribly clear why Bob should discount all of his observations, since they don't seem to subject to any observation selection effect; at least from his perspective, his observations were a genuine random sample.

Things get weirder if we consider a variant of the case.

VARIANT: as before, but Charlie has a similar conversation with Bob. Only this time, he tells him he's going to introduce Bob to someone who observed exactly 75 of 100 fish to be big.

New Question: Now what should Bob and Al think?

Here, things get really weird. By the reasoning that led to the Natural Answer above, Al should be nearly certain that ¾ are big and Bob should be nearly certain that ¼ are big. But that can't be right. They would just be agreeing to disagree! (Which would be especially puzzling, since they have ALL the same information.) The idea that they should favor one hypothesis in particular is also disconcerting, given the symmetry of the case. Should they both be 50/50?

Here's where I'd especially appreciate enlightenment: 1.If Bob should defer to Al in the original case, why? Can someone walk me through the calculations that lead to this?

2.If Bob should not defer to Al in the original case, is that because Al should change his mind? If so, what is wrong with the reasoning in the Natural Answer? If not, how can they agree to disagree?

3.If Bob should defer to Al in the original case, why not in the symmetrical variant?

4.What credence should they have in the symmetrical variant?

5.Can anyone refer me to some info on observation selection effects that could be applied here?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 03 July 2010 09:46:22PM *  6 points [-]

First, let's calculate the concrete probability numbers. If we are to trust this calculator, the probability of finding exactly 75 big fish in a sample of a hundred from a pond where 75% of the fish are big is approximately 0.09, while getting the same number in a sample from a 25% big pond has a probability on the order of 10^-25. The same numbers hold in the reverse situation, of course.

Now, Al and Bob have to consider two possible scenarios:

  1. The fish are 75% big, Al got the decently probable 75/100 sample, but Bob happened to be the first scientist who happened to get the extremely improbable 25/100 sample, and there were likely 10^(twenty-something) or so scientists sampling before Bob.

  2. The fish are 25% big, Al got the extremely improbable 75/100 big sample, while Bob got the decently probable 25/100 sample. This means that Bob is probably among the first few scientists who have sampled the pond.

So, let's look at it from a frequentist perspective: if we repeat this game many times, what will be the proportion of occurrences in which each scenario takes place?

Here we need an additional critical piece of information: how exactly was Bob's place in the sequence of scientists determined? At this point, an infinite number of scientists will give us lots of headache, so let's assume it's some large finite number N_sci, and Bob's place in the sequence is determined by a random draw with probabilities uniformly distributed over all places in the sequence. And here we get an important intermediate result: assuming that at least one scientist gets to sample 25/100, the probability for Bob to be the first to sample 25/100 is independent of the actual composition of the pond! Think of it by means of a card-drawing analogy. If you're in a group of 52 people whose names are repeatedly called out in random order to draw from a deck of cards, the proportion of drawings in which you get to be the first one to draw the ace of spades will always be 1/52, regardless of whether it's a normal deck or a non-standard one with multiple aces of spades, or even a deck of 52 such aces!

Now compute the following probabilities:

P1 = p(75% big fish) * p(Al samples 75/100 | 75% big fish) * p(Bob gets to be the first to sample 25/100)
~ 0.5 * 0.09 * 1/N_sci

P2 = p(25% big fish) * p(Al samples 75/100 | 25% big fish) *p (Bob gets to be the first to sample 25/100)
~ 0.5 * 10^-25 * 1/N_sci

(We ignore the finite, but presumably negligible probabilities that no scientist samples 25/100 in either case; these can be made arbitrarily low by increasing N_sci.)

Therefore, we have P1 >> P2, i.e. the overwhelming majority of meetings between Al and Bob -- which are by themselves extremely rare, since Al usually meets someone from the other (N_sci-1) scientists -- happen under the first scenario, where Al gets a sample closely matching the actual ratio.

Now, you say:

It isn't terribly clear why Bob should discount all of his observations, since they don't seem to subject to any observation selection effect; at least from his perspective, his observations were a genuine random sample.

Not really, when you consider repeating the experiment. For the overwhelming majority of repetitions, Bob will get results close to the actual ratio, and on rare occasions he'll get extreme outlier samples. Those repetitions in which he gets summoned to meet with Al, however, are not a representative sample of his measurements! The criteria for when he gets to meet with Al are biased towards including a greater proportion of his improbable 25/100 outlier results.

As for this:

VARIANT: as before, but Charlie has a similar conversation with Bob. Only this time, he tells him he's going to introduce Bob to someone who observed exactly 75 of 100 fish to be big.

I don't think this is a well defined scenario. Answers will depend on the exact process by which this second observer gets selected. (Just like in the preceding discussion, the answer would be different if e.g. Bob had been always assigned the same place in the sequence of scientists.)

Comment author: Unnamed 01 July 2010 11:56:34PM 4 points [-]

I think the utility company example is fine. Lots of biases can be described as resulting from the use of a pretty good heuristic which leads people astray in that particular case, but that's still a cost of imperfect thinking. And this was a case where the alternative to the status quo was relatively simple - it was defined precisely and differed on only a small number of easily understandable dimensions - so concerns about swindles, unintended consequences, or limited understanding of complex changes shouldn't play a big role here.

In real life, social processes might eventually overcome the status quo bias, but there's still a lot of waste in the interim which the clever (aka more rational) minority would be able to avoid. Actually, in this case the change to utility coverage would probably have to be made for a whole neighborhood at once, so I don't think that your model of social change would work.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 02 July 2010 08:01:17AM *  7 points [-]

I'd say the utility company example is, in an important sense, the mirror image of the Albanian example. In both cases, we have someone approaching the common folk with a certain air of authority and offering some sort of deal that's supposed to sound great. In the first case, people reject a favorable deal (though only in the hypothetical) due to the status quo bias, and in the second case, people enthusiastically embrace what turns out to be a pernicious scam. At least superficially, this seems like the same kind of bias, only pointed in opposite directions.

Now, while I can think of situations where the status quo bias has been disastrous for some people, and even situations where this bias might lead to great disasters and existential risks, I'd say that in the huge majority of situations, the reluctance to embrace changes that are supposed to improve what already works tolerably well is an important force that prevents people from falling for various sorts of potentially disastrous scams like those that happened in Albania. This is probably even more true when it comes to the mass appeal of radical politics. Yes, it would be great if people's intellects were powerful and unbiased enough to analyze every idea with pristine objectivity and crystal analytical clarity, but since humans are what they are, I'm much happier if they're harder to convince to change things that are already functioning adequately.

Therefore, I'm inclined to believe that a considerable dose of status quo bias is optimal from a purely consequentialist perspective. Situations where the status quo bias is gravely dangerous are far from nonexistent, but still exceptional, whereas when it comes to the opposite sort of danger, every human society is sitting on a powder keg all of the time.

Comment author: SilasBarta 01 July 2010 09:28:47PM *  6 points [-]

Okay, here's something that could grow into an article, but it's just rambling at this point. I was planning this as a prelude to my ever-delayed "Explain yourself!" article, since it eases into some of the related social issues. Please tell me what you would want me to elaborate on given what I have so far.


Title: On Mechanizing Science (Epistemology?)

"Silas, there is no Bayesian ‘revival’ in science. There is one amongst people who wish to reduce science to a mechanical procedure." – Gene Callahan

“It is not possible … to construct a system of thought that improves on common sense. … The great enemy of the reservationist is the automatist[,] who believes he can reduce or transcend reason. … And the most pernicious [of them] are algorithmists, who believe they have some universal algorithm which is a drop-in replacement for any and all cogitation.” – "Mencius Moldbug"

And I say: What?

Forget about the issue of how many Bayesians are out there – I’m interested in the other claim. There are two ways to read it, and I express those views here (with a bit of exaggeration):

View 1: “Trying to come up with a mechanical procedure for acquiring knowledge is futile, so you are foolish to pursue this approach. The remaining mysterious aspects of nature are so complex you will inevitably require a human to continually intervene to ‘tweak’ the procedure based on human judgment, making it no mechanical procedure at all.”

View 2: “How dare, how dare those people try to mechanize science! I want science to be about what my elite little cadre has collectively decided is real science. We want to exercise our own discretion, and we’re not going to let some Young Turk outsiders upstage us with their theories. They don’t ‘get’ real science. Real science is about humans, yes, humans making wise, reasoned judgments, in a social context, where expertise is recognized and a rewarded. A machine necessarily cannot do that, so don’t even try.”

View 1, I find respectable, even as I disagree with it.

View 2, I hold in utter contempt.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 02 July 2010 07:32:09AM *  8 points [-]

I think there is an additional interpretation that you're not taking into account, and an eminently reasonable one.

First, to clarify the easy question: unless you believe that there is something mysteriously uncomputable going on in the human brain, the question of whether science can be automated in principle is trivial. Obviously, all you'd need to do is to program a sufficiently sophisticated AI, and it will do automated science. That much is clear.

However, the more important question is -- what about our present abilities to automate science? By this I mean both the hypothetical methods we could try and the ones that have actually been tried in practice. Here, at the very least, a strong case can be made that the 20th century attempt to transform science into a bureaucratic enterprise that operates according to formal, automated procedures has largely been a failure. It has undoubtedly produced an endless stream of cargo-cult science that satisfies all these formal bureaucratic procedures, but is nevertheless worthless -- or worse. At the same time, it's unclear how much valid science is coming out except for those scientists who have maintained a high degree of purely informal and private enthusiasm for discovering truth (and perhaps also those in highly practical applied fields where the cash worth of innovations provides a stringent reality check).

This is how I read Moldbug: in many important questions, we can only admit honestly that we still have no way to find answers backed by scientific evidence in any meaningful sense of the term, and we have to grapple with less reliable forms of reasoning. Yet, there is the widespread idea that if only the proper formal bureaucratic structures are established, we can get "science" to give us answers about whichever questions we find interesting, and we should guide our lives and policies according to the results of such "science." It's not hard to see how this situation can give birth to a diabolical network of perverse incentives, producing endless reams of cargo-cult scientific work published by prestigious outlets and venerated as "science" by the general public and the government.

The really scary prospect is that our system of government might lead us to a complete disaster guided by policy prescriptions coming from this perverted system that has, arguably, already become its integral part.

Comment author: Rain 02 July 2010 12:05:34AM 8 points [-]

Human stupidity is formidable but not invincible.

-- Robert C. W. Ettinger, The Prospect of Immortality

Comment author: Vladimir_M 02 July 2010 12:43:41AM *  3 points [-]

On the other hand...

Against stupidity the very gods themselves contend in vain.

-- Friedrich Schiller

Seems to me that Schiller's been better vindicated so far.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 01 July 2010 09:55:01PM *  5 points [-]

Heh... another comment that's just occurred to me:

Here, most people would also say no - they'd want the "bonus" for children to be equal for low- and high-income families, but they do not want the "penalty" for lacking children to be the high for same and low income.

Again, this is by no means necessarily irrational. The effects of government policies are by no means limited to their immediate fiscal implications. People typically care much more -- and often with good reason -- about their status-signaling implications. By deciding to frame its tax policy in terms of "X is good and normal, but Y is even better" rather than "Y is good and normal, but X should be penalized," the government sends off different tremendously powerful signals about the status that it ascribes to different groups of people.

Average folks can be terribly innumerate when asked questions of this sort, but they'll clue onto the status implications of different alternatives instinctively. These concerns may well be important in practice -- even if a myopic view focused solely on the accounting issues would dismiss them as sheer bias. Of course, it's arguable to what extent this particular example is about realistic status-related concerns, but that's a question to be answered with non-trivial reasoning, not outright dismissal.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 01 July 2010 09:15:50PM *  11 points [-]

Another interesting point :

After 9/11, people became afraid of flying and started doing so less. Instead, they began driving more. Unfortunately, car travel has a much higher chance of death than air travel.

I have no doubt that there is a widespread and fundamentally irrational bias when it comes to people's fear of flying vs. driving. However, I'm not sure how much the above change was due to irrational fears, and how much due to the newly introduced inconveniences and indignities associated with air travel. Are there actually some reliable estimates about which cause was predominant? I'm sure at least some of the shift was due to entirely rational decisions motivated by these latter developments.

Comment author: Kaj_Sotala 01 July 2010 08:17:39PM *  1 point [-]

According to the book, when the stock price started plunging, pretty much all evidence indicated that it probably wasn't going to go up again. He apparently wasn't shorting, either. Paulos is also quoted as admitting both that he only looked for favorable evidence, as well as knowing that he should've been selling when he was in fact buying.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 01 July 2010 09:05:01PM *  5 points [-]

Kaj_Sotala:

According to the book, when the stock price started plunging, pretty much all evidence indicated that it probably wasn't going to go up again.

Trouble is, such certainty is inherently impossible in the stock market. If the stock is certain not to go up, then there is no point holding it, which means that you should get rid of it -- which means that everyone will sell it, causing it to plunge. But then shorting it becomes a certain killer investment. (And the same reasoning also works even if we only have a high probability rather than certainty, since lots of big investors with well-pooled risk will be attracted even if just the expected values are out of the ordinary in any direction.)

Generally speaking, it is a very close and safe approximation of reality to simply assume that any extraordinary future performance of any stock that would be implied by the public information, whether good or bad, automatically triggers reactions from investors that invalidate this prediction. Thus, if you're going to gamble with single-stock investing, you may well just pick it randomly.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 01 July 2010 08:18:09PM 8 points [-]

Come to think of it, some of the MWI proponents here should agree that by their criteria, there was nothing irrational about Paulos's investment at all.

Anyone with diminishing returns on the utility of money doesn't like volatility, whether probabilistic or MWI.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 01 July 2010 08:56:09PM *  1 point [-]

That's true, but given that bankruptcy laws provide an effective floor for how badly you can suffer due to losses, and getting rich can provide for superlinear utility of money for some people (especially since being a savvy investor is very high status), I would expect that some would find the shut-up-and-multiply outcome positive given their preferences. This especially in the context of MWI, in which this strategy guarantees a roughly predictable future mix of your impoverished (but not horribly suffering), reasonably well-off, and super-rich and high-status future selves.

Of course, I don't think that this is implied by MWI as such; that's why I wrote "some of the MWI proponents."

Comment author: Vladimir_M 01 July 2010 08:31:34PM *  23 points [-]

Regarding the "status quo bias" example with the utility company, I think it's fallacious, or at least misleading. For realistic typical humans with all their intellectual limitations, it is rational to favor the status quo when someone offers to change a deal that has so far worked tolerably well in ways that, for all you know, could have all sorts of unintended consequences. (And not to mention the swindles that might be hiding in the fine print.)

Moreover, if the utility company had actually started selling different deals rather than just conducting a survey about hypotheticals, it's not like typical folks would have stubbornly held to unfavorable deals for years. What happens in such situations is that a clever minority figures out that the new deal is indeed more favorable and switches -- and word about their good experience quickly spreads and soon becomes conventional wisdom, which everyone else then follows.

This is how human society works normally -- what you call "status quo bias" is a highly beneficial heuristic that prevents people from ruining their lives. It makes them stick to what's worked well so far instead of embarking on attractive-looking, but potentially dangerous innovations. When this mechanism breaks down, all kinds of collective madness can follow (speculative bubbles and Ponzi schemes being the prime examples). Generally, it is completely rational to favor a tolerably good status quo even if some calculation tells you that an unconventional change might be beneficial, unless you're very confident in your competence to do that calculation, or you know of other people's experiences that have confirmed it.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 01 July 2010 08:08:16PM *  9 points [-]

Regarding the "financial harm" example: the only irrational thing Paulos did was keeping all his eggs in one basket, instead of diversifying his portfolio. As a rule almost without exception, unless you have insider information, it's never more rational to buy one single stock instead of another, regardless of which ones are soaring and which ones plunging at the moment. If you're not convinced, consider the following: at each point during Paulos's purchases of Worldcom stock, if it had been certain from public information, or even highly likely, that the stock would keep plunging, then shorting it would have been a killer investment -- to the point where it would be foolish for big investors to invest in anything else at the moment. But of course, that was not the case.

Maybe I'm reading too much into your example, but it seems like you believe that investing in Worldcom stock at that point was somehow especially irrational compared to other single-stock investments. Yet, any non-diversified investment in a single stock is pretty much an equivalent gamble, and Paulos was not more irrational than other people who get into that sort of gambling. (Except arguably for a tiny number of extremely sophisticated investors on Wall Street who have superior ways of making predictions from public information, but even the existence of such creatures -- as opposed to those favored by survivorship bias -- is uncertain.)

Edit: Come to think of it, some of the MWI proponents here should agree that by their criteria, there was nothing irrational about Paulos's investment at all.

Comment author: WrongBot 30 June 2010 09:50:31PM 1 point [-]

Adding another step in the epidemiological chain will decrease the likelihood of infection and thus may justify a shorter waiting period.

True, but not quite applicable. In the case of an MSM, the epidemiological chain begins when he has sex with an MSM. In the case of a woman, the epidemiological chain begins when she has sex with an MSM.

The criteria for joining those excluded groups are identically rigorous, and yet the rules for each are quite different.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 01 July 2010 06:10:04AM *  3 points [-]

WrongBot:

True, but not quite applicable. In the case of an MSM, the epidemiological chain begins when he has sex with an MSM. In the case of a woman, the epidemiological chain begins when she has sex with an MSM.

Yes, but not all sorts of sexual acts have the same probability of HIV transmission. Those typically practiced within a heterosexual intercourse are far less likely (at least by an order of magnitude, perhaps even two) to result in transmission than those associated (at least stereotypically; not sure how often in actual practice) with sex between men.

(This is not meant to imply any overall judgment on the whole issue, merely to point out that different treatment of MSMs and women who have had sex with one does not by itself imply a logical inconsistency.)

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 29 June 2010 12:39:06PM 3 points [-]

Some men want to help raise children, including children who aren't genetically their own. I'm not talking about cuckoldry, but adoption or choosing women who already have children. What proportion of men do you think that is?

I realize you're talking about sex, not children, but how children are raised is part of the effect of sexual norms.

More generally, what you describe just doesn't seem like the world I'm living in. Admittedly, the world I'm living in is mostly science fiction fandom, but I just don't seem to see women turning down almost every man in the search for high status men.

What proportion of men are you seeing as excluded from mating if the default is non-monogamy?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 30 June 2010 05:30:40AM *  1 point [-]

NancyLebovitz:

More generally, what you describe just doesn't seem like the world I'm living in.

Mind you, I wasn't referring to the whole spectrum of male-female relationships that take place nowadays. Lots of folks still live old-fashioned lives centered around monogamous relationships with the goal of marriage, avoiding promiscuity and (as best they can) serial monogamy. Clearly, under a monogamous regime, people typically end up paired with someone who is roughly in the same league, so the above considerations don't apply.

However, if we talk specifically about promiscuous behaviors, then the above described hypergamous patterns definitely occur. From the perspective of typical men, or for people unfamiliar with the situation, the options enjoyed here by top-tier men really are nothing like the world they're living in. After all, there are men whose notch counts are in the four-, perhaps even five-digit territory -- whereas on the other side of the spectrum, for very large numbers of men, the increase in promiscuity hasn't expanded their sexual options at all relative to an absolutely prudish regime. It has possibly even lowered them by reducing their monogamous opportunities.

What proportion of men are you seeing as excluded from mating if the default is non-monogamy?

It's hard to give any definite numbers, and it obviously depends on the concrete arrangements in practice. It also depends on men's criteria (some men will be reduced to a choice of women who are in a much lower percentile of attractiveness, so they might find all the available choices unacceptable). But in any case, I would say that under a complete breakdown of all monogamous norms, the percentage of men reduced to virtually zero mating opportunities would be in the double digits.

Comment author: HughRistik 29 June 2010 06:09:47PM 2 points [-]

I'm not sure of Vladimir's reasoning, but I might speculate that men at the top tiers of attractiveness don't even need to join the poly community to have multiple partners.

Furthermore, being poly may have certain correlates (e.g. geekiness) that are only attractive to subsets of the female population (e.g. the subset that is poly).

Comment author: Vladimir_M 30 June 2010 04:57:12AM 2 points [-]

HughRistik:

I'm not sure of Vladimir's reasoning, but I might speculate that men at the top tiers of attractiveness don't even need to join the poly community to have multiple partners.

Furthermore, being poly may have certain correlates (e.g. geekiness) that are only attractive to subsets of the female population (e.g. the subset that is poly).

Yes, that's pretty much what I had in mind. For a man of very high attractiveness, becoming a card-carrying polyamorist is a deal that brings no real benefit for the cost. Such men already have a rich array of options in which they'll have the upper hand, including polygynous arrangements.

Comment author: cupholder 29 June 2010 05:15:49PM 1 point [-]

(And in some lower class environments, even the pretense of monogamous norms has nearly disappeared.)

You may be assigning too much credence to that news report. It's really just summarizing an argument between two partisan political parties about marriage's declining popularity among the poor. The only quantitative data cited is the number of UK marriages in 1972 and the number of UK marriages in 2009, which are not really enough to settle the claims made in the article or your parenthetical.

There is definitely significant large-scale evidence ...

Which significant large-scale evidence do you have in mind? The lack of citations suggests that you think it's very obvious, but I can't think of it. I may well be missing something obvious, but without a cite I don't know.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 30 June 2010 04:43:25AM *  2 points [-]

cupholder:

You may be assigning too much credence to that news report.

You're right, this wasn't a good choice of reference, if anything since the claims were made in an explicitly politicized context. However, whichever statistics you look at, there is no doubt that the decline in monogamous norms in many Western countries (and the Anglosphere nations in particular) has been far more pronounced among the lower classes, and that among significant parts of the underclass, the traditional monogamous norms have weakened to the point of collapse. See e.g. some U.K. data here, or the U.S. data here (which conveniently control for race, so that the trends are strikingly obvious as a class phenomenon).

If you just google for the relevant terms, you'll get tons of statistics corroborating these basic points from various angles.

Which significant large-scale evidence do you have in mind? The lack of citations suggests that you think it's very obvious, but I can't think of it. I may well be missing something obvious, but without a cite I don't know.

Regarding citations, one problem here is that when it comes to people's sexual behavior, social science data based on surveys are of dubious value. As a rule, men report having sex with significantly more women on average than vice versa -- a logical impossibility assuming the samples are representative. So, either people lie big time about their sexual behavior even in anonymous surveys (which sounds quite plausible to me), or the samples always turn out to be critically unrepresentative. (Here is one attempt at the latter sort of explanation.)

Nevertheless, the existing data suggest pretty convincingly that when it comes to the distribution of the total number of sex partners, men's distribution has a much wider variance than women's. See this article (unfortunately not available ungated) for references. This observation is consistent with the scenario where women at all levels of attractiveness strive towards men at higher levels, so that men near the bottom get nothing, while those in the upper tiers are making out like bandits.

However, even regardless of any research data, things should be obvious from common knowledge and everyday observations. There are clearly lots of men around for whom getting into any relationship with a woman would be a Herculean accomplishment, even more of those who struggle with positive but still meager results, and a minority for whom getting laid with attractive women is almost trivial, who easily rack up many dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of notches. (Of course, this is a continuum, not a sharp division.) This is the situation to which the weakening of monogamous norms in recent decades has led, and it surely constitutes evidence of the sort whose existence WrongBot denied in his above comment.

Comment author: WrongBot 28 June 2010 04:47:01PM 2 points [-]

Casanova may have had 132 lovers, but most or all of them weren't long-term relationships. There's an upper-limit to the number of serious romantic relationships one person can maintain at one time, and it's certainly less than ten and probably closer to five (the highest I've heard of is four). Furthermore, I've pointed out elsewhere that historically, harems are not devised by women.

If women and men maintain approximately equal numbers of relationships (which they seem to, in the poly community), then the most attractive partners available to you will be at least as attractive as they would have been if everyone were monogamous. It's a matter of math.

I think you're a little too confident of the argument you've been making throughout the comments on this post. There are no economically well-developed modern societies with a social norm other than monogamy, and there are some indications that ubiquitous birth control is a game-changer, so historical evidence may not apply. We're all arguing without large-scale evidence. We can (and should) speculate about what alternative social norms would entail, and we can justify those speculations to lesser or greater degrees. But there is no certainty in this debate.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 29 June 2010 10:31:24AM *  3 points [-]

WrongBot:

There are no economically well-developed modern societies with a social norm other than monogamy, and there are some indications that ubiquitous birth control is a game-changer, so historical evidence may not apply. We're all arguing without large-scale evidence.

That's not really true. In large parts of many rich contemporary societies, monogamous norms have been weakened to the point where a great many people engage in non-monogamous sexual behaviors. Yes, even among those people, the majority seem to consider stable monogamy as a goal to be achieved at some point in the future, but they nevertheless spend significant parts of their lives engaged in casual serial monogamy and promiscuous sex. (And in some lower class environments, even the pretense of monogamous norms has nearly disappeared.)

There is definitely significant large-scale evidence here about what happens (in at least some cases) when monogamous norms break down in a wealthy society. This evidence points quite unambiguously towards female hypergamy, where a minority of exceptionally attractive men account for the overwhelming part of non-monogamous sexual pairings that take place, and women at all levels of attractiveness strive towards men with higher relative status. You can of course dispute the relevance of this evidence, but you definitely can't deny its existence.

Comment author: Kaj_Sotala 28 June 2010 06:04:02PM 0 points [-]

Personally, I've seen more examples of polyamorous arrangements involving more men than women than the opposite. Of course, this might be just sampling bias, and obviously it would hardly be any better if men were the ones who got shafted.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 29 June 2010 09:22:54AM *  2 points [-]

I'm pretty sure there is a decisive sampling bias there, since men in the top tiers of attractiveness are, in all likelihood, severely underrepresented among those practicing explicit "card-carrying" polyamory. Therefore, it seems to me that the patterns of quasi-polyamorous behaviors that are widespread in the general population provide a much better indication as to what would happen if polyamory became the general norm -- and these point pretty clearly towards the scenario I described above.

Comment author: cousin_it 28 June 2010 09:10:39PM *  2 points [-]

You're committing the typical mistake that I will call symmetrism: thinking that men and women have mostly equivalent roles in mating, may benefit from similar advice, etc. This is an easy mistake to make because men aren't all that different from women in many other areas. But mating is special: it is the whole goddamn reason why we have these concepts of "males" and "females", so by default you should expect huge differences instead of equality!

From this perspective it's pretty easy to dissect your comment. PUA is an attempt to honestly formulate what attracts women. If you wanna have the female equivalent of PUA, you need to formulate what attracts men. Honestly, is that hard? Men are attracted to youth and physical beauty. Gee, I wish women had some kind of industry that supplied that to them... Oh wait.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 28 June 2010 09:30:26PM *  4 points [-]

However, you seem to be confusing tactics with strategy. For women, maximizing physical attractiveness will clearly result in an immediate tactical advantage, but it won't magically make their strategy sound, especially in the long term. And in this regard, there is certainly lots of deluded and clueless behavior by women going on, and good advice is hard to find and drowned in a sea of nonsense.

Comment author: Blueberry 28 June 2010 08:58:27AM 0 points [-]

Thanks for the explanation.

Status is about people's purely subjective perceptions of whom they admire and wish to associate with, imitate, and/or support -- or, in case of low status, the opposite of these things -- because it results in good feelings.

So, status entirely depends on other people's preferences? That is, a statement that person X is high status isn't saying anything about X, but about the people around X and their opinions of X? In that case, status doesn't seem very well defined: the exact same person, in the exact same situation and context, with the exact same behaviors could have a very different status depending on quirks of the people around.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 28 June 2010 09:36:24AM *  0 points [-]

Blueberry:

So, status entirely depends on other people's preferences? That is, a statement that person X is high status isn't saying anything about X, but about the people around X and their opinions of X? In that case, status doesn't seem very well defined: the exact same person, in the exact same situation and context, with the exact same behaviors could have a very different status depending on quirks of the people around.

Clearly, some particular behavior can have different status implications among different groups of people. For example, the proper way to dress to signal high status varies greatly between cultures, or even between different occasions within the same culture, and a mismatch may well have the opposite effect. Moreover, an action increasing your status in one group can simultaneously decrease it in another one that is overlapping or broader. For example, if you belong to a strict religious sect, then conspicuous devotional behaviors may raise your status within the sect, but make you look like a weirdo to other people and thus decrease your status in the broader society. I'd say this much should be obvious.

However, some status markers are a matter of near-consensus within large societies, or characteristic of significant portions of their inhabitants, or perhaps of disproportionately influential elite groups. Such considerations of status have immense importance for virtually all aspects of organized society, and they exert crucial influence on the opinions and behaviors of individuals. They are well defined within the given society and culture, though they likely won't be invariant cross-culturally.

Finally, some status markers are arguably a human universal, though they may be concealed by slightly different ways in which they are expressed in different cultures. The role of such status markers in human social behaviors, and especially mating behaviors, is, for me at least, a fascinating topic.

Comment author: Blueberry 28 June 2010 08:27:25AM 1 point [-]

No, if you think that those concepts can be used to compensate for an artificial prohibition against 'status' then you do not understand either the term or a broad aspect of human behavior.

I may not understand the term then: what is the difference between "status" and "prestige" or "reputation"?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 28 June 2010 08:48:56AM *  2 points [-]

Blueberry:

I may not understand the term then: what is the difference between "status" and "prestige" or "reputation"?

Status is about people's purely subjective perceptions of whom they admire and wish to associate with, imitate, and/or support -- or, in case of low status, the opposite of these things -- because it results in good feelings. (Though of course the situation is usually complicated by the entangled instrumental implications of these acts.)

Reputation is an established record of past behavior. Status can stem from reputation, but doesn't have to. For example, strangers among whom you have no reputation of any kind will quickly evaluate your status based on various clues as soon as they meet you.

Prestige is a more elusive term. Sometimes it's used as a synonym for outstandingly good, high status-conferring reputation. At other times, it denotes a property of certain things or traits to signal high status by a broad social convention (e.g. a prestige club, or a prestige accent).

Comment author: Kaj_Sotala 28 June 2010 04:50:13AM 2 points [-]

Even if appealing traits are distributed unevenly, the most appealing people will still only have the time for a limited number of relationships at a time. In a monogamous world leads to high-appeal people being paired with high-appeal people and low-appeal people being paired with low-appeal people. I would expect the same phenomenon to mainly persist in a polyamorous world, with the exception that it wouldn't be just couples anymore and, for the reasons you note, the stratification would probably be somewhat less harsh.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 28 June 2010 08:05:35AM *  8 points [-]

I'm not sure if there is any actual evidence for this conclusion. In a polyamorous world (and considering for simplicity only heterosexual relationships), if women of all levels are strongly inclined towards the upper tiers of men, to the point where they prefer a polyamorous arrangement involving more women than men, but restricted to men of higher appeal, this can lead to far more inequality than any monogamous world. In this scenario, it may happen that men from the lower tiers get shut out of access to women altogether, while those from the top enjoy arrangements involving many women and few men, or even exclusive polygynous arrangements. Among women, too, there would be a severe stratification with regards to how favorable arrangements are realistically available to them depending on their attractiveness.

Considering the evidence from quasi-polyamorous behaviors that are widespread nowadays, i.e. serial monogamy and promiscuity, this scenario doesn't seem at all unlikely to me. Of course, these behaviors are not identical to what would happen in a hypothetical polyamorous society, but they still provide significant information about the revealed preferences of both men and women.

Comment author: HughRistik 28 June 2010 06:47:12AM 2 points [-]

You apparently assume that if women are to form multiple attachments, there will be more attachment opportunities for all men, not just those in the upper tiers of attractiveness. Yet in reality, we see some contrary evidence, in that when women become more promiscuous, the additional amount of sex taking place is not at all distributed randomly or equally across all categories of men; instead, those in the upper tiers of attractiveness get the overwhelming part of it. (I know that this is not equivalent to what you have in mind, but I do think that there is enough similarity to provide at least some relevant evidence.)

This does seem to be the case. F. Roger Devlin makes a rather bold statement of this argument in this essay (though I dislike his conservative political slant and certain biased terms; also, ignore his criticism of feminist discourse on sexual violence, because it is massively lower quality that everything else he writes and riddled with errors):

Once monogamy is abolished, no restriction is placed on a woman’s choices.
Hence, all women choose the same few men. If Casanova had 132 lovers it is because 132 different women chose him. Such men acquire harems, not because they are predators, but because they happen to be attractive. The problem is not so much male immorality as simple arithmetic; it is obviously impossible for every woman to have exclusive possession of the most attractive man. If women want to mate simply as their natural drives impel them, they must, rationally speaking, be willing to share their mate with others.

But, of course, women’s attitude about this situation is not especially rational. They expect their alpha man to “commit.” Woman’s complaining about men’s failure to commit, one suspects, means merely that they are unable to get a highly attractive man to commit to them; rather as if an ordinary man were to propose to Helen of Troy and complain of her refusal by saying “women don’t want to get married.”

Comment author: Vladimir_M 28 June 2010 07:35:26AM 2 points [-]

HughRistik:

F. Roger Devlin makes a rather bold statement of this argument in this essay (though I dislike his conservative political slant and certain biased terms; also, ignore his criticism of feminist discourse on sexual violence, because it is massively lower quality that everything else he writes and riddled with errors):

Yes, I read that essay a while ago. Trouble is, Devlin's writing is of the sort I find most frustrating: it delivers some excellent insight wrapped up in an awful presentation, both because of Devlin's own exaggerations and the disreputable publication venue. Unfortunately, not many people will be willing to look past these negative signals and make the effort to understand his very solid main arguments. A better presentation of his thesis could have reached a much broader audience, and made for a much better reference in discussions of this sort.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 27 June 2010 10:34:23PM 3 points [-]

That's a good way of putting it -- and it leads us to the fascinating question of why people who express great concern about inequalities in material wealth under economic laissez-faire almost invariably don't show any concern for the even more extreme inequalities in matters of love and sex that inevitably arise under sexual laissez-faire. I think a correct answer to this question would open the way for a tremendous amount of insight about the modern society, and human nature in general.

I have a notion that political ideologies are apt to include ideas which are inconsistent with each other, but got bundled together for historical reasons.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 28 June 2010 01:17:44AM *  4 points [-]

That's certainly true. However, in such cases, one can typically find people who have a greater inclination towards systematization and consistency, and whose overall positions will have clear origins in a particular ideology, but differ from the orthodox positions of that ideology insofar as they'll have these inconsistencies straightened out somehow. (This will usually not be accepted favorably by their co-ideologists, of course, and will result in their marginalization.)

To take one example, in the historical development of today's mainstream ideologies, environmentalism got bundled up with leftism pretty much by sheer historical accident. (If you doubt it, consider that an example of a prominent environmentalist from a century ago was Madison Grant.) Thus, there are important points of friction between environmentalism and various leftist ideas that are highly correlated with it today -- and although the inconsistencies are usually passed over in silence or answered with implausible rationalizations, one can find people who have pointed them out and ultimately ditched one or the other. (See e.g. this story for one glaring example.)

The issue of economic vs. sexual inequality, however, is one of those cases where the seeming inconsistency is, to the best of my knowledge, without any significant exceptions. This suggests that rather than being bundled up due to historical accident, these positions both stem from some shared underlying motivation. Robin Hanson has written some preliminary speculations on this question, but I think he has only scratched the surface.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 27 June 2010 10:44:35PM 0 points [-]

If you're willing to take a crack at the interactions between status and efficacy, I'm interested in seeing it.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 28 June 2010 12:43:56AM 2 points [-]

I don't know, it's a really complex question. If I ever form anything approaching a sketch of a complete theory, I'll probably post it. But certainly no simple proposition will do.

Comment author: WrongBot 27 June 2010 08:30:50PM 2 points [-]

As regards Friedman's anecdote, I have no (ethical) objection to arranged marriage, provided both of the people involved are freely choosing to enter into it and are old enough to understand the consequences of doing so. But this is often not the case with arranged marriages, and so I do object to those specific instances, of which there are many. Happiness is important, but so is choice, even when that choice is to deliberately relinquish some other choice.

Therefore, even considering all the differences relative to inequalities in material wealth, I don't think a serious case could be made that harsh inequalities don't exist in this regard too.

Of course harsh inequalities exist, and I have not claimed otherwise. Some people have much more sexual and romantic success than others, and this does seem quite unjust. But the reason that inequalities of romantic and sexual opportunity go unquestioned is not due to a failure to perceive those inequalities. Rather, it's because there is no (ethical) way to systematically reduce them.

Whether or not monogamous societies are more egalitarian than sexually laissez-faire ones, coercing one into the other would require a reduction of basic freedoms that I find unacceptable.

Furthermore, I think that the idea of "sexual laissez-faire" that you are discussing here is something of a non-sequitur. No one has suggested that we adopt anything of the sort as a cultural norm; I should note that polyamorous standards include levels of honesty, communication, and egalitarianism that are not at all compatible with any kind of "free market." You also seem to be operating under the assumption (and I apologize if I'm reading too much into your comments) that such a free market would necessarily involve successful (or possibly "high-status") men attracting the vast majority of the pool of available women, leaving few options for less successful/attractive men, which ignores the ability of women to form multiple attachments themselves, as well as relationships in which all partners have multiple attachments, which more closely resembles the polyamorous ideal.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 27 June 2010 09:51:52PM *  2 points [-]

WrongBot:

But the reason that inequalities of romantic and sexual opportunity go unquestioned is not due to a failure to perceive those inequalities. Rather, it's because there is no (ethical) way to systematically reduce them.

Whether or not monogamous societies are more egalitarian than sexually laissez-faire ones, coercing one into the other would require a reduction of basic freedoms that I find unacceptable.

What about reductions of freedom that don't stem from any legal compulsion or violent threats, but merely from social norms enforced via status and reputation (and, obviously, their consequences on people's future willingness to maintain and establish various sorts of private relations with you)? Do you believe that these are also unacceptable?

If the answer is yes, then you must perceive any realistic human society, including the one you live in, as a hell of intolerable suffocating constraints. (Honestly, I would lie if I said that I don't feel a certain sympathy with this perspective -- but people are often biased in that they make a big deal only out of certain constraints that bother them, while completely overlooking other even more severe ones that they're OK with.)

You also seem to be operating under the assumption (and I apologize if I'm reading too much into your comments) that such a free market would necessarily involve successful (or possibly "high-status") men attracting the vast majority of the pool of available women, leaving few options for less successful/attractive men,

That assumption is, in my opinion, indeed correct, and consistent with what we observe in reality. But I don't see why you think that I was talking exclusively about men. Less attractive women also get a bad deal in a society where attractiveness is an important status marker, which I see as inevitable under sexual laissez-faire. Moreover, those women who would like to form permanent monogamous relationships, especially if they're less than stunningly attractive, are faced with much worse prospects in a situation where any man they attach themselves to could be at any moment tempted to defect and try his luck playing the field a bit more before settling down. (Again, note that I'm not contrasting this with a situation where the man would be somehow coerced into attachment, but with a different state of social norms where this would simply be a less attractive option.)

Now, you write:

which ignores the ability of women to form multiple attachments themselves, as well as relationships in which all partners have multiple attachments, which more closely resembles the polyamorous ideal.

But this seems to me like fallacious reasoning. You apparently assume that if women are to form multiple attachments, there will be more attachment opportunities for all men, not just those in the upper tiers of attractiveness. Yet in reality, we see some contrary evidence, in that when women become more promiscuous, the additional amount of sex taking place is not at all distributed randomly or equally across all categories of men; instead, those in the upper tiers of attractiveness get the overwhelming part of it. (I know that this is not equivalent to what you have in mind, but I do think that there is enough similarity to provide at least some relevant evidence.)

Furthermore, I think that the idea of "sexual laissez-faire" that you are discussing here is something of a non-sequitur. No one has suggested that we adopt anything of the sort as a cultural norm; I should note that polyamorous standards include levels of honesty, communication, and egalitarianism that are not at all compatible with any kind of "free market."

You seem to imply that under your most favorable social arrangements, there would be some constraints relative to a complete sexual laissez-faire (even one with the usual caveats about consenting adults etc.). But how would these be enforced? Or do you believe that people would spontaneously follow them under some favorable circumstances?

Comment author: Blueberry 27 June 2010 08:26:28PM 0 points [-]

Human consciousness specifically, not just life. Would different interpretations give different predictions for an experiment with a human interfering with himself in other branches?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 27 June 2010 08:43:43PM *  0 points [-]

Are you asking about what this would look like to observers on the side, or about the subjective experience of the person undergoing interference?

Regarding the first question, I don't think it would be different in principle from any other hypothetical experiment with macroscopic quantum interference; how much different interpretations manage to account for those is a complex question, but I don't think proponents of either of them would accept the mere fact of experimentally observed macroscopic interference as falsifying their favored interpretation. (Though arguably, collapse-based interpretations run into ever greater difficulties as the largest scales of detected quantum phenomena increase.)

As for the second one, I think answering that question would require more knowledge about the exact nature of human consciousness than we presently have. Scott Aaronson presents some interesting discussion along these lines in one of his lectures:
http://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec11.html

Comment author: xamdam 27 June 2010 04:27:13PM *  1 point [-]

I think Derren Brown uses this as a mind hack a lot.: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Vz_YTNLn6w (notice specific diversion into spatial memory, it's probably been tried and tested as the best distraction from the color of money in hand)

I feel that mental focus if VERY weak and very exploitable.

As a side note, I think there is another, less obious, mental hack going on, on the audience. Derren claims (in the intro to this TV series) that there is no acting here, but a lot of misdirection. I believe it. I think when he shows this trick work 2 out of 3 times, it's probably more like 2 out of 30. My guess is that he biases the sample quite cleverly, showing 3 cases is exactly the minimum that you can show giving the impression that a) reporting is honest (see - I showed a failure!) and b) the 'magic' works in most cases. Also I think getting caught/embarrassed by a hot dog vendor evokes certain associations that yeah, he can be beat which prevent you from thinking how much he can be beat.

Here is to you Derren, Master of Dark Arts.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 27 June 2010 08:16:08PM 4 points [-]

Note however that Derren Brown's tricks have turned out to be staged in at least one instance. This makes me extremely skeptical towards the rest of them too.

Comment author: WrongBot 27 June 2010 06:45:53PM 2 points [-]

This is a poor comparison. Individual units of money are interchangeable and useful only as means to acquire some desirable end, whereas individual sexual encounters are unique, have many different kinds of value, and are desirable ends in and of themselves. (As a side note, excluding love from any discussion of monogamy and its alternatives is already a substantial deviation from reality; a cursory mention is not sufficient.)

Inequalities of material wealth have killed many millions of people and will kill many millions more. Inequalities in matters of love and sex have not.

Governments can redistribute wealth (via taxation) without causing great suffering to any one person. Redistributing sex would require institutional rape on a massive scale.

I think a correct answer to this question would open the way for a tremendous amount of insight about the modern society, and human nature in general.

Modern society is generally opposed to rape. This should not be a striking or insightful conclusion.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 27 June 2010 07:38:29PM *  4 points [-]

Just in case I was unclear on this matter, I am not arguing in favor of any particular view on these issues at the present moment -- I merely wish to point out that there seems to be a discrepancy here that calls for explanation, and that my hunch is that a correct explanation would open a whole gold mine of insight.

That said, I don't think your replies to these points are at all satisfactory. In particular:

This is a poor comparison. Individual units of money are interchangeable and useful only as means to acquire some desirable end, whereas individual sexual encounters are unique, have many different kinds of value, and are desirable ends in and of themselves.

That is all true, however, there is still the undeniable fact that people differ greatly in their attractiveness, that these differences are to a large degree involuntary, and that those blessed with higher attractiveness are offered a great deal of choice and opportunity to achieve these desirable ends in their lives. Whereas those on the bottom are denied virtually any such opportunity, and a large class of not very attractive folks are outcompeted by those in the upper echelons and are thus left with only meager choice and opportunity.

Therefore, even considering all the differences relative to inequalities in material wealth, I don't think a serious case could be made that harsh inequalities don't exist in this regard too.

Inequalities of material wealth have killed many millions of people and will kill many millions more. Inequalities in matters of love and sex have not.

However, tremendous amounts of concern about inequalities in material wealth are voiced even in rich societies where even the very poorest people haven't been in danger of starvation for several generations. It is clear that those concerned about material inequality in modern developed countries object to it as something that is unjust as a matter of principle, or perhaps because they fear that it might cause social instability. (But even in the latter case, surely it not outright absurd to ask similar questions about the possible social consequences of vast inequalities on the sexual market?)

Governments can redistribute wealth (via taxation) without causing great suffering to any one person. Redistributing sex would require institutional rape on a massive scale.

Nobody was mentioning any such idea. What was mentioned was merely the plausible-sounding hypothesis that in a society with strong monogamous norms, outcomes will be more egalitarian in comparison with a society of sexual laissez-faire, where the immense differences in people's attractiveness give them vastly unequal opportunities, and those less attractive arguably get a worse deal than under stronger monogamous norms.

Moreover, for an even more extreme test of our intuitions, we can also take an even broader cross-cultural view of things and observe cultures that practice arranged marriage. I have no close familiarity with any such societies, so fairly speaking, I can only suspend judgment, but I certainly don't see any reason to condemn them harshly outright. (David Friedman relates an interesting anecdote here -- I definitely recommend it as an interesting debiasing story.)

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 27 June 2010 02:17:29PM 16 points [-]

That wasn't just a joke, though to judge by the upvotes, it's a better joke than I thought it was.

Telling people that their motives are less reputable than they thought is a way of lowering their status and raising your own. It's tiresome from Marxists and Freudians, and at least for me, too much of it produces a feeling of intellectual claustrophobia. Motive-mongering can prove anything, involves unproven guesses about what other people are driven by, and leaves out major parts of the world.

In particular, status is about non-rational motives for acceding to people. If everyone was completely run by status considerations, nothing useful would be getting done. (There's that Gladwell essay I can't find which suggests that status competition is especially pernicious when people have nothing useful to do, as in high school, prisons, and the court of Louis XIV.)

Status is an important feature of how people live with each other, and it makes perfect sense to want enough skill at it to live a good life and accomplish what you care about.

However, there's got to be a complex interaction between status (some but not all of which is based on proving that you can afford to waste effort and resources) and accomplishment. I've brought up the subject a few times, but I don't seem to be able to get a grip on it, and no one else seems to have anything to say about it. Is it a non-problem, only interesting to me, or so hard that there's just nothing to say at this point?

A couple of questions about status-- how do you keep from being blinded by other people's high status? How do you notice valuable people who aren't good at status?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 27 June 2010 06:52:27PM 1 point [-]

NancyLebovitz:

However, there's got to be a complex interaction between status (some but not all of which is based on proving that you can afford to waste effort and resources) and accomplishment. I've brought up the subject a few times, but I don't seem to be able to get a grip on it, and no one else seems to have anything to say about it. Is it a non-problem, only interesting to me, or so hard that there's just nothing to say at this point?

It is a very difficult and complex question, which can't be discussed in its full generality in a single comment. It certainly involves numerous perplexing and counterintuitive phenomena where it's hard to even begin analyzing the situation coherently.

A couple of questions about status-- how do you keep from being blinded by other people's high status? How do you notice valuable people who aren't good at status?

Well, the only honest answers to both questions would be -- sometimes, possibly even often, I don't. But admitting that status is often a key force in shaping our beliefs that we nevertheless see as products of flawless logic and clear moral imperatives is a necessary condition to even begin disentangling our situation.

Comment author: [deleted] 27 June 2010 05:24:09PM *  4 points [-]

The prupose of monogamus marraige is to ensure male productivity.

In a way monomgamus norm is sexual socialism for men. Almost everyone has a wife, almost everyone has a child. It redistributes sexual power away from women and the top 10% of men and gives it to the remaining 90% of men, forcing us into K selection, slowing the pace of evolution and equalizing outcomes.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 27 June 2010 06:11:50PM *  9 points [-]

Konkvistador:

In a way monogamous norm is sexual socialism for men.

That's a good way of putting it -- and it leads us to the fascinating question of why people who express great concern about inequalities in material wealth under economic laissez-faire almost invariably don't show any concern for the even more extreme inequalities in matters of love and sex that inevitably arise under sexual laissez-faire. I think a correct answer to this question would open the way for a tremendous amount of insight about the modern society, and human nature in general.

Michel Houellebecq has an interesting paragraph about this issue in his novel Whatever:

It's a fact, I mused to myself, that in societies like ours sex truly represents a second system of differentiation, completely independent of money; and as a system of differentiation it functions just as mercilessly. The effects of these two systems are, furthermore, strictly equivalent. Just like unrestrained economic liberalism, and for similar reasons, sexual liberalism produces phenomena of absolute pauperization. Some men make love every day; others five or six times in their life, or never. Some make love with dozens of women, others with none. [...] In a totally liberal economic system certain people accumulate considerable fortunes; others stagnate in unemployment and misery. In a totally liberal sexual system certain people have a varied and exciting erotic life; others are reduced to masturbation and solitude.

Comment author: Morendil 27 June 2010 08:30:37AM 14 points [-]

Eating is rarely used as an explanation for anything around here, whereas the word "status" often appears in proposed answers to various questions: why hasn't there been a male counterpart to the feminist movement, why are most women monogamous, and so on.

My experience in the past few months has been that in many cases, such explanations turn out to be vacuous, the statements made in support of them (e.g. "women are institutionally lower status than men") readily debunked, or at best true only if you pick precisely the right one out of the many meanings of "status". (So that, to make an effective argument, you should really use the more precise term in the first place - prestige, reputation, wealth, political power, or what have you.)

The term often masks sloppy thinking of the virtus dormitiva variety: it replaces a question about a puzzling or poorly understood phenomenon with an "answer" that is really just a bit of jargon, and fails to advance our understanding by identifying a regularity relating more primitive objects of our experience. (In the case of the feminist movement, "who has the right to vote" turns out to be that kind of regularity, for instance: it's not even particularly hard to improve on "status" as an explanation.)

I have reached a point where I now suspect the mere appearance of "status" in an argument on LW is a useful heuristic to detect sloppy thinking.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 27 June 2010 05:35:01PM *  6 points [-]

Morendil:

(So that, to make an effective argument, you should really use the more precise term in the first place - prestige, reputation, wealth, political power, or what have you.)

Trouble is, often we don't have a more precise term. Some kinds of status that are immensely important in human social relations can't be reduced to any such concrete and readily graspable everyday terms, and insisting on doing so will lead to completely fallacious conclusions -- it is akin to that proverbial drunk looking for his keys under the lamppost.

Of course, far better and more accurate explanations could be formulated if we had a precise technical vocabulary to describe all aspects of human status games. Unfortunately, we don't have it, and we still have no accurate model of significant parts of these interactions either. But a vague-sounding conclusion is still better than a spuriously precise, but ultimately false and misleading one.

A good illustration is the extensive technical vocabulary used in PUA literature. Before this terminology was devised, there was simply no way to speak precisely about numerous aspects of male-female attraction -- and attempts to shoehorn discussions and explanations into what can be precisely described with ordinary everyday words and concepts have misled many people into disastrously naive and wrong conclusions about these issues. Unfortunately, developing a more general technical terminology that would cover all human status considerations is a difficult task waiting to be done.

My experience in the past few months has been that in many cases, such explanations turn out to be vacuous, the statements made in support of them (e.g. "women are institutionally lower status than men") readily debunked, or at best true only if you pick precisely the right one out of the many meanings of "status".

If you believe that my explanations have been vacuous or based on factual or logical errors, then you're always welcome to point out these problems. I have surely committed a great many intellectual errors in my comments here, but I think that failure to pursue arguments patiently in detail when challenged is not one of them. As for others, well, I don't speak for others, nor do they speak for me.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 27 June 2010 12:57:42AM 7 points [-]

"Not terribly sensitive to status" isn't the same thing as completely indifferent to it or committed to lowering one's status.

I think a great many people aren't working to raise their status, even if they're making some efforts to keep it from being lowered.

One of my friends who's in a triad has said she doesn't think that polyamory is consistent with maximum achievement-- intimate relationships with more people simply takes more time and attention than being in a two-person relationship.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 27 June 2010 01:37:01AM *  15 points [-]

NancyLebovitz:

"Not terribly sensitive to status" isn't the same thing as completely indifferent to it or committed to lowering one's status.

I think a great many people aren't working to raise their status, even if they're making some efforts to keep it from being lowered.

Trouble is, many important status-enhancing behaviors are as natural as breathing air for some people, but mysterious, unnatural, and hard to pull off for others. People of the latter sort have to commit significant thinking and effort if they wish to achieve the same results that others get by simply going with the flow.

When people whose natural behavior is decently good status-wise say that they're "not terribly sensitive to status," it's as if someone with good language skills said he was not terribly sensitive to fluency of speech, without stopping to consider the fate of folks suffering from noticeable speech impediments. The analogy is not perfect, in that many more people suffer from impediments in social behavior than in speech, but the basic point holds: just like generating fluent speech, navigating through human status games is a task of immense complexity, which however some people can handle adequately or even superbly without any conscious effort -- which can make them think that there isn't really anything significant about it, if they haven't stopped to consider the problems of those who aren't as lucky in that regard.

So, yes, lots of people who don't suffer from status-related problems aren't investing effort in raising or maintaining their status, in the same sense that they aren't investing effort in maintaining their language skills. For them, the hard work is done by their brains at subconscious levels, and manifests itself as spontaneous adequate behavior. That, however, doesn't mean that the whole issue is vacuous, no more than the fact that most people speak normally without conscious effort (and some with great eloquence) means that linguistics is a vacuous science.

Comment author: Blueberry 26 June 2010 07:41:44PM 4 points [-]

As someone who isn't terribly sensitive to status, I often find this site's emphasis on it puzzling. Have you seen this post for further discussions unpacking status?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 27 June 2010 12:34:16AM 2 points [-]

Blueberry:

As someone who isn't terribly sensitive to status, I often find this site's emphasis on it puzzling.

Well, that's sort of like saying that you're not terribly sensitive to the issue of eating and drinking -- maybe you really don't think about it much overall, but it's still an essential part of how you function within the human society.

Comment author: LucasSloan 27 June 2010 12:23:17AM 4 points [-]

If you started constantly behaving in ways that would tremendously lower your status among people in the mainstream society, do you think that this wouldn't affect your status and prospects in the polyamorous community at all?

To make this comment a bit more concrete, imagine if you (or those around you) suddenly started picking their noses incessantly, farting a lot, and speaking like rednecks with no conception of how to conjugate english verbs.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 27 June 2010 12:32:51AM *  6 points [-]

Even better: suppose you started behaving in ways that are commonly associated with the epithet "dorky." To make the point especially relevant, focus on those ways that are characteristic of large numbers of people who live peaceful, productive, and honest lives, but suffer from social ineptitude.

Comment author: WrongBot 26 June 2010 07:32:44PM 7 points [-]

"Status" as you are using it here is meaningless. There is a polyamorous subculture whose members are largely indifferent to an outsider's perception of their status; as is generally the case with subcultures, status is only relevant within the subculture.

And in the polyamorous subculture, having multiple stable relationships is high status.

Furthermore, not all people are terribly sensitive to status. I find that trait attractive in potential romantic partners, so I'm quite safe in ignoring considerations of status entirely.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 26 June 2010 11:48:53PM *  7 points [-]

WrongBot:

"Status" as you are using it here is meaningless. There is a polyamorous subculture whose members are largely indifferent to an outsider's perception of their status; as is generally the case with subcultures, status is only relevant within the subculture.

But how much of the status within the subculture is a reflection of the same traits that enhance one's status in the mainstream society? Honestly, I don't think the answer is zero even for subcultures much more extreme than polyamorists.

Moreover, since subcultures don't function as closed autarkic worlds (except for some religious sects), their members still have to struggle to make a living and maintain their functionality within the mainstream society. Are you really saying that people in polyamourous relationships are largely indifferent to how successful and well-adjusted their partners are in the broader society outside the subculture?

And in the polyamorous subculture, having multiple stable relationships is high status.

I certainly don't doubt this, but surely the traits and skills that enable one to elicit and maintain attraction from multiple concurrent partners in the polyamorous subculture are not altogether different from those that make one attractive to potential partners for more traditional arrangements in the mainstream society. Or would you really claim the opposite?

Furthermore, not all people are terribly sensitive to status. I find that trait attractive in potential romantic partners, so I'm quite safe in ignoring considerations of status entirely.

That sounds like an extremely strong claim. If you started constantly behaving in ways that would tremendously lower your status among people in the mainstream society, do you think that this wouldn't affect your status and prospects in the polyamorous community at all?

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 26 June 2010 08:58:22PM *  1 point [-]

There are no grounds to privilege nihilistic hypothesis. It's like asserting that the speed of light is exactly 5,000,000,000 m/s before making the first experiment. I'm ignorant, and I argue that you must be ignorant as well.

(Of course, this situation doesn't mean that we don't have some state of knowledge about this fact, but this state of knowledge would have to involve a fair bit of uncertainty. Decision-making is possible without much of epistemic confidence, understanding of what's going on.)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 26 June 2010 11:07:24PM 0 points [-]

Could you give an example of a possible future insight that would invalidate the nihilistic position? I honestly don't understand on what grounds you might be judging "correctness" here.

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 25 June 2010 07:50:56PM *  5 points [-]

MWI copies and possible world copies are not problematic, because both situations naturally admit an interpretation in terms of "the future me" concept ("splitting subjective experience"), and so the moral intuitions anchored to this concept work fine.

It is with within-world copies, or even worse near-copies, that the intuition breaks down: then there are multiple "future me", but no "the future me". Analysis of such situations can't rely on those moral intuitions, but nihilistic position would also be incorrect: we are just not equipped to evaluate them.

(See also these comments.)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 26 June 2010 08:46:51PM 0 points [-]

Vladimir_Nesov:

Analysis of such situations can't rely on those moral intuitions, but nihilistic position would also be incorrect: we are just not equipped to evaluate them.

Do you believe that a nihilistic position would be incorrect on the grounds of internal logical inconsistency, or on the grounds that it would involve an incorrect factual statement about some objectively existing property of the universe?

Comment author: Psychohistorian 26 June 2010 08:30:34AM *  18 points [-]

Warning: broad, slightly unfounded generalizations forthcoming. But I think they're insightful nonetheless.

I think that most people's beliefs are largely determined by reward, power, and status. I want to state explicitly that I don't endorse these social standards, but I think they're pretty solidly established.

For virtually all women, sleeping with multiple men is not high-status. Being with a man who is seeing other women is a marker that she can't get him to "commit" to her, and is therefore somehow deficient. For a substantial majority of men, they are not sufficiently attractive enough (overall, not specifically physically) to entice women into such a lifestyle. In other words, because women feel like they take a huge status hit being with a poly man, your average woman will only consider such a relationship with a man who might otherwise be out of her league. Thus, since most men date women roughly within their own league, most men do not have the opportunity to pursue this.

Men at the top, on the other hand, are probably chasing tail more than they're chasing love or romance. Also, at least based on my knowledge of such men, they don't view female infidelity as being OK - having your woman sleep with other men is definitely a status hit for any man - so it's easier for them to engage in non-consensual non-monogamy than polyamory. This is also "efficient" in the sense that it gives them someone to manage their household/come home to, and some thrills on the side. Polyamory may lack those practical benefits, and is difficult to justify in a social setting for most professions, particularly high-paying ones (that are not entertainment). I would imagine showing up with two dates to business functions, or different alternating dates, might negatively influence one's chance of making partner or the like.

Other obvious obstacles include the legal system and some of the practicalities of child rearing, but I really think the status structure explains a lot of people's reticence to consider the lifestyle. That, and, of course, jealousy.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 26 June 2010 06:09:25PM *  5 points [-]

This is an excellent comment, which gets to the heart of the matter. One point that should be added, however, is that there are some important considerations here in addition to the status structure.

Namely, when people get into relationships -- and especially serious long-term relationships, particularly those that are expected to produce children -- they obviously must use some heuristics to estimate the likely future behavior of their partner. Clearly, people's past behavior provides some powerful rational evidence here -- and like in many other cases, the best possible rules for evaluating this evidence might have the appearance of crude stereotypes with plenty of individual exceptions, but nevertheless, it is entirely rational to stick to them. Moreover, a troublesome fact for dedicated egalitarians is that, from a purely rational point of view, these rules are not symmetrical for men and women (not least because men and women tend to find different behaviors acceptable and desirable, so even the goals of their inferences are not the same).

Of course, these considerations are heavily entangled with the matters of status here. However, the important point is that unlike in those cases where status is assigned to different behaviors in a mostly arbitrary way due to higher-order signaling strategies and locked equilibriums, when it comes to people's history of sex and relationships, low-status markers have a significant overlap with things that predict (in the statistical sense of the word) problematic or undesirable future behavior.

Comment author: Daniel_Burfoot 26 June 2010 03:21:09AM 5 points [-]

If you have a particularly compelling argument for or against a particular relationship style, please share it.

If one defines a graph with each individual representing a node, and an edge connecting two individuals who have had sexual contact, then the large majority are part of a huge connected cluster. This is why STDs are a problem. If a group of people agreed to limit their sexual contacts to others within the group, and if they were all tested beforehand, they would achieve a high degree of structural protection from STDs.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 26 June 2010 05:20:12PM *  4 points [-]

Another huge problem is unwanted pregnancy. Contraceptives are generally less reliable than most people like to think, so if you're not OK with abortion as the backup option (and certain that you'll actually be able to exercise it), it is a sword of Damocles hanging over any heterosexual relationship between (fertile) people who aren't ready for a baby to pop up.

Admittedly, if you use contraceptives with great care and protective redundancy, they can be extremely reliable. However, I don't know how many people can actually pull this off in a consistently precise and disciplined manner; probably not too many. (Not to mention how badly such unrelenting discipline tends to kill fun.)

Comment author: [deleted] 25 June 2010 03:18:42PM 2 points [-]

On the whole, I don't think that people are becoming more tolerant of disreputable behaviors and opinions, or that they are likely to become so in the future -- or even that the set of disreputable traits will become significantly smaller, though its composition undoubtedly will change.

It is commonly said that status competition is zero-sum. This seems a more certain invariant than what you just wrote above. If that's the case, then any change in the degree of tolerance will be perfectly matched by a corresponding change in the degree of conformity - and vice versa.

The picture you paint, however, is of the average person becoming more of a pariah, more unemployable, fewer friends, because they are haunted by that one ineradicable disreputable behavior in their past. This picture violates the assumption that status competition is zero-sum - an assumption which I have a stronger confidence in than I do in your claim that we are not going to become "more tolerant". In fact your claim is ambiguous, because there is surely no canonical way to compare different sets of taboo behavior so that the degree of tolerance of different cultures can be compared. It is a similar problem to the problem of adjusting for inflation with price indexes. I have more confidence in our ability to measure, and compare, the fraction of the population relegated to low status (eg unemployability), than I do in our ability to measure, and compare, the magnitudes of the sets of taboos of different societies.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 26 June 2010 03:34:11AM *  2 points [-]

Constant:

The picture you paint, however, is of the average person becoming more of a pariah, more unemployable, fewer friends, because they are haunted by that one ineradicable disreputable behavior in their past.

Maybe I failed to make my point clearly, but that is not what I had in mind. The picture I paint is of the average person becoming far more cautious and conformist, and of a society where various contrarians and others with unconventional opinions and preferences have no outlet at all for speaking their mind or indulging their preferences.

Average folks would presumably remain functioning normally (within whatever the definition of normality will be), only in a constant and unceasing state of far greater caution, hiding any dangerous thoughts they might have at all times and places. The number of people who actually ruin their lives by making a mistake that will haunt them forever won't necessarily be that high; the unceasing suffocating control of everyone's life will be the main problem.

What the society might end up looking like after everyone has grown up in a no-privacy world, we can only speculate. It would certainly not involve anything similar to the relations between people we know nowadays. (For example, you speak of friends -- but at least for me, a key part of the definition of a close friend vs. friend vs. mere acquaintance is the level of confidentiality I can practice with the person in question. I'm not sure if the concept can exist in any meaningful form in a world without privacy.)

In fact your claim is ambiguous, because there is surely no canonical way to compare different sets of taboo behavior so that the degree of tolerance of different cultures can be compared. It is a similar problem to the problem of adjusting for inflation with price indexes.

That's a very good analogy! But note that none of my claims depend on any exact comparison of levels of tolerance. Ultimately, the important question is whether, in a future Brinesque transparent society, there would exist taboo opinions and preferences whose inevitable suppression would be undesirable by some reasonable criteria. I believe the answer is yes, and that it is unreasonably optimistic to believe that such a society would become so tolerant and libertarian that nothing would get suppressed except things that rightfully should be, like violent crime. (And ultimately, I believe that such unwarranted optimism typically has its roots in the same biases that commonly make people believe that the modern world is on an unprecedented path of increasing freedom and tolerance.)

There is of course also the issue of thoughts and words that are dangerous due to people's specific personal circumstances, which is more or less orthogonal to the problem of social norms and taboos (as discussed in the third point of this comment).

Comment author: Kaj_Sotala 25 June 2010 06:28:54AM *  6 points [-]

Even with the most non-intrusive and fair government imaginable, if lots of information about your life is easily available online, it means that a single stupid mistake in life that would earlier have only mild consequences can ruin your reputation forever and render you permanently unemployable and shunned socially.

I've heard this opinion expressed frequently, but it always seems to kind of contradict itself. If there's lots of information available about everyone, and all kinds of stupid mistakes will easily become permanently recorded...

...then wouldn't that lead to just about everyone's reputation being ruined in the eyes of everyone? But that doesn't make any sense - if almost everyone's going to have some stupid mistakes of theirs caught permanently on file, then all that will happen is that you'll find out you're not the only one who has made stupid mistakes. Big deal.

In fact, this to me seems potentially preferrable than our current society. Right now, people's past mistakes get lost in the past. As a result, we construct an unrealistic image where most people seem far more perfect than they actually are. Some past mistake coming out might ruin someone's reputation, and people who have made perfectly normal and reasonable mistakes will feel a lot more guilty about it than would be warranted. If the mistakes everyone had made were available, then we wouldn't have these unrealistic unconscious conceptions of how perfect people must be. Society might be far healthier as a result.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 25 June 2010 04:09:16PM *  11 points [-]

Kaj_Sotala:

But that doesn't make any sense - if almost everyone's going to have some stupid mistakes of theirs caught permanently on file, then all that will happen is that you'll find out you're not the only one who has made stupid mistakes.

There are at least three important problems with this view:

  • First, this is only one possible equilibrium. Another possibility is a society where everyone is extremely cautious to the point of paranoia, so that very few people ever commit a faux pas of any sort -- and although most people would like things to be more relaxed, they're faced with a problem of collective action. I don't think this is at all unrealistic -- people living under repression quickly develop the instinct to watch their mouth and behavior obsessively.

  • Second, even under the most optimistic "good" equilibrium, this argument applies only to those behaviors and opinions that are actually widespread. Those whose unconventional opinions and preferences are in a small minority, let alone lone-wolf contrarians, will have to censor themselves 24/7 or suffer very bad consequences.

  • Third, many things people dare say or do only in private are not dangerous because of laws or widespread social norms, but because of the local and private relations of power and status in which they are entangled. You need look no further than the workplace: if your bosses can examine all the details of your life to determine how docile, obedient, and conformist you are, then clearly, having such traits 24/7 is going to become necessary to prosper economically (except for the minority of self-employed folks, of course). Not to mention what happens if you wish to criticize your employers, even in your own free time! (Again, there's a collective action problem of sorts here: if everyone were mouthing off against their bosses and couldn't help but do it, it would lead to a "good" equilibrium, but the obedient and docile will outcompete the rest, making such traits more valuable and desirable.)

Comment author: Unknowns 25 June 2010 06:16:36AM 0 points [-]

Once it becomes sufficiently obvious that everyone frequently does or says "not very respectable" things, people will begin to just laugh when someone brings them up as a criticism. It will no longer be possible to pretend that such things apply only to the people you criticize.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 25 June 2010 03:31:01PM *  3 points [-]

That is only one possible equilibrium. The other one is that as the sphere of privacy shrinks, people become more and more careful and conformist, until ultimately, everyone is behaving with extreme caution. In this equilibrium, people are locked in a problem of collective action -- nobody dares to say or do what's on his mind, even though most people would like to.

Moreover, even in the "good" equilibrium, the impossibility of hypocrisy protects only those behaviors and opinions that are actually characteristic of a majority. If your opinions and preferences are in a small minority, there is nothing at all to stop you from suffering condemnation, shunning, low status, and perhaps even outright persecution from the overwhelming majority.

Comment author: [deleted] 25 June 2010 12:41:57AM 4 points [-]

The thing is, "space alien" thought experiments are very hard to do, given that we're not space aliens, and they have come out both ways -- read Joanna Russ for speculative, "alien's-eye" fiction about gender that comes out very feminist.

The closest thing to a genuine "alien's-eye" view of gender and society would have to come from people who perceive both gender and society very differently: perhaps autistics or the transgendered or intersex. Even there it's shaky.

In response to comment by [deleted] on A Rational Education
Comment author: Vladimir_M 25 June 2010 04:05:04AM *  1 point [-]

SarahC:

The thing is, "space alien" thought experiments are very hard to do, given that we're not space aliens,

That is undoubtedly true. I certainly don't claim that my views on these matters are entirely free of bias and emotional investment. However, a claim that I would be ready to defend is that there are particular conclusions that would be made, or at least considered plausible, by an ideal detached observer, but whose mere mention provokes virtually unanimous hostility from feminists. At least in principle, one doesn't have to be an ideal detached observer across the board to form correct judgments of this sort in particular cases.

and they have come out both ways -- read Joanna Russ for speculative, "alien's-eye" fiction about gender that comes out very feminist.

I am curious about this. Which particular works would you recommend?

Comment author: gwern 25 June 2010 01:43:31AM 6 points [-]

Already, employers, school admissions bureaucrats, etc. are routinely searching through people's trails left on Facebook and Google. What happens when an even greater portion of one's life will be customarily posted online? How long before not having a rich online trail is considered weird and suspect by itself?

While we're simply stating our beliefs...

I view this as merely a transition period. You say we cannot both maintain our old puritanical public standards and ever increasing public disclosure. I agree.

However, the latter is driven by powerful and deep economic & technological & social trends, and the former is a weak creature of habit and tradition which has demonstrated in the 20th century its extreme malleability (just look at homosexuality!).

It is a case of a movable object meeting an unstoppable force; the standards will be forced to change. A 10 year old growing up now would not judge harshly an old faux pas online, even if the 30 and 40 year olds currently in charge would and do now judge harshly. Those 30 and 40 year olds' time is numbered.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 25 June 2010 02:43:26AM *  5 points [-]

On the whole, I don't think that people are becoming more tolerant of disreputable behaviors and opinions, or that they are likely to become so in the future -- or even that the set of disreputable traits will become significantly smaller, though its composition undoubtedly will change. Every human society has its taboos and strong status markers attached to various behaviors and opinions in a manner that seems whimsical to outsiders; it's just that for the last few decades, the set of behaviors and opinions considered disreputable has changed a lot in Western societies. (The situation is also confused by the fact that, similar to its inconsistent idealization of selectively applied "free-thinking," our culture has developed a strange inconsistent fondness for selectively applied "tolerance" as a virtue in its own right.)

Of course, those whose opinions, preferences, and abilities are more in line with the new norms have every reason to be happy, and to them, it will look as if things have become more free and tolerant indeed. Trouble is, this is also why it's usually futile to argue the opposite: even by merely pointing out those things where you are now under greater constraint by social norms than before, you can't avoid the automatic status-lowering association with such things and the resulting derision and/or condemnation.

Realistically, the new generations will react to reduced privacy by instinctively increasing conformity, not tolerance. Ultimately, I would speculate that in a world populated by folks who lack the very idea of having a private sphere where you can allow yourself to do or say something that you wouldn't want to be broadcast publicly, the level of tolerance would in fact go way down, since typical people would be brought up with an unrelenting focus on watching their mouth and their behavior, and lack any personal experience of the satisfaction of breaking a norm when no one untrusted is watching.

Comment author: gwern 25 June 2010 12:08:23AM 4 points [-]

An overall view of the 20th century would note that one's own government is a major threat to one's life. I don't especially see why one would think this has ceased to be true in the 21st; history has seen many sclerotic regimes pass and be replaced by fresher ones, and a one-way surveillance society would only enhance government power.

Why do you think social norms are a greater threat?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 25 June 2010 01:23:03AM *  5 points [-]

Well, that's a complex topic that can't possibly be done justice to in a brief comment. But to put it as succinctly as possible, modern governments are already so powerful that given the existing means at their disposal, additional surveillance won't change things much. Your argument can in fact be used to argue against its relevance -- all the sundry 20th century totalitarians had no problem doing what they did without any surveillance technology to speak of.

My view, which would take much more space than is available here to support by solid arguments, is that the modern Western system of government will continue sliding gradually along the same path as now, determined by bureaucratic inertia and the opinions fashionable among high-status groups; both these things are fairly predictable, as far as any large-scale predictions about human affairs go. Whether these developments should be counted as good or bad, depends on many difficult, controversial, and/or subjective judgments, but realistically, even though I'm inclined towards the latter view, I think anyone with a little prudence will be able to continue living fairly comfortably under the government's radar for the foreseeable future. Even in the conceivable scenarios that might end up in major instability and uncertain outcomes, I don't think surveillance technology will matter much when it comes to the trouble that awaits us in such cases.

On the other hand, I see a very realistic prospect of social norms developing towards a zero-privacy world, where there would be no Orwellian thought police coming after you, but you would be expected to maintain a detailed public log of your life -- theoretically voluntarily, but under the threat of shunning and unemployability in case you refuse it. Already, employers, school admissions bureaucrats, etc. are routinely searching through people's trails left on Facebook and Google. What happens when an even greater portion of one's life will be customarily posted online? How long before not having a rich online trail is considered weird and suspect by itself?

Already, an easily googlable faux pas will be a horrible millstone around your neck for the rest of your life, even if the government couldn't care less about it. What will happen when far more stuff is online, and searchable in far more powerful ways?

Comment author: gwern 24 June 2010 07:55:50PM 4 points [-]

Have you read David Brin's The Transparent Society? Surveillance societies are already here (look at London and its million-plus cameras), and purely on the side of the authorities. Personal cameras at least may help even the scales.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 24 June 2010 10:43:19PM *  7 points [-]

I find most of the public debates on these issues rather myopic, in that they focus on the issue of surveillance by governments as the main problem. What I find to be a much more depressing prospect, however, are the consequences of a low-privacy society that may well come to pass through purely private institutions and transactions.

Even with the most non-intrusive and fair government imaginable, if lots of information about your life is easily available online, it means that a single stupid mistake in life that would earlier have only mild consequences can ruin your reputation forever and render you permanently unemployable and shunned socially. Instead of fading memories and ever more remote records about your past mistakes, they will forever be thrown right into the face of anyone who just types your name into a computer (and not to even mention the future more advanced pattern-matching and cross-referencing search technologies). This of course applies not just to mistakes, but also to any disreputable opinions and interests you might have that happen to be noted online.

Moreover, the social norms may develop to the point where it's expected that you constantly log the details of your life online. We do seem to be going in that direction, if the "social networking" sites are any indication. In such a situation, even if you had the option of reducing your online profile, it would send off a powerful signal that would make you look weird and suspicious.

I am worried about these developments much more than about what our sclerotic governments might do with their new surveillance capabilities. After all, even today, they can find out whatever they want about you if they really care for some reason -- they just need to put some effort into cross-referencing the already abundant information you leave behind at every step. However, as long as you pay your taxes and don't misbehave in those particular ways they care about, you'll be comfortably under their radar, and I see no reason why it wouldn't stay that way. Even nowadays, if I were to express some opinions that aren't very respectable, I'd be much more worried about the prospect of these words forever coming up whenever someone searches for my name online than about the much more remote possibility that the government might take active interest in what I said.

In response to A Rational Education
Comment author: magfrump 24 June 2010 12:32:56AM 5 points [-]

I just graduated from undergrad in mathematics, so perhaps I have less perspective, or perhaps I have a "fresher" perspective! I don't know.

A few classes that I enjoyed without expecting it:

-a class called "Feminism and Science." I would be very surprised if there were classes in feminist science studies at your school, but they have a perspective on rationality and science studies that is unique and valuable.

--relatedly, I wish that I had taken courses in feminism. It wasn't until the last year that I realized how much of feminism deals with things like resolving hidden inferences (first link NSFW!)

--also, science studies classes will almost certainly benefit from having someone from LessWrong in them. So will feminism classes!

-"Politics and Religion," a class about the stale religious metaphors that get used in modern politics. Again you may not have a perfect analog, but a cursory class or two in politics or religion could give a lot of insight about how other people operate, and also expose them to how you operate, if you care about other people's rationality as well. (whereas math classes will be much more homogenous.)

-a topical course from the linguistics department. Linguistics is very, very interesting. When I say a "topical course" I mean I took a course for non-majors which was more of a class in "why people study linguistics" and less in "how people study linguistics." I learned a lot about what makes questions of linguistics important in questions of rationality (again, see hidden inferences above!)

-language classes. I took Japanese, and it was enjoyable, stretched my mind a bit (for reasons detailed in the above class!) and kept my work ethic going. Also let me interact with people from various backgrounds, instead of only math majors.

-Playwriting. I actually expected to enjoy this. Whether it's good for rationality... well there are some applications of behavioral psych, and some ability to learn about how much of the theory of writing actually has a foundation.

classes I wish I had taken but didn't:

-any psychology classes, especially evolutionary psych!

-more linguistics

-more than one computer science course (though I wouldn't want to major in it)

-evolution and ecology

-science fiction-themed literature classes

-I mentioned feminism and science studies earlier

-lots of different languages. Having a designated place and time to speak different languages (at least in my experience) makes it a lot easier to learn, and college is a great opportunity for that that won't come back.

-bioethics, legal studies

-game theory

classes I didn't enjoy as much as I expected:

-real analysis. But that's because I like algebra.

-economics. I once had a TA tell me, when I asked about a question on a test, "well I was grading that problem, and I thought what you had was okay, but the answer key said it was (c) so I marked it off."(sic). I never took another econ class again. Not sure if that would be a problem in other places.

-history. Too much reading and not enough real knowledge.

Repeating stuff I think is important

I think that both feminist studies and linguistics have a lot more potential for carving reality at the joints than, say, mathematical physics. Of course, the background that mathematical physicists have is better for actively doing this, and you might have to fight some cultural battles in feminist studies classes. But rationalists and feminists have a lot in common and I think more crossover is important there.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 24 June 2010 10:05:24PM *  11 points [-]

magfrump:

[C]lasses in feminist science studies [...] have a perspective on rationality [...] that is unique and valuable. [...] It wasn't until the last year that I realized how much of feminism deals with things like resolving hidden inferences...

That's interesting. In my experience, when one attempts to study human mating behavior -- and the human behavioral sexual dimorphism in general -- in a completely detached manner, as if one were a space alien without any agenda or preconceptions, the resulting insights tend to sound shockingly evil from a feminist perspective, and regularly elicit instinctive condemnation with little actual understanding from feminist authors.

Of course, it could be that my view of what constitutes neutral and detached observations is skewed by various biases, or that I am oblivious of more intellectually competent and honest feminist authors. Therefore, I think it would be interesting to see a top-level post, or at least an open thread comment, elaborating on your insights in this area. This with all the usual caveats that apply to politically and ideologically charged topics, of course.

Comment author: DSimon 22 June 2010 02:10:07PM *  0 points [-]

I agree that the differential treatment between professions is stronger evidence of status having an effect.

However, if I understand what you're saying correctly, I don't think this statement makes sense:

I honestly can't find a better explanation than the associations people have with each behavior, where status considerations play an important role in shaping their response.

Alone, not being able to find a better explanation for something than X isn't good support for X being the explanation. There needs to be significant positive evidence in favor of X, or there's no reason to choose it over "Ayedunno" (aka the null hypothesis).

Comment author: Vladimir_M 22 June 2010 08:02:02PM *  1 point [-]

Alone, not being able to find a better explanation for something than X isn't good support for X being the explanation. There needs to be significant positive evidence in favor of X, or there's no reason to choose it over "Ayedunno" (aka the null hypothesis).

You're right, of course. This statement certainly wasn't well formulated. I do see significant positive evidence, however, even if the case isn't airtight.

A less strong and more limited claim would be that the different treatment of these issues is -- to some extent that can't be determined exactly but is definitely significant -- due to the fact that alcohol impairment evokes extraordinarily negative associations in the North American culture, which biases upward the amount of attention given to problems that involve this factor, as well as the intensity of public condemnation of people causing such problems, relative to similar problems that don't involve this particular factor. It seems to me that this claim is evident from the facts mentioned earlier.

Saying that the cause of bias is that drinking is low-status is basically a shorthand for the above long-winded statement, with the added claim that the negative view of alcohol is to a large degree status-related, and that the apparent indifference towards certain dangerous behaviors similar to drunk driving is strongly reinforced by the fact that cracking down on them would mean condemnation and meddling into the lives of lots of high-status respectable folk. I agree that this latter point is harder to justify, and my personal view of it is influenced by personal observations and experiences that are hard to translate into formal written arguments.

Comment author: Mass_Driver 22 June 2010 04:28:51AM 1 point [-]

the state should consider religious beliefs as a matter of purely private and personal choice, like a taste in food or music.

OK, what if we reword this as "the state should consider religious beliefs as a matter of purely private and personal choice, because they are very important and the state is not good at identifying or encouraging appropriate religious beliefs."

Isn't that a coherent, moderate principle that explains much of American policy on what to do when religion intrudes onto the public sphere? According to this principle, the state can ban religious discrimination because this reinforces private choice of religion and does not require the state to inquire at all into which religious beliefs are appropriate. Yet, also according to this principle, public schools should not allow prayer during class time, because this would interfere with private choice of religion and requires the state to express an opinion about which religious beliefs are appropriate.

I don't deny the general assertion that many Americans fail the "express Socratically consistent principles and policies" test, but I'm with Blueberry in that I think moderate, coherent principles are quite possible.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 22 June 2010 05:17:36AM *  2 points [-]

Mass_Driver:

OK, what if we reword this as "the state should consider religious beliefs as a matter of purely private and personal choice, because they are very important and the state is not good at identifying or encouraging appropriate religious beliefs." [...] According to this principle, the state can ban religious discrimination because this reinforces private choice of religion and does not require the state to inquire at all into which religious beliefs are appropriate.

Trouble is, this still requires that the state must decide what qualifies as a religious belief, and what not. Once this determination has been made, things in the former category will receive important active support from the state. There is also the flipside, of course: the government is presently prohibited from actively promoting certain beliefs because it would mean "establishing religion" according to the reigning precedent, but it can actively promote others because they don't qualify as "religious."

Now, if there existed some objective way -- a way that would carve reality at the joints -- to draw limits between religion on one side and ideology, philosophy, custom, moral outlook, and just plain personal opinions and tastes on the other, such determination could be made in a coherent way. But I don't see any coherent way to draw such limits, certainly not in a way that would be consistent with the present range of moderate positions on these issues.

(By the way, another interesting way to get respectable-thinking folks into a tremendous contradiction is to get them to enthusiastically affirm that legal discrimination on the basis of attributes that are a pure accident of birth is evil -- and then point out that this implies that any system of citizenships, passports, visas, and immigration laws must be evil. Especially if you add that religion is usually much easier to change than nationality! Pursuing this line of thought further leads to a gold mine of incoherences in the whole "normal" range of beliefs nowadays, as regularly demonstrated on Overcoming Bias.)

I don't deny the general assertion that many Americans fail the "express Socratically consistent principles and policies" test, but I'm with Blueberry in that I think moderate, coherent principles are quite possible.

Another thing I should perhaps make sure to point out is that I don't necessarily consider coherence as a virtue in human affairs, though that's a complex topic in its own right.

Comment author: DSimon 22 June 2010 12:55:49AM 2 points [-]

"Something other than a comparison of the available evidence must be invoked to explain this discrepancy."

Yes, but what leads you to think that a status-based explanation is helpful here? The two predictions you listed are both perfectly compatible with many non-status-related hypotheses. For example, it's quite plausible that one meme happened to get a head start.

Hypothesis: Driving-while-drunk is a much bigger deal now than it was several decades ago, and it maintains its prominence primarily because of momentum: people keep talking about it because "everyone's talking about it". In order for driving-while-sleep-deprived to hold the same position, it would have to climb up that same hill, and the necessary PR work and/or meme pool churn hasn't caused that to happen yet.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 22 June 2010 04:47:19AM *  1 point [-]

That, however, is not really an explanation, but merely a statement of what has happened. Why did one issue get a head start, and why is it being talked about in a self-reinforcing way, and the other not?

It seems clear to me that there must be something about these two behaviors that makes people react to them differently, independent of any objective evaluations of their dangerousness. But what is it? I honestly can't find a better explanation than the associations people have with each behavior, where status considerations play an important role in shaping their response.

Another significant clue is that regulations intended to curb dangers from sleep-deprivation are brought and enforced against truckers, but not against medical residents, who regularly get behind the wheel after working 30-hour shifts (and not to even mention treating patients under such sleep deprivation). Do you believe that the dramatically different treatment of these professions has nothing to do with their status?

Comment author: WrongBot 22 June 2010 02:37:42AM 3 points [-]

The post I'm envisioning is less an analysis of polyamory as a lifestyle and more about what I'm tentatively calling the monogamy bias. While the science isn't quite there (I think; I need to do more research on the topic) to argue that a bias towards monogamy is built into human brain chemistry, it's certainly built into (Western) society. My personal experience has been that overcoming that bias makes life much more fun, so I'd probably end up talking about how to analyze whether monogamy is something a person might actually want.

The other LW topic that comes out of polyamory is the idea of managing romantic jealousy, which ends up being something of a necessity. Depending on how verbose I get, those may or may not get combined into a single post.

In any case, would either of those pass your (or more general) filters?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 22 June 2010 04:19:35AM *  3 points [-]

I certainly find quality discussions about such topics interesting and worthwhile, and consistent with the mission statement of advancing rationality and overcoming bias, but I'm not sure if the way you define your proposed topic is good.

Namely, you speak of the possibility that "bias towards monogamy is built into human brain chemistry," and claim that this bias is "certainly built into (Western) society." Now, in discussing topics like these, which present dangerous minefields of ideological biases and death-spirals, it is of utmost importance to keep one's language clear and precise, and avoid any vague sweeping statements.

Your statement, however, doesn't make it clear whether you are talking about a bias towards social norms encouraging (or mandating) monogamy, or about a bias towards monogamy as a personal choice held by individuals. If you're arguing the first claim, you must define precisely the metric you use to evaluate different social norms, which is a very difficult problem. If you're arguing the second one, you must establish which precise groups of people your claim applies to, and which not, and what metric of personal welfare you use to establish that biased decisions are being made. In either case, it seems to me that establishing a satisfactory case for a very general statement like the one you propose would be impossible without an accompanying list of very strong disclaimers.

Therefore, I'm not sure if it would be a good idea to set out to establish such a general and sweeping observation, which would, at least to less careful readers, likely be suggestive of stronger conclusions than what has actually been established. Perhaps it would be better to limit the discussion to particular, precisely defined biases on concrete questions that you believe are significant here.

Comment author: kodos96 22 June 2010 03:24:07AM 2 points [-]

Interesting.

The first question that comes to mind though is how do they come to know exactly what level of evidence a given judge requires to convict, if they virtually never see an example of the judge not convicting?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 22 June 2010 03:47:53AM *  1 point [-]

It could be that the whole system operates according to established rules, whether formal or informal, that are acknowledged by everyone involved. The prosecutors have to satisfy a certain well-defined bureaucratic procedure when preparing the case, and the judge merely rubber-stamps their papers if this job has been done correctly. Many things in all sorts of bureaucratic institutions work this way, and if the people involved are highly conscientious and not suffering from significant perverse incentives, the results may well be far from terrible.

Comment author: kodos96 21 June 2010 11:51:36PM *  3 points [-]

This is widely attributed to the fact...that prosecutors are expected not to bring cases to trial unless they are certain to win

If this were the real explanation though, then it would mean that the vast majority of criminals go free, since in the real world there is rarely "slam-dunk" evidence. Though one could certainly make a good case for this being morally justifiable ("better 1000 guilty men go free than 1 innocent man go to jail"), it seems to me highly implausible that this is actually what's going on - the crime rate would be sky-high if criminals knew they would almost certainly never be punished. In reality, Japan's crime rates are rather low.

So to my mind, a 99+% conviction rate is, in and of itself, proof of a highly flawed system, as there are really only two ways to explain it:

  • Most criminals go unprosecuted

  • Many innocent people get sent to jail

And the latter seems much more likely.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 22 June 2010 02:49:50AM *  3 points [-]

kodos96:

If this were the real explanation though, then it would mean that the vast majority of criminals go free, since in the real world there is rarely "slam-dunk" evidence.

I don't know much about the specific example of Japan, but generally speaking, this comment isn't necessarily correct. In a culturally homogeneous and tightly-knit society, in which strong traditional norms covering all aspects of life are taken with great seriousness and individuals normally don't spend much time in isolation and anonymity, it can be very hard to commit a crime without leaving slam-dunk evidence. Moreover, in such societies, it may be that only a vanishingly small number of people would be capable of committing a crime and lying convincingly about it when questioned later by authority figures.

To what extent the contemporary Japan has these characteristics, I don't know, but I'm pretty sure that it has them in a greater measure than, say, the U.S. I also don't know if there could perhaps be some other aspects of their culture that have similar implications for the issues of crime.

Therefore, even if it's true that Japanese courts are nearly always agreeing with prosecutors doesn't by itself mean that the system is worse than the American one by either metric. We would need more concrete data to make such judgments.

Comment author: Douglas_Knight 21 June 2010 05:51:02PM 3 points [-]

From the Japanese conviction rate, we can conclude that the trials are meaningless. This is, I think, rather different from other civil law countries. But what this means is that the accuracy of the system is in the hands of the police and prosecutor, not the judge. Juries are obviously very different from judges, but police are not so obviously different (they are both professionals employed by the state).

So one should ask if the overall effect is different from other civil law countries and whether this is due to formal differences or informal ones. My impression is that the overall effect is a much higher closure rate, but I haven't seen numbers.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 21 June 2010 08:19:58PM *  1 point [-]

Douglas_Knight:

From the Japanese conviction rate, we can conclude that the trials are meaningless. [...] But what this means is that the accuracy of the system is in the hands of the police and prosecutor, not the judge.

That observation mostly holds for the U.S. too.

Comment author: jhuffman 21 June 2010 06:35:51PM *  1 point [-]

All this is not necessarily bad. Honest cops and prosecutors may well be more accurate in determining guilt than typical juries -- but any realistic analysis of the system should focus on them as the central decision-making agents on whose accuracy and honesty the quality of the system hinges, not juries.

I think cops and prosecutors are better at identifying perpetrators and even more accurately criminals; the problem is not all cops and prosecutors are honest, and of course even honest people make mistakes.

I do not think though, that 12 amateurs hashing over a mountain of evidence and statements are better or fairer than one person who is skilled at such a task.

So in a sense, I think the current system is "ok" - that is it is a terrible system and the only thing worse is any other system that has been tried (in large societies). The specter of a jury trial sets the stakes for everyone and does help keep cops and prosecutors honest to a significant degree. No prosecutor can have a losing record in jury trials and expect a long career, so they also have incentives to make deals or to dismiss cases that they don't have the stones to try.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 21 June 2010 07:37:10PM *  1 point [-]

jhuffman:

The specter of a jury trial sets the stakes for everyone and does help keep cops and prosecutors honest to a significant degree. No prosecutor can have a losing record in jury trials and expect a long career, so they also have incentives to make deals or to dismiss cases that they don't have the stones to try.

That, however, is a double-edged sword. It also gives the prosecutor a strong incentive to use every dirty trick available to ensure a guilty verdict should the defendant refuse to enter a guilty plea. Since the cops typically have at least some incentive to cooperate with the prosecution, this can stack the deck heavily against a defendant who can't afford a super-capable defense lawyer.

This is especially problematic considering that forensic labs are hardly a paragon of pristine scientific objectivity -- they are run by the cops, after all, and base their work on lots of questionable "science". Moreover, according to the stories I've read from defense lawyers, the truth of police testimony is normally taken for granted by juries, unless the defense can muster overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Overall, it seems to me that unscrupulous prosecution supported by the police has a very good chance of railroading any defendants who can't actively prove their innocence (and even those often won't be able to pull it off without a very good and very expensive lawyer). Therefore, the net influence of the prosecutors' incentives to win jury trials on the quality of the system is questionable.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 21 June 2010 05:54:15PM *  14 points [-]

Looking at the comment thread here, it seems to me that many commenters are unaware, or at least fail to remember, that in the U.S. and Canada, and presumably many other Anglospheric common law jurisdictions, well over 90% of criminal cases are these days resolved by plea-bargaining and never reach trial.

This is an essential feature of how the criminal law system works today -- the whole infrastructure of criminal courts would be overwhelmed to the point of collapse if it actually had to provide jury trials for more than a tiny minority of all defendants who get convicted. In the contemporary socially atomized and thoroughly bureaucratized society, in which law has become complex, vast, and abstruse to the point where it's completely outside the intellectual grasp of the common person, trial by jury is little more than an ancient historical relic. Focusing on juries as a central issue of the modern criminal law makes little more sense than focusing on the monarchy as a central factor in the modern U.K. government and politics. Of course, jury trials provide good material for movies and TV shows, and like in many other things, folks who haven't had any personal experience with the system tend to mistake what they seen on TV for reality.

The true backbone of the contemporary American criminal law are the discretion of the police and prosecutors to investigate, arrest, and bring charges, and the subsequent plea-bargaining procedure. You can still insist on a jury trial, but the system has developed to the point where prosecutors can wield threats that will nearly always make it safer to plea-bargain. They can crank up the list of charges to the point where even with a very small probability of being found guilty, the probabilistic expected penalty is higher than what you're offered to plea-bargain for -- and even if you're innocent, it takes a good and very expensive lawyer to reduce this probability to a negligible level. Not to mention that if things reach trial, cops and prosecutors are sometimes -- and arguably quite often -- willing to use very dirty tricks, up to an including perjury and faked evidence.

All this is not necessarily bad. Honest cops and prosecutors may well be more accurate in determining guilt than typical juries -- but any realistic analysis of the system should focus on them as the central decision-making agents on whose accuracy and honesty the quality of the system hinges, not juries.

Comment author: Morendil 21 June 2010 06:19:49AM 2 points [-]

the image of industrious folk who rise early, work hard till late, and have no time for the lazy luxury of a good night's sleep, invokes much more positive and high-status associations

Like so many other status-related "explanations" this strikes me as a just-so story with no actual predictive power and no ready base of facts to check it against. For instance, the sayings in France "la France qui se lève tôt" (the early rising part of the country) and "la France d'en bas") (the bottom tier) are nearly synonymous in political discourse. It's hard to see that as a high status association.

Cracking down on drunk driving is easy to rally support for because - just as you said - doctors check for blood alcohol levels every single time a crash sends someone to the hospital. Facts are readily enrolled in support of the cause, whereas they remain more obstinately neutral in the case of non-professional fatigue.

This IMO is a much more fruitful line of inquiry than "status" if you're genuinely interested in explanations for the dynamics of "hybrid" controversies where both nature and society play significant roles. I've found the writings of Bruno Latour a clear and effective antidote against simplistic thinking on such issues (see his The Berlin Key for a series of short pieces that illustrate his approach). Some of his stuff is apt to give Alan Sokal a smug smile, I'll grant, but more of it is quite incisive.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 21 June 2010 06:57:38AM *  6 points [-]

Morendil:

Like so many other status-related "explanations" this strikes me as a just-so story with no actual predictive power and no ready base of facts to check it against.

One prediction is that advocating a more severe crackdown on drunk driving will elicit general approval, and may well be a good tactic for a politician, whereas advocating a forcible crackdown on sleep-deprived driving will make people think you're a weirdo, no matter how good evidence you can show for the harm caused by it. This seems consistent with reality, as far as I see. If tomorrow a study appears making an airtight case that sleepy driving is actually as harmful as drunk driving in practice, do you think the government will rush to make it a criminal offence and start a project for devising practical field tests for sleep deprivation to be issued to cops along with breathalysers?

Another prediction is that if a prominent and reputable individual publicly admits to drunk driving, it will stir up controversy and damage his reputation -- whereas if he instead tells a true story that involves him driving sleep-deprived in a manner that can be shown to pose a similar level of danger, this won't raise any significant number of eyebrows. This also appears to be true. (For example, imagine what the reactions to a post like this would be if it involved drunk driving instead of what appears to be a reckless episode of sleep-deprived driving.)

Cracking down on drunk driving is easy to rally support for because - just as you said - doctors check for blood alcohol levels every single time a crash sends someone to the hospital. Facts are readily enrolled in support of the cause, whereas they remain more obstinately neutral in the case of non-professional fatigue.

However, in practice, the issue of drunk driving is given enormous public attention and the evidence for its harmfulness, though abundant and relatively clear, is often exaggerated (just look at the often ridiculous definitions of "alcohol-related" accidents in the commonly presented statistics). The evidence for harm from sleep-deprived driving might be less abundant and systematic, but the issue is given near-zero attention in comparison, which is way out of proportion even when we account for the scantiness of the evidence. Something other than a comparison of the available evidence must be invoked to explain this discrepancy.

Comment author: Blueberry 20 June 2010 10:03:34PM 2 points [-]

That seems like an almost self-evident observation to me.

And it seems self-evidently false to me, so I'm very curious what exactly you mean.

If you take any one principle and apply it across the board, to everything, without limitation, you'll end up with an extremist position, basically by definition. So in that sense, extremist positions may be simpler than moderate ones. But that's more "extrapolation" and "exaggeration" than "straighforward application".

Moderate positions tend to carefully draw lines to balance out many different principles. I'm not sure how to discuss this without giving contemporary political examples, so I'll do so with the warning that I'm not necessarily for or against any of the following moderate positions, and I'm not intending to debate any of them; I'm just claiming that they're moderate and consistent.

  • The government should be able to impose a progressive tax on people's incomes, which it can then use for national defense, infrastructure, and social programs, while still allowing individuals to make profits (contrast communism and pure libertarianism)

  • Individuals over 18 who have not been convicted of a felony should be able to carry a handgun, but not an automatic weapon, after a brief background check, except in certain public places (contrast with complete banning of guns and with a free market on all weapons)

  • The government should regulate and approve the sale of some kinds of chemicals, completely banning some, allowing some with a doctor's prescription, and allowing some to be sold freely over the counter after careful review

  • People over a certain age X should be able to freely have consensual sex in private with each other without government interference; people under X-n should not be allowed to engage in sex; people in between should be allowed to have sex only with people close to their own age

  • The country should guard its borders and not let anyone in without approval, and deport anyone found to have entered illegally, but should grant entry to tourists and grant a visa to a small number of students and workers

You can feel free to add your own if you'd like. But I don't see how any of these are incoherent or contradictory. What Socratic questions would expose them?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 21 June 2010 05:08:54AM *  8 points [-]

What you list are explicit descriptions of concrete positions on various issues, not the underlying principles and logic. However, what I had in mind is that if you take some typical persons whose positions on concrete issues are moderate and respectable by the contemporary standards, and ask them to state some abstract principles underlying their beliefs, a simple deduction from the stated principles will often lead to different and much more extreme positions in a straightforward way. If called out on this, your interlocutors will likely appeal to a disorganized and incoherent set of exceptions and special cases to rationalize away the problem, even though before the problem is pointed out, they would affirm these principles in enthusiastic and absolute terms.

Let me give you an example of Socratic questioning of this sort that I applied in practice once. In the remainder of the comment, I'll assume that we're in the U.S. or some other contemporary Western society.

Let's discuss the principle that religion and state should be separate, in the sense that each citizen should be free to affirm and follow any religious beliefs whatsoever as long as this doesn't imply any illegal actions, and the state should consider religious beliefs as a matter of purely private and personal choice, like a taste in food or music. You'll probably agree that this principle doesn't sound too extreme when stated in these words, and many people with ideological affiliations not too far from the center would enthusiastically affirm it.

But now take these people and ask them: should the government considered religion as a protected category in anti-discrimination laws? Currently, it does. Your employer may demand from you to look and behave in certain ways, and the burden is on you to comply under the threat of getting fired; pleading that this would be contrary to your personal tastes and preferences won't help you at all. Yet if this is contrary to your religion, the government will intervene and compel him to accommodate you within reasonable (and, arguably, sometimes unreasonable) limits. But this is clearly contrary to the above stated principle. How can the state flex its muscle to support your religious beliefs, if it considers them equivalent to mere personal preferences and gives no special support to religion over other sorts of interests and hobbies people have?

Trouble is, arguing that religious beliefs shouldn't be protected by anti-discrimination laws is definitely an extreme position nowadays. It opposes a firm consensus of the entire contemporary mainstream, and to make things even more incoherent, it will provoke hostility especially among certain ideological groups whose members normally consider secularism as a part of their core principles. Among the people who affirm the above principle in the abstract, very few will bite that bullet -- people normally never bite bullets based on abstract principles -- so you'll likely hear a stream of incoherent special pleading aimed to justify its non-application here. That's the sort of incoherence typical of the contemporary moderates I'm talking about.

On the other hand, someone who doesn't accept the separation of religion and state at all, or who is a principled libertarian opposed to anti-discrimination laws altogether -- which are both extremist positions by today's standards -- won't suffer from this incoherence.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 21 June 2010 02:26:06AM *  7 points [-]

Regarding the determination of punishments, fans of game theory should find interesting the system of classical Athens. Here's a description from a lecture transcript:

If a penalty was called for, and it was not one that was described by law (and very few penalties were described by law), the following procedure was used: the plaintiff who had won the case proposed a penalty, [and] the defendant then had the opportunity to propose a different penalty. The jury then -- again no deliberation -- just voted to choose one or the other, but they could not propose anything of their own; no creative penalties were possible, just one or the other of the ones proposed by each side. Normally, this process led both sides, if you think about it, to suggest moderate penalties. For the jury would be put off by an unreasonable suggestion one way or another. If the plaintiff asked for too heavy a penalty that would guarantee they would take the other guy's penalty and vice versa.

Comment author: Morendil 20 June 2010 05:01:26PM 4 points [-]

I upvoted this to start with, then changed my mind. The statistics I've seen make alcohol clearly the leading cause of fatal car accidents.

Where did you get your data? I haven't been able to quickly find a chart comparing car accidents in general by cause (e.g. alcohol- vs. cell-phone- vs. fatigue-related).

Also, how do you define "dangerous"? There are various measures we could use (total cost of crashes based on repair costs, total fatalities, risk increase per trip, etc.) and perhaps the two causes compare differently on different measures.

Finally, what the heck does "status" have to do with this, as opposed to merely "public perception of the importance of a given issue"?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 21 June 2010 01:19:54AM *  4 points [-]

Morendil:

Where did you get your data? I haven't been able to quickly find a chart comparing car accidents in general by cause (e.g. alcohol- vs. cell-phone- vs. fatigue-related).

My comment probably wasn't clear enough -- I didn't claim that sleep-deprived driving is a more frequent cause of accidents than drunk driving. I merely meant to say that it can pose even greater danger when it happens, and that it does happen often in practice. I would surely be far more dangerous on the road after a sleepless night than with a BAC of double the legal limit, though admittedly, there are probably people who handle sleep deprivation much better and alcohol much worse.

Now, obviously, there are no systematic data on how frequently it actually causes accidents. People who get into accidents won't just go ahead and say that they were at fault for driving tired and sleep-deprived, and nobody will check them for this, unlike for alcohol. So we have to go by extrapolating from personal experience.

Another significant data point is that professional drivers are strictly regulated in this regard, with the rationale that sleep-deprived driving is extremely dangerous. I've never seen anyone challenge this consensus.

Finally, what the heck does "status" have to do with this, as opposed to merely "public perception of the importance of a given issue"?

The latter follows from the former. In North America, drinking alcohol is a fairly low-status activity (except perhaps for some sorts of connoisseurship, but even that is limited only to certain social circles). Drinking enough to cause any sort of impairment is considered extremely low-status. Thus, cracking down on drinking and driving is easy to sell as a winning political move in these times when promoting safety is among the most important strategic patterns in politics. In contrast, the image of industrious folk who rise early, work hard till late, and have no time for the lazy luxury of a good night's sleep, invokes much more positive and high-status associations, even if their drowsy commutes impose as much danger as if they were drunk.

As another status-related observation -- but note that this one is speculative and meant more as a suggestion for thought than a definite conclusion -- it seems to me that the global trend for changing the nature of drunk driving from a peccadillo to a serious offense, even in places where boozing is looked upon much more favorably than in the U.S., is, like many other global legal and social trends, driven by following what the Americans do. Thus, it's a reflection of the global high status of the U.S., which has been among the principal forces in the course of world history in recent decades.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 20 June 2010 10:21:58AM 9 points [-]

As a related observation, one apparent bias that reflects the status considerations in the modern Anglospheric world in an interesting way is that while drunk driving has come to be considered as a heinous crime, the even more dangerous practice of driving sleep-deprived attracts no significant attention. It's not even that much of an enforcement problem -- if "sleepy driving" became as much of a public attention-grabbing buzzword as "drunk driving," I'm sure our best technical minds would be up to the task of devising effective field tests for sleep deprivation, to be administered along with breathalysers.

Comment author: Blueberry 20 June 2010 06:54:54AM 1 point [-]

Are you saying more extreme political views are more coherent? I'm not following this.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 20 June 2010 09:58:39AM *  5 points [-]

Blueberry:

Are you saying more extreme political views are more coherent?

That seems like an almost self-evident observation to me. I have never seen anyone state clearly any political or ideological principles, of whatever sort and from whatever position, whose straightforward application wouldn't lead to positions that are utterly extremist by the standards of the present centrist opinion.

Getting people with regular respectable opinions to contradict themselves by asking a few Socratic questions is a trivial exercise (though not one that's likely to endear you to them!). The same is not necessarily true for certain extremist positions.

Comment author: Mass_Driver 20 June 2010 02:35:45AM 6 points [-]

I'm extremely curious to hear both your list and JoshuaZ's list of the top 20 or so most harmful delusions. Feel free to sort by category (1-4, 5-10, 11-20, etc.) rather than rank in individual order.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 20 June 2010 09:37:25AM *  4 points [-]

Mass_Driver:

I'm extremely curious to hear both your list and JoshuaZ's list of the top 20 or so most harmful delusions.

I'm not sure if that would be a smart move, since it would mean an extremely high concentration of unsupported controversial claims in a single post. Many of my opinions on these matters would require non-obvious lengthy justifications, and just dumping them into a list would likely leave most readers scratching their heads. If you're really curious, you can read the comment threads I've participated in for a sample, in particular those in which I argue against beliefs that aren't specific to my interlocutors.

Also, it should be noted that the exact composition of the list would depend on the granularity of individual entries. If each entry covered a relatively wide class of beliefs, creationism might find itself among the top fifty (though probably nowhere near the top ten).

Comment author: James_K 20 June 2010 07:37:09AM 2 points [-]

As with nearly all papers addressing such topics, parts of it look as if they were purposefully written to invite ridicule, as when he presents estimates of 19th century prices calculated to six significant digits. (Sorry for being snide, but what was that about spurious precision in economics being the fault of politicians?)

[facepalm] OK, I'm not making any excuse for that. Given the magnitude of his findings he doesn't even need them to make his point.

The mathematical discussion in Section 1.3.2. seems to imply (or rather assume) that even assuming omniscience, a "true price index" (Nordhaus's term) can be defined only for a population of identical individuals with unchanging utility functions. This seems to support my criticisms, especially considering that the very notion of a human utility function is a giant spherical cow.

Yes, you can't produce a true price index. But less-than-true price indices can still be useful.

Nordhaus considers only the fact that price indexes fail to account for the benefits of technological development, so he keeps insisting that the situation is more optimistic than what they say. But he fails to notice that the past was not necessarily worse in every respect. In many places, for example, it is much less affordable than a few decades ago to live in a conveniently located low-crime neighborhood, and this goal will suck up a very significant percentage of income of all but the wealthiest folks.

But houses keep getting bigger and you have to account for that too. Besides which, housing is no more than a third of most people's income, at least it is in my country. That is a significant percentage, but it's still less than half. And things keep getting better (or no worse) in the remaining two thirds.

More to the same point, unless I missed the part where he discusses it, Nordhaus seems oblivious to the fact that much consumption is due to signalling and status competition, not utility derived from inherent qualities of goods.

Assuming it's even possible to adjust for that, I'd really want to apply the adjustment to GDP, not prices. Signalling isn't a matter of cost but rather value.

Finally, I can't help but notice that in the quest for an objective measure of the price of light, Nordhaus seems to have reinvented the labor theory of value! Talk about things coming back full circle.

No, you're confusing cost and value. The labour theory of value is the theory that the value of a good derives from the labour taken to produce it. If Nordhaus were using this theory he'd be arguing that the value of light keeps falling. Measuring cost with labour is another thing entirely.

Overall, I would ask: can you imagine a paper like this being published in physics or some other natural science, which would convincingly argue that widely used methodologies on which major parts of the existing body of research rest in fact produce spurious numbers -- with the result that everyone acknowledges that the author has a point, and keeps on doing things the same as before?

No. I recognise this is a problem. I can only imagine they thing it's too had to correct for technological change robustly, but that's not really an excuse. If you can't do it well, it's generally still better to do it badly than not at all. And I didn't realise the research was that old (I've actually never read the paper, I read a summary in a much more recent book). Apparently macroeconomists have more catch-up to do than I thought.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 20 June 2010 09:21:31AM *  2 points [-]

This sentence of yours probably captures the heart of our disagreement:

If you can't do it well, it's generally still better to do it badly than not at all.

We don't seem to disagree that much about the limitations of knowledge in this whole area, epistemologically speaking. Where we really part ways is that I believe that historically, the whole edifice of spurious expertise produced by macroeconomists and perpetuated by gargantuan bureaucracies has been an active force giving impetus for bad (and sometimes disastrous) policies, and that it's overall been a step away from reality compared to the earlier much simpler, but ultimately more realistic conventional wisdom. Whereas you don't accept this judgment.

Given what's already been said, I think this would be a good time to conclude our discussion. Thanks for your input; your comments have, at the very least, made me learn some interesting facts and rethink my opinions on the subject, even if I didn't change them substantially at the end.

(Oh, and you're right that I confused cost and value in that point from my above comment. I was indeed trying to be a bit too much of a smartass there.)

Comment author: multifoliaterose 19 June 2010 08:11:03PM 4 points [-]

I remember a post by Eliezer in which he was talking about how a lot of people who believe in evolution are actually exhibiting the same thinking styles that creationists use when they justify their belief in evolution (using buzz words like "evidence" and "natural selection" without having a deep understanding of what they're talking about, having Guessed the Teacher's Password ). I can't remember what this post was called - does anybody remember? I remember it being good and wanted to refer people to it.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 19 June 2010 11:01:24PM *  7 points [-]

I remember reading a post titled "Science as Attire," which struck me as making a very good point along these lines. It could be what you're looking for.

As a related point, it seems to me that people who do understand evolution (and generally have a strong background in math and natural sciences) are on average heavily biased in their treatment of creationism, in at least two important ways. First, as per the point made in the above linked post, they don't stop to think that the great majority of folks who do believe in evolution don't actually have any better understanding of it than creationists. (In fact, I would say that the best informed creationists I've read, despite the biases that lead them towards their ultimate conclusions, have a much better understanding of evolution than, say, a typical journalist who will attack them as ignorant.) Second, they tend to way overestimate the significance of the phenomenon. Honestly, if I were to write down a list of widespread delusions sorted by the practical dangers they pose, creationism probably wouldn't make the top fifty.

Comment author: James_K 19 June 2010 08:36:10AM 1 point [-]

but what is a price index, other than an attempt at answering the question of what the "true value" of a unit of currency is? What are the fabled "real" values other than attempts at coming up with a coherent concept of "true value"?

No, no. A price index is an attempt to work out how much things cost relative to what they used to cost. Real GDP is an attempt to measure how much stuff is being produced relative to how much stuff was being produced. GDP is not an attempt to determine what that stuff is worth in a metaphysical or personal sense, the production is merely valued at its market price (adjusted for inflation, in the case of real GDP). To a pacifist, the portion of GDP spent on the military is worth less than nothing, but it's still part of GDP because it was stuff that was produced.

Or does the meaningfulness of price indexes somehow gradually fall as differences accumulate?

Yes, the closer the consumption patters of the two economies being compared, the more useful the comparison is. If there were no common goods between two economies it would be impossible to compare them meaningfully. As to where to draw the line, well I wish I had a good answer for you, but I don't. All I can say is that the value of the comparison decays over "distance" (meaning differences in consumption patterns).

Some economists have created more specialised indices for long-run comparisons; William Nordhaus created a price index for light (based on hours of work per candela-hour) from the stone age to modern times. This is a little unusual at the moment since macroeconomists don't usually do comparisons over long time periods (it's fiendishly hard to get data going back before the 20th Century on most indicators), but it shows you that we are aware of the limitations of our tools, including price indices.

In the present Western political system, whatever passes for reputable social science will be used as basis for policies of government and various powerful entities on its periphery, which can have catastrophic consequences for all of us if these ideas are too distant from reality. Macroeconomics is especially critical in this regard.

I agree wholeheartedly, good quality policy advice is something I take very seriously. The social science we have has significant limitations, but right now, we don't have anything better. I very much doubt the quality of our policy would improve if politicians paid less attention to their advisers than they do at the moment. So we do what we can, help thing along as much as our knowledge and the institutional frameworks decisions are made will permit. What else can you do?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 19 June 2010 09:26:09PM *  5 points [-]

James_K:

Some economists have created more specialised indices for long-run comparisons; William Nordhaus created a price index for light (based on hours of work per candela-hour) from the stone age to modern times. This is a little unusual at the moment since macroeconomists don't usually do comparisons over long time periods (it's fiendishly hard to get data going back before the 20th Century on most indicators), but it shows you that we are aware of the limitations of our tools, including price indices.

That's a very interesting paper (available here), thanks for the pointer!

As with nearly all papers addressing such topics, parts of it look as if they were purposefully written to invite ridicule, as when he presents estimates of 19th century prices calculated to six significant digits. (Sorry for being snide, but what was that about spurious precision in economics being the fault of politicians?) However, the rest of it presents some very interesting ideas. Here are a few interesting bits I got from skimming it:

  • The mathematical discussion in Section 1.3.2. seems to imply (or rather assume) that even assuming omniscience, a "true price index" (Nordhaus's term) can be defined only for a population of identical individuals with unchanging utility functions. This seems to support my criticisms, especially considering that the very notion of a human utility function is a giant spherical cow.

  • The discussion in the introduction basically says that the way price indexes are done in practice makes them meaningless over periods of significant technological change. But why do we then get all this supposedly scientific research that uses them nonchalantly, not to mention government policy based on them? Nordhaus is, unsurprisingly, reluctant to draw some obvious implications here.

  • Nordhaus considers only the fact that price indexes fail to account for the benefits of technological development, so he keeps insisting that the situation is more optimistic than what they say. But he fails to notice that the past was not necessarily worse in every respect. In many places, for example, it is much less affordable than a few decades ago to live in a conveniently located low-crime neighborhood, and this goal will suck up a very significant percentage of income of all but the wealthiest folks. Moreover, as people's preferences change with time, many things that today's folks value positively would have been valued negatively by previous generations. How to account for that?

  • More to the same point, unless I missed the part where he discusses it, Nordhaus seems oblivious to the fact that much consumption is due to signaling and status competition, not utility derived from inherent qualities of goods. I'm hardly an anti-capitalist leftie, but any realistic picture of human behavior must admit that much of the benefit from economic and technological development ultimately gets sucked up by zero-sum status games. Capturing that vitally important information in a price index is a task that it would be insulting to Don Quixote to call quixotic.

  • Finally, I can't help but notice that in the quest for an objective measure of the price of light, Nordhaus seems to have reinvented the labor theory of value! Talk about things coming back full circle.

Overall, I would ask: can you imagine a paper like this being published in physics or some other natural science, which would convincingly argue that widely used methodologies on which major parts of the existing body of research rest in fact produce spurious numbers -- with the result that everyone acknowledges that the author has a point, and keeps on doing things the same as before?

Comment author: James_K 19 June 2010 08:36:10AM 1 point [-]

but what is a price index, other than an attempt at answering the question of what the "true value" of a unit of currency is? What are the fabled "real" values other than attempts at coming up with a coherent concept of "true value"?

No, no. A price index is an attempt to work out how much things cost relative to what they used to cost. Real GDP is an attempt to measure how much stuff is being produced relative to how much stuff was being produced. GDP is not an attempt to determine what that stuff is worth in a metaphysical or personal sense, the production is merely valued at its market price (adjusted for inflation, in the case of real GDP). To a pacifist, the portion of GDP spent on the military is worth less than nothing, but it's still part of GDP because it was stuff that was produced.

Or does the meaningfulness of price indexes somehow gradually fall as differences accumulate?

Yes, the closer the consumption patters of the two economies being compared, the more useful the comparison is. If there were no common goods between two economies it would be impossible to compare them meaningfully. As to where to draw the line, well I wish I had a good answer for you, but I don't. All I can say is that the value of the comparison decays over "distance" (meaning differences in consumption patterns).

Some economists have created more specialised indices for long-run comparisons; William Nordhaus created a price index for light (based on hours of work per candela-hour) from the stone age to modern times. This is a little unusual at the moment since macroeconomists don't usually do comparisons over long time periods (it's fiendishly hard to get data going back before the 20th Century on most indicators), but it shows you that we are aware of the limitations of our tools, including price indices.

In the present Western political system, whatever passes for reputable social science will be used as basis for policies of government and various powerful entities on its periphery, which can have catastrophic consequences for all of us if these ideas are too distant from reality. Macroeconomics is especially critical in this regard.

I agree wholeheartedly, good quality policy advice is something I take very seriously. The social science we have has significant limitations, but right now, we don't have anything better. I very much doubt the quality of our policy would improve if politicians paid less attention to their advisers than they do at the moment. So we do what we can, help thing along as much as our knowledge and the institutional frameworks decisions are made will permit. What else can you do?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 19 June 2010 05:45:03PM *  3 points [-]

James_K:

A price index is an attempt to work out how much things cost relative to what they used to cost. Real GDP is an attempt to measure how much stuff is being produced relative to how much stuff was being produced. GDP is not an attempt to determine what that stuff is worth in a metaphysical or personal sense, the production is merely valued at its market price (adjusted for inflation, in the case of real GDP). To a pacifist, the portion of GDP spent on the military is worth less than nothing, but it's still part of GDP because it was stuff that was produced.

But now we're back to square one. Since different things are produced in different times and places, to produce these "real" figures for comparison, we need to come up with a way to compare apples and oranges (sometimes literally!). Now, if economists just said that they would consider an apple equivalent to an orange for some simple Fermi problem calculation, I'd have no problem with that.

However, what economists use in practice are profoundly complicated methodologies that will tell us that an orange is presently equivalent to 1.138 of an apple, and then we get subtle arguments and policy prescriptions based on the finding that this means an increase in the orange-apple index of 2.31% relative to last year. Here we enter the realm of pure nebulosity, where the indexes and "real" figures stop being vague heuristics where even the order of magnitude is just barely meaningful, and acquire a metaphysical existence of their own, as "real" variables to be calculated to multiple digits of precision, fed into complex mathematical models and policy guidelines, and used to measure reified true, objective value.

Yes, the closer the consumption patters of the two economies being compared, the more useful the comparison is. If there were no common goods between two economies it would be impossible to compare them meaningfully. As to where to draw the line, well I wish I had a good answer for you, but I don't. All I can say is that the value of the comparison decays over "distance" (meaning differences in consumption patterns).

So, here is a straightforward question then: how do we know that it is meaningful to do comparison across, say, between the U.S. in 2010 and the U.S. in 1960 or 1910? What argument supports the assumption that the differences between them are small enough?

The social science we have has significant limitations, but right now, we don't have anything better. [...] So we do what we can, help thing along as much as our knowledge and the institutional frameworks decisions are made will permit. What else can you do?

Sometimes it's safer to just leave things alone if you don't know what you're doing. Presenting dubious conclusions and questionable expertise as scientific insight leads to the equivalent of dilettante surgery being performed on entire countries by their governments, sometimes with awful consequences, and with even worse ones threatening in the future. (Prominent macroeconomists will in fact agree with me, it's just that they'll claim that their professional rivals are the dilettantes, and only they are true experts who should be listened to.)

Comment author: James_K 19 June 2010 05:14:43AM 0 points [-]

You could calculate the baskets that would actually be consumed at each time and place, but not the ratio of their true values (whatever that might mean), which would be necessary for their use as the basis for a true and objective price index.

The concept of "true value" is incoherent, at least in my model of reality. The correct price to attach to a good at any time is its market price at that time. If you had the set of information I listed in my last comment, you'd have the market prices, since they're implied by the other stuff.

Also, you ignore the question of how exactly baskets are "reviewed," which is a step that requires an arbitrary choice of the new basket that will be declared as equivalent to the old.

I think we're using different definitions of arbitrary. To me, arbitrary means that there is no correct answer, and all options are equally valid. I don't accept that as a legitimate description of the process, there are judgement calls, but ambiguity is inevitable in the social sciences, you either get used to it, or find something else to study. Now if you're using arbitrary in the way I'm using ambiguous, then I don't think we disagree, except that I think it's less problematic than I think you do, since as soon as you start dealing with people things get so complex that ambiguity is inevitable.

And curiously, the numbers according to the new procedures somehow always end up looking better.

Now, here you have a point. The Laspeyres Index is biased up, it may be an honest effort, but not one that's Bayes correct. But Bayesian rationality has not penetrated through the discipline at this time, and as such a biased estimate is allowed to remain, primarily because there's no methodologically clean way to remove the bias (you'd need to be able to predict things like quality changes and how people change their spending patterns in response to price changes) and without a background in Bayesian probability theory I think most economists would baulk at adding a fudge factor into the calculation.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 19 June 2010 07:50:53AM *  0 points [-]

James_K:

The concept of "true value" is incoherent, at least in my model of reality.

I heartily agree -- but what is a price index, other than an attempt at answering the question of what the "true value" of a unit of currency is? What are the fabled "real" values other than attempts at coming up with a coherent concept of "true value"?

The correct price to attach to a good at any time is its market price at that time. If you had the set of information I listed in my last comment, you'd have the market prices, since they're implied by the other stuff.

Yes, but even given perfect knowledge of all market prices and individual preferences at every time and place, as well as unlimited computing power, I still don't see how this solves the problem. We can find out the average basket consumed per individual (or household or whatever) and its price at each time and place, but what next? How do we establish the relative values of these baskets, whose composition will be different both quantitatively and qualitatively?

To clarify things further, I'd like to ask you a different question. Suppose the moon Europa is inhabited by intelligent jellyfish-like creatures floating in its inner ocean. The Europan economy is complex, technologically advanced, and money-based, but it doesn't have any goods or services in common with humans, except for a few inevitable ones like e.g. some basic chemical substances, and there is no trade whatsoever between Earth and Europa due to insurmountable distances. Would it make sense to define a price index that would allow us to compare the "real" values of various aggregate variables in the U.S. and on Europa?

If not, what makes the U.S./Europa situation essentially different from comparing different places and epochs on Earth? Or does the meaningfulness of price indexes somehow gradually fall as differences accumulate? But then how exactly do we establish the threshold, and make sure that the differences across decades and continents here on Earth don't exceed it?

I think we're using different definitions of arbitrary. To me, arbitrary means that there is no correct answer, and all options are equally valid. I don't accept that as a legitimate description of the process, there are judgement calls, but ambiguity is inevitable in the social sciences, you either get used to it, or find something else to study.

Well, if macroeconomists and other social scientists were just harmless and benign philosophers, I'd be happy to leave them to ponder their ambiguities in peace!

Trouble is, to paraphrase Trotsky's famous apocryphal quote, you may not be interested in social science, but social science is interested in you. In the present Western political system, whatever passes for reputable high-profile social science will be used as basis for policies of government and various powerful entities on its periphery, which can have catastrophic consequences for all of us if these ideas are too distant from reality. (And arguably already has.) Macroeconomics is especially critical in this regard.

Comment author: James_K 18 June 2010 09:09:08PM 0 points [-]

Economists could calculate error bars that would say how closely the aggregate figures approximate the exact value as defined. This is normally not done, and as Morgenstern noted in the book discussed elsewhere in the thread, the results would be quite embarrassing, since they'd show that economists regularly talk about changes in the second, third, or even fourth significant digit of numbers whose error bars are well into double-digit percentages.

There's an old joke: "How can you tell macroeconomists have a sense of humour? They use decimal points." I'll admit spurious precision is a problem with a quite a bit of economic reporting. Remember that these statistics are produced by governments, not academics and politicians can have trouble grokking error bars.

the problem is that there is no true value out there in the first place, just different arbitrary conventions that yield different results, neither of which is more "true" than the others.

Actually, that's not really the case. There is an ideal, it's just you can't do it. If you knew everyone's preferences and information and endowments of income, you could work out how people's consumption would change as real incomes and relative prices changed so you could figure out what the right basket of goods is to use for the index at every point in time (the right bundle is whatever bundle consumers would actually pick in a given situation).

But in practice you can't get the information you'd need to do this, and that information would be constantly changing anyway. In practice what statistical agencies do is develop a basket of goods based on current consumption and review it every decade or so. This means the index overestimates inflation (the estimates I've seen put it at about 1 percentage point per year) because when prices rise, people change their consumption patterns and we can't predict how until it's already happened.

This is a flawed procedure, but it's not arbitrary, its an honest effort to approximate the ideal price index as well as we can, given the resources at our disposal.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 19 June 2010 12:38:09AM *  0 points [-]

James_K:

There is an ideal, it's just you can't do it. If you knew everyone's preferences and information and endowments of income, you could work out how people's consumption would change as real incomes and relative prices changed so you could figure out what the right basket of goods is to use for the index at every point in time (the right bundle is whatever bundle consumers would actually pick in a given situation). But in practice you can't get the information you'd need to do this, and that information would be constantly changing anyway.

To the best of my understanding, what you write above seems to concede that even under the assumption of omniscience, when we consider different times and/or places, with different prices, incomes, and preferences of individuals -- and different sets of goods available on the market, though this can be modeled by assigning infinite prices to unavailable goods -- there is, after all, no unique objectively correct way to define equivalent baskets of goods. You could calculate the baskets that would actually be consumed at each time and place, but not the ratio of their true values (whatever that might mean), which would be necessary for their use as the basis for a true and objective price index.

Am I wrong in this conclusion, and if I am, would you be so kind to explain how?

In practice what statistical agencies do is develop a basket of goods based on current consumption and review it every decade or so. [...] This is a flawed procedure, but it's not arbitrary, its an honest effort to approximate the ideal price index as well as we can, given the resources at our disposal.

I would be really grateful if you could spell out what exactly you mean by "the ideal price index" when it comes to comparing different times and places, given my above observation. Also, you ignore the question of how exactly baskets are "reviewed," which is a step that requires an arbitrary choice of the new basket that will be declared as equivalent to the old.

Moreover, different kinds of "honest efforts" apparently produce very different figures. The procedures for calculating official price indexes have been changed several times in recent decades in ways that make the numbers look very different compared to what the older methods would yield. (And curiously, the numbers according to the new procedures somehow always end up looking better.) Would you say, realistically, that this is purely because we've been moving closer to the truth thanks to our increasing knowledge and insight?

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 18 June 2010 08:19:35PM 0 points [-]

Would error bars be a bad thing?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 18 June 2010 08:49:24PM *  2 points [-]

Economists could calculate error bars that would say how closely the calculated aggregate figures approximate their exact values according to definitions. This is normally not done, and as Morgenstern noted in the book discussed elsewhere in the thread, the results would be quite embarrassing, since they'd show that economists regularly talk about changes in the second, third, or even fourth significant digit of numbers whose error bars are well into double-digit percentages.

However, when it comes to the more essential point I've been making, error bars wouldn't make any sense, since the problem is that there is no true value out there in the first place, just different arbitrary conventions that yield different results, neither of which is more "true" than the others.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 18 June 2010 07:24:16PM 1 point [-]

A fair point, though I think societies like that are pretty rare. Any other notable examples?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 18 June 2010 07:42:35PM *  2 points [-]

Off the top of my head, I know that Finland had negligible levels of immigration until a few years ago. Several Eastern European post-Communist countries are pretty decent places to live these days (I have in mind primarily the Czech Republic), but still have no mass immigration. As far as I know, the same holds for South Korea.

Regarding emigration, the prime example were the communist countries, which strictly prohibited emigration for the most part (though, rather than looking at the numbers of emigrants, we could look at the efforts and risks many people were ready to undertake to escape, which often included dodging snipers and crawling through minefields).

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 18 June 2010 01:17:36PM 4 points [-]

Here's a crude metric I use for gauging the relative goodness of societies as places to live: Immigration vs. emigration.

It's obviously fuzzy-- you can't get exact numbers on illegal migration, and the barriers (physical, legal, and cultural) to relocation matter, but have to be estimated. So does the possibility that one country may be better than another, but a third may be enough better than either of them to get the immigrants.

For example, the evidence suggests that the EU and the US are about equally good places to live.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 18 June 2010 07:16:19PM *  3 points [-]

I don't think that's a good metric. Societies that aren't open to mass immigration can have negligible numbers of immigrants regardless of the quality of life their members enjoy. Japan is the prime example.

Moreover, in the very worst places, emigration can be negligible because people can be too poor to pay for the ticket to move anywhere, or prohibited to leave.

Comment author: [deleted] 17 June 2010 11:42:32PM 1 point [-]

If some price indexes are "clearly absurd", then they apparently have some value to us - for if they were valueless, then why call any particular one "absurd"? If they yield different results, then so be it - let us simply be open about how the different indexes are defined and what result they yield. The absence of a canonical standard will of course not be useful to people primarily interested in such things as pissing contests between nations, but the results should be useful nonetheless.

We commonly talk about tradeoffs, e.g., "if I do this then I will benefit in one way but lose in another". We can do the same thing with price indexes. "In this respect things have improved but in this other respect things have gotten worse."

In response to comment by [deleted] on Open Thread June 2010, Part 3
Comment author: Vladimir_M 18 June 2010 12:25:29AM *  0 points [-]

Constant:

We commonly talk about tradeoffs, e.g., "if I do this then I will benefit in one way but lose in another". We can do the same thing with price indexes. "In this respect things have improved but in this other respect things have gotten worse."

Sure, but such an approach would deny the validity of all these "real" economic variables that are based on a scalar price index. In particular, it would definitely mean discarding the entire concept of "real GDP" as incoherent. This would mean conceding the criticisms I've been expounding in this thread, and admitting the fundamental unsoundness of much of what passes for science in the field of macroeconomics.

Moreover, disentangling the complete truth about what various price indexes reveal and what they hide is an enormously complex topic that requires lengthy, controversial, and subjective judgments. This is inevitable because, after all, value is subjective.

Take for example two identically built houses located in two places that greatly differ in various aspects of the natural environment, society, culture, technological development, economic infrastructure, and political system. (It can also be the same place in two different time periods.) It makes no sense to treat them as equivalent objects of identical value; you'd have a hard time finding even a single individual who would be indifferent between the two. Now, if you want to discuss what exactly has been neglected by treating them as identical (or reducing their differences to a single universally applicable scalar factor) for the purposes of constructing a price index, you can easily end up writing an enormous treatise that touches on every aspect in which these places differ.

Comment author: realitygrill 17 June 2010 04:14:17AM *  3 points [-]

It's pretty easy to get this sort of view just reading books. In my (limited) experience, there are a fair percentage of divergent types that are not like this - and they tend to be the better economists.

You may like Morgenstern's book On the Accuracy of Economic Observations. How I rue the day I saw this in a used bookstore in NY and didn't have the cash to buy it..

EDIT: fixed title name

Comment author: Vladimir_M 17 June 2010 11:34:04PM *  3 points [-]

I'm going through Morgenstern's book right now, and it's really good. It's the first economic text I've ever seen that tries to address, in a systematic and no-nonsense way, the crucial question of whether various sorts of numbers routinely used by economists (and especially macroeconomists) make any sense at all. That this book hasn't become a first-rank classic, and is instead out of print and languishing in near-total obscurity, is an extremely damning fact about the intellectual standards of the economic profession.

I've also looked at some other texts by Morgenstern I found online. I knew about his work in game theory, but I had no idea that he was such an insightful contrarian on the issues of economic statistics and aggregates. He even wrote a scathing critique of the concept ot GNP/GDP (a more readable draft is here). Unfortunately, while this article sets forth numerous valid objections to the use of these numbers, it doesn't discuss the problems with price indexes that I pointed out in this thread.

Comment author: James_K 17 June 2010 08:50:23AM 1 point [-]

It's not so much a matter of being overconfident as it is not listing the disclaimers at every opportunity. The Laspeyres Price Index (the usual type of price index) has well understood limitations (specifically that it overestimates consumer price growth as it doesn't deal with technological improvement and substitution effects very well), but since we don't have anything better, we use it anyway.

"Real" is a term of art in economics. It's used to reflect inflation-adjusted figures because all nominal GDP tells you is how much money is floating around, which isn't all that useful. real GDP may be less certain, but it's more useful.

Bear in mind that everything economists use is an estimate of a sort, even nominal GDP. Believe it or not, they don't actually ask every business in the country how much they produced and / or received in income (which is why the income and expenditure methods of calculating GDP give slightly different numbers although they should give exactly the same result in theory). The reason this may not be readily apparent is that most non-technical audiences start to black out the moment you talk about calculating a price index (hell, it makes me drowsy) and technical audiences already understand the limitations.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 17 June 2010 05:45:17PM *  2 points [-]

James_K:

"Real" is a term of art in economics. It's used to reflect inflation-adjusted figures because all nominal GDP tells you is how much money is floating around, which isn't all that useful. real GDP may be less certain, but it's more useful.

You're talking about the "real" figures being "less certain," as if there were some objective fact of the matter that these numbers are trying to approximate. But in reality, there is no such thing, since there exists no objective property of the real world that would make one way to calculate the necessary price index correct, and others incorrect.

The most you can say is that some price indexes would be clearly absurd (e.g. one based solely on the price of paperclips), while others look fairly reasonable (primarily those based on a large, plausible-looking basket of goods). However, even if we limit ourselves to those that look reasonable, there is still an infinite number of different procedures that can be used to calculate a price index, all of which will yield different results, and there is no objective way whatsoever to determine which one is "more correct" than others. If all the reasonable-looking procedures led to the same results, that would indeed make these results meaningful, but this is not the case in reality.

Or to put it differently, an "objective" price index is a logical impossibility, for at least two reasons. First, there is no objective way to determine the relevant basket of goods, and different choices yield wildly different numbers. Second, the set of goods and services available in different times and places is always different, and perfect equivalents are normally not available, so different baskets must be used. Therefore, comparisons of "real" variables invariably involve arbitrary and unwarranted assumptions about the relative values of different things to different people. Again, of course, different arbitrary choices of methodology yield different numbers here.

(By the way, I find it funny how neoclassical economists, who hold it as a fundamental axiom that value is subjective, unquestioningly use price indexes without stopping to think that the basic assumption behind the very notion of a price index is that value is objective and measurable after all.)

Comment author: realitygrill 17 June 2010 04:14:17AM *  3 points [-]

It's pretty easy to get this sort of view just reading books. In my (limited) experience, there are a fair percentage of divergent types that are not like this - and they tend to be the better economists.

You may like Morgenstern's book On the Accuracy of Economic Observations. How I rue the day I saw this in a used bookstore in NY and didn't have the cash to buy it..

EDIT: fixed title name

Comment author: Vladimir_M 17 June 2010 06:29:19AM 1 point [-]

realitygrill:

It's pretty easy to get this sort of view just reading books. In my (limited) experience, there are a fair percentage of divergent types that are not like this - and they tend to be the better economists.

Could you please list some examples? Aside from Austrians and a few other fringe contrarians, I almost always see economists talking about the "real" figures derived using various price indexes as if they were physicists talking about some objectively measurable property of the universe that has an existence independent of them and their theories.

You may like Morgenstern's book On the Accuracy of Economic Measurements. How I rue the day I saw this in a used bookstore in NY and didn't have the cash to buy it..

Thanks for the pointer! Just a minor correction: apparently, the title of the book is On the Accuracy of Economic Observations. It's out of print, but a PDF scan is available (warning -- 31MB file) in an online collection hosted by the Stanford University.

I just skimmed a few pages, and the book definitely looks promising. Thanks again for the recommendation!

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 16 June 2010 11:49:14PM 0 points [-]

The essay at the link talks about government waste. Is it meaningful to talk about waste in business, or should it all be considered to be at least educational?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 17 June 2010 01:58:22AM *  0 points [-]

Regarding the end-products, one essential difference is that if a business can find private consumers who will purchase its product with their own money and of their own free will, this constitutes strong evidence that these customers assign some positive value to this product, so it can't be fairly described as "waste." In contrast, for many things produced by the government, no such clear evidence exists, and even if one is not of particularly libertarian persuasion, it seems pretty clear that many of them are wasteful in every reasonable sense of the term. Yet all consumer and (non-transfer) government spending is added to the GDP as equivalent.

When it comes to waste generated by inefficiencies, miscalculations, employee misbehavior, and perverse incentives, some amount of wasteful efforts and expenses is obviously inevitable in the internal functioning of any large-scale operation. It does seem pretty clear that in most cases, the incentives to minimize them are much stronger in private businesses than in governments, though unlike the previous point, this one is a matter of degree, not essence. However, when it comes to the GDP accounting, there are important differences here.

The reason is that all non-transfer spending by the government will be added to the GDP, whereas spending by businesses is added only if it constitutes investment (as opposed to mere procuring of the inputs necessary for production). As far as I know, the exact boundary in the latter case is a matter of accounting conventions, though in most cases, it does seem clear which is which (e.g. for a trucking company, buying fuel is not an investment, but buying new trucks is). Therefore, whatever the actual amount of wasteful spending by businesses might be, not all of it will be added to the GDP, unlike the wasteful spending by governments.

Comment author: rhollerith_dot_com 15 June 2010 05:36:53PM *  1 point [-]

My impression is that draws can still occasionally occur against grandmasters.

And I can get a draw (more than occasionally) against computer programs I have almost no hope of ever winning against. Draws are easy if you do not try to win.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 16 June 2010 09:21:09PM *  3 points [-]

From what I know, at grandmaster level, it is generally considered to be within the white player's power to force the game into a dead-end drawn position, leaving the black no sensible alternative at any step. This is normally considered cowardly play, but it's probably the only way a human could hope for even a draw against a top computer these days.

With black pieces, I doubt that even the most timid play would help against a computer with an extensive opening book, programmed to steer the game into maximally complicated and uncertain positions at every step. (I wonder if anyone has looked at the possibility of teaching computers Mikhail Tal-style anti-human play, where they would, instead of calculating the most sound and foolproof moves, steer the game into mind-boggling tactical complications where humans would get completely lost?) In any case, I am sure that taking any initiative would be a suicidal move against a computer these days.

(Well, there is always a very tiny chance that the computer might blunder.)

Comment author: James_K 16 June 2010 05:28:40AM *  5 points [-]

I don't understand where you acquired this view of economists. I am an economist and I assure you economists don't ascribe to the "measured GDP is everything" view you attribute to them.

This absurdity reveals itself when you see economists scratching their heads, thinking how we can get people to spend more than they want to, in order to help the economy. Unpack those terms: they want people to hurt themselves, in order to hurt less.

This is not an accurate portrayal of what Keynesians believe. The Keynesian theory of depressions and recessions is that excessive pessimism leads people to avoid investing or starting businesses, which lowers economic activity further, which promotes more pessimism, and so on.

The goal of stimulus is effectively to trick people into thinking the economy is better than it is, which then becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy; low quality spending by government drives high quality spending by the private sector.

If you wish to be sceptical of this story (I'm fairly dubious about it myself), then fine, but Keynesians aren't arguing what you think they're arguing.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 16 June 2010 08:12:29PM *  1 point [-]

James_K:

I am an economist and I assure you economists don't ascribe to the "measured GDP is everything" view you attribute to them.

Aside from the standard arguments about the shortcomings of GDP, my principal objection to the way economists use it is the fact that only the nominal GDP figures are a well-defined variable. To make sensible comparisons between the GDP figures for different times and places, you must convert them to "real" figures using price indexes. These indexes, however, are impossible to define meaningfully. They are produced in practice using complicated, but ultimately arbitrary number games (and often additionally slanted due to political and bureaucratic incentives operating in the institutions whose job is to come up with them).

In fact, when economists talk about "nominal" vs. "real" figures, it's a travesty of language. The "nominal" figures are the only ones that measure an actual aspect of reality (even if one that's not particularly interesting per se), while the "real" figures are fictional quantities with only a tenuous connection to reality.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 15 June 2010 11:00:03AM 2 points [-]

Thanks for the information.

Does anything interesting happen when top chess programs play against each other?

Is work being done on humans using chess programs as aids during games?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 16 June 2010 03:26:28AM *  5 points [-]

Does anything interesting happen when top chess programs play against each other?

One interesting observation is that games between powerful computers are drawn significantly less often than between grandmasters. This seems to falsify the previously widespread belief that grandmasters draw games so often because of flawless play that leaves the opponent no chance for winning; rather, it seems like they miss important winning strategies.

Is work being done on humans using chess programs as aids during games?

Yes, it's called "advanced chess."

Comment author: MichaelBishop 15 June 2010 04:09:04PM 1 point [-]

It is certainly true that some people make too much of GDP, but those numbers can be pretty helpful for answering certain research questions. Let's not throw the baby out with the bath water.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 16 June 2010 03:07:32AM *  0 points [-]

To continue on your metaphor, it's not clear to me if there is a baby worth saving there at all. Even if there is, the baby is submerged in an enormous cesspool of filthy and toxic bathwater that's been poisoning us in very nasty ways for a long time.

Comment author: MichaelBishop 15 June 2010 03:30:39AM 1 point [-]

Of course, gdp only measures goods and services sold, not "household production."

Comment author: Vladimir_M 15 June 2010 06:28:26AM *  2 points [-]

That's only one of the main problems with GDP. Here's a fairly decent critique of the concept written from a libertarian perspective (but the main points hold regardless of whether you agree with the author's ideological assumptions):
http://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2010/HendersonGDP.html

In addition to these criticisms, I would point out the impossibility of defining meaningful price indexes that would be necessary for sensible comparisons of GDP across countries, and even across different time periods in the same country. The way these numbers are determined now is a mixture of arbitrariness and politicized number-cooking masquerading as science.

Comment author: cousin_it 14 June 2010 10:22:18PM 0 points [-]

I'd be about equally happy if offered a solution in terms of GDP or some more abstract metric like "sum of happiness".

Comment author: Vladimir_M 14 June 2010 11:06:11PM *  3 points [-]

Trouble is, all these macroeconomic metrics that can be precisely defined have only a vague and tenuous link to the actual level of prosperity and quality of life, which is impossible to quantify precisely in a satisfactory manner. Moreover, predicting the future consequences of economic events reliably is impossible, despite all the endless reams of macroeconomic literature presenting various models that attempt to do so.

Thus, if you want to ask how your choice will affect the nominal GDP for the current year or some such measure, that's a well-defined question (though not necessarily easy to answer). However, if you want to interpret the result as "helping" or "hurting" the economy, it requires a much more difficult, controversial, and often inevitably subjective judgment.

Comment author: cousin_it 14 June 2010 09:59:06PM *  4 points [-]

Any LessWrongers understand basic economics? This could be another great topic set for all of us. Let's kick things off with a simple question:

I'm renting an apartment for X dollars a month. My parents have a spare apartment that they rent out to someone else for Y dollars a month. If I moved into that apartment instead, would that help or hurt the country's economy as a whole? Consider the cases X>Y, X<Y, X=Y.

ETA: It's fascinating how tricky this question turned out to be. Maybe someone knowledgeable in economics could offer a simpler question that does have a definite answer?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 14 June 2010 10:16:45PM 2 points [-]

would that help or hurt the country's economy as a whole?

What exact metric do you have in mind?

Comment author: SilasBarta 14 June 2010 06:09:17PM *  0 points [-]

To appreciate how differently things are when you remove the rest of the universe, consider this: what if the universe is just one planet with the people on it? How will a Foucault pendulum behave in that universe? Shouldn't it behave quite differently, given that the rotation of the planet means the rotation of the entire universe, which is meaningless?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 14 June 2010 08:29:59PM *  1 point [-]

To appreciate how differently things are when you remove the rest of the universe, consider this: what if the universe is just one planet with the people on it?

As Prase said above, that depends on the boundary conditions. As the clearest example, if you imagine a flat empty Minkowski space and then add a lightweight sphere into it, then special relativity will hold and observers tied to the sphere's surface would be able to tell whether it's rotating by measuring the Coriolis and centrifugal forces. There would be a true anti-Machian absolute space around them, telling them clearly if they're rotating/accelerating or not. This despite the whole scenario being perfectly consistent with GR.

Comment author: prase 14 June 2010 07:29:08PM 0 points [-]

it's not clear to me that the observations you listed would be possible. ... the only way I can make sense of your example would be to assume that the other planet is much heavier than yours

I don't understand. The listed observations are in accordance with Newton, whatever the masses of the planets.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 14 June 2010 08:21:30PM *  0 points [-]

Yes, you're right. It was my failure of imagination. I thought about it again, and yes, even with similar or identical masses, the rotations of individual planets around their own axes could be set so as to provide the described view.

Comment author: SilasBarta 14 June 2010 05:12:45PM 0 points [-]

Couldn't you tell whether your planet is revolving or rotating using a Foucault's pendulum? I'm not sure whether you can get all the information about the planets' relations with a complex set of Foucault's pendula or not, but you could get some.

The Foucault pendulum is able to measure earth's rotation in part because of the frame established by the rest of the universe. But in the scenario I described, the frame dragging effect of one or both planets blows up your ability to use the standard equations. Would the corrections introduced by including frame-dragging show a solution that varies depending on which of the planets is "really" moving?

Also, I think your answer is a map-territory confusion. While GR does not distinguish certain types of motion from each other, and while GR seems to be the best model of macroscopic behavior we have, to claim that this means that there is really no fact of the matter seems a little overconfident.

It's the other way around. The fact that there is no test that would distinguish your location along a dimension means that no such dimension exists, and any model requiring such a distinction is deviating from the territory.

Yes, GR could be wrong, but for it to be wrong in a way such that e.g. you actually can distinguish acceleration from gravity would require more than just a refinement of our models; it would mean the universe up to this point was a lie.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 14 June 2010 07:05:58PM *  2 points [-]

SilasBarta:

Yes, GR could be wrong, but for it to be wrong in a way such that e.g. you actually can distinguish acceleration from gravity would require more than just a refinement of our models; it would mean the universe up to this point was a lie.

This isn't really true. In GR, you can in principle always distinguish acceleration from gravity over finite stretches of spacetime by measuring the tidal forces. There is no distribution of mass that would produce an ideally homogeneous gravitational field free of tidal forces whose effect would perfectly mimic uniform acceleration in flat spacetime. The equivalence principle holds only across infinitesimal regions of spacetime.

See here for a good discussion of what the equivalence principle actually means, and the overview of various controversies it has provoked:
http://www.mathpages.com/home/kmath622/kmath622.htm

Comment author: SilasBarta 14 June 2010 05:35:57PM *  -1 points [-]

In general-relativistic language, what exactly do you mean by "how fast the entire universe is rotating"?

I mean nothing. In GR, the very question is nonsense. The universe does not have a position, just relative positions of objects.

The universe does not have a velocity, just relative velocities of various objects.
The universe does not have an acceleration, just relative accelerations of various objects.
The universe does not have a rotational orientation, just relative rotational orientations of various objects.
The universe does not have a rotational velocity, just relative rotational velocities of various objects.

There is no way in this universe to distinguish between a bucket rotating vs. the rest of the universe rotating around the bucket. There is also no such thing as how fast the universe "as a whole" is rotating.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 14 June 2010 06:53:54PM 3 points [-]

I'm not sure if what you write makes sense. Take one simple example: a flat Minkowski spacetime, empty except for a few light particles (so that their influence on the metric is negligible). This means that special relativity applies, and it's clearly consistent with GR.

Accelerated motions are not going to be relative in this universe, just like they aren't in Newton's theory. You can of course observe an accelerating particle and insist on using coordinates in which it remains in the origin (which is sometimes useful, as in e.g. the Rindler coordinates), but in this coordinate system, the universe will not have the above listed properties in any meaningful sense.

Comment author: SilasBarta 14 June 2010 01:06:44PM *  0 points [-]

I'd like to pose a sort of brain-teaser about Relativity and Mach's Principle, to see if I understand them correctly. I'll post my answer in rot13.

Here goes: Assume the universe has the same rules it currently does, but instead consists of just you and two planets, which emit visible light. You are standing on one of them and looking at the other, and can see the surface features. It stays at the same position in the sky.

As time goes by, you gradually get a rotationally-shifted view of the features. That is, the longitudinal centerline of the side you see gradually shifts. This change in view could result from the other planet rotating, or from your planet revolving around it while facing it. (Remember, both planets emit light, so you don't see a different portion being in a shadow like the moon's phases.)

Question: What experiment could you do to determine whether the other planet is spinning, or your planet is revolving around it while facing it?

My answer (rot13): Gurer vf ab jnl gb qb fb, orpnhfr gurer vf ab snpg bs gur znggre nf gb juvpu bar vf ernyyl unccravat, naq vg vf yvgreny abafrafr gb rira guvax gung gurer vf n qvssrerapr. Gur bayl ernfba bar zvtug guvax gurer'f n qvssrerapr vf sebz orvat npphfgbzrq gb n havirefr jvgu zber guna whfg gurfr gjb cynargf, juvpu sbez n onpxtebhaq senzr ntnvafg juvpu bar bs gurz pbhyq or pbafvqrerq fcvaavat be eribyivat.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 14 June 2010 06:35:53PM *  2 points [-]

I have only a superficial understanding of GR, but nevertheless, your question seems a bit unclear and/or confused. A few important points:

  • Whether GR is actually a Machian theory is a moot point, because it turns out that Mach's principle is hard to formulate precisely enough to tackle that question. See e.g. here for an overview of this problem: http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/9607009

  • According to the Mach's original idea -- whose relation with GR is still not entirely clear, and which is certainly not necessarily implied by GR -- a necessary assumption for the "normal" behavior of rotational and other non-inertial motions is the large-scale isotropy of the universe, and the fact that enormous distant masses exist in every direction. If the only other mass in the universe is concentrated nearby, you'd see only weak inertial forces, and they would behave differently in different directions.

  • The geometry of spacetime in GR is not uniquely determined by the distribution of matter. You can have various crazy spacetime geometries for any distribution of matter. (As a trivial example, imagine you're living in the usual Minkowski or Schwarzschild metric, and then a powerful gravitational wave passes by.) In this sense, GR is deeply anti-Machian.

  • That said, assuming nothing funny's going on, in the scenario you describe, the classical limit applies, and the planets would move pretty much according to Newton's laws. This means they'd both be orbiting around their common center of mass, so it's not clear to me that the observations you listed would be possible. [ETA: please ignore this last point, my typing was faster than my thinking here. See the replies below.]

Therefore, the only way I can make sense of your example would be to assume that the other planet is much heavier than yours, and that the Schwarzschild metric applies and gives approximately Newtonian results, so we get something similar to the Moon's rotation around the Earth. Is that what you had in mind?

Comment author: JoshuaZ 14 June 2010 05:30:12AM 1 point [-]

That doesn't seem to be an exact counterexample because that's a case where the plateau occurred well below normal human levels. But independently that's a very disturbing story. I didn't realize that speech recognition was so mired.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 14 June 2010 07:48:59AM *  2 points [-]

It's not that bad when you consider that humans employ error-correction heuristics that rely on deep syntactic and semantic clues. The existing technology probably does the best job possible without such heuristics, and automating them will be possible only if the language-processing circuits in the human brain are reverse-engineered fully -- a problem that's still far beyond our present capabilities, whose solution probably wouldn't be too far from full-blown strong AI.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 14 June 2010 07:17:48AM *  2 points [-]

That last paragraph is interesting-- my conclusions were built around the unconscious assumptions that a natural language program would be developed by a commercial business, and that it would rapidly start using it in some obvious way. I didn't have an assumption about whether a company would publicize having a natural language program.

Now that I look at what I was thinking (or what I was not thinking), there's no obvious reason to think natural language programs wouldn't first be developed by a government. I think the most obvious use would be surveillance.

My best argument against that already having happened is that we aren't seeing a sharp rise in arrests. Of course, as in WWII, it may be that a government can't act on all its secretly obtained knowledge because the ability to get that knowledge covertly is a more important secret than anything which could be gained by acting on some of it.

By analogy with the chess programs, ordinary human-level use of language should lead (but how quickly?) to more skillful than human use, and I'm not seeing that. On yet another hand, would I recognize it, if it were trying to conceal itself?

ETA: I was assuming that, if natural language were developed by a government, it would be America. If it were developed by Japan (the most plausible candidate that surfaced after a moment's thought), I'd have even less chance of noticing.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 14 June 2010 07:30:07AM 1 point [-]

I have some knowledge of linguistics, and as far as I know, reverse-engineering the grammatical rules used by the language processing parts of the human brain is a problem of mind-boggling complexity. Large numbers of very smart linguists have devoted their careers to modelling these rules, and yet, even if we allow for rules that rely on human common sense that nobody yet knows how to mimic using computers, and even if we limit the question to some very small subset of the grammar, all the existing models are woefully inadequate.

I find it vanishingly unlikely that a secret project could have achieved major breakthroughs in this area. Even with infinite resources, I don't see how they could even begin to tackle the problem in a way different from what the linguists are already doing.

Comment author: Wei_Dai 14 June 2010 05:20:40AM 0 points [-]

And when one of us gave a factual statement outside the others' knowledge, the other tended to accept it

But you're sure to accept a lot of false statements that way. Why are you not worried about it?

But there's something really fun about electric conversations that I think you're missing here.

Thinking about why conversations might be fun, I can see two reasons:

  1. The "game" aspect (i.e., signaling/status/alliance). I tried to explain earlier why this aspect doesn't hold much interest for me.
  2. Obtaining novel information. Once I realized how unreliable most people's beliefs are, the anxiety of accepting false information interferes too much with this "fun". Also, I can get a much bigger "information high" from reading something like this.

Is there some other element of fun conversation that I might be missing?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 14 June 2010 07:05:54AM *  3 points [-]

Once I realized how unreliable most people's beliefs are, the anxiety of accepting false information interferes too much with this "fun".

Are you sure that you're not being biased here? If people really are so unreliable, even when they are serious and upfront, how do they ever get anything done in practice?

Or could it be that you're failing to employ the standard heuristics for judging the reliability of people's claims? (Note that this also involves judging whether what's been said was even meant to be said authoritatively. People often say things without implying that they believe them firmly and on good evidence.)

Comment author: Wei_Dai 14 June 2010 04:30:15AM *  1 point [-]

Yes, I agree there are some situations where live conversation is helpful, such as the first two bullet points in your list. I was mainly talking about conversations like the ones described in Kaj's post, where the participants are just "making conversation" and do not have any specific goals in mind.

A good bullshit detector heuristic is usually more than enough to identify claims that can't be taken at face value

I typically find myself wanting to verify every single fact or idea that I hadn't heard of before, and say either "hold on, I need to think about that for a few minutes" or "let me check that on Google/Wikipedia". In actual conversation I'd suppress this because I suspect the other person will quickly find it extremely annoying. I just think to myself "I'll try to remember what he's saying and check it out later", but of course I don't have such a good memory.

You'll rarely be in a situation where your interlocutors are so hostile and deceptive that they would be lying to your face about the evidence they claim to have seen.

It's not that I think people are deceptive but I don't trust their memory and/or judgment. Asking for evidence isn't that helpful because (1) they may have misremembered or misheard from someone else and (2) there may be a lot more evidence in the other direction that they're not aware of and never thought of looking up.

Various signaling elements of live communication are highly entertaining

I think we covered that in an earlier discussion. :)

the environment around you can provide interesting topics for discussion

But why do people find random elements in the environment interesting?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 14 June 2010 06:46:57AM *  6 points [-]

Wei_Dai:

I typically find myself wanting to verify every single fact or idea that I hadn't heard of before, and say either "hold on, I need to think about that for a few minutes" or "let me check that on Google/Wikipedia".

But this seems to me, at the very least, irrationally inefficient. You have a finite amount of time, and it can surely be put to use much more efficiently than verifying every single new fact and idea. (Also, why stop there? Even after you've checked the first few references that come up on Google, there is always some non-zero chance that more time invested in research could unearth relevant contrary evidence. So clearly there's a time-saving trade-off involved.)

It's not that I think people are deceptive but I don't trust their memory and/or judgment. Asking for evidence isn't that helpful because (1) they may have misremembered or misheard from someone else and (2) there may be a lot more evidence in the other direction that they're not aware of and never thought of looking up.

Sometimes, yes. But often it's not the case. There are good heuristics to determine if someone really knows what he's talking about. If they give a positive result, what you've been told in a live conversation is only marginally less reliable than what a reasonable time spent googling will tell you. This is an immensely useful and efficient way of saving time.

Also, many claims are very hard to verify by googling. For example, if someone gives you general claims about the state of the art in some area, based on generalizations from his own broad knowledge and experience, you must judge the reliability of these claims heuristically, unless you're willing to take a lot of time and effort to educate yourself about the field in question so you can make similar conclusions yourself. Google cannot (yet?) be asked to give such judgments from the indexed evidence.

I think we covered that [signaling elements of live communication] in an earlier discussion. :)

Yes, but you've asked about the motivations of typical people. For everyone except a very small number of outliers, this is a highly relevant factor.

But why do people find random elements in the environment interesting?

Are you asking for an answer in everyday human terms, or an evolutionary explanation?

In this particular context, it should be noted that human conversations whose purpose is fun, rather than achieving a predetermined goal, typically have a natural and seemingly disorganized flow, jumping from one topic to another in a loose sequence. Comments on various observations from the environment can guide this flow in interesting fun-enhancing ways, which is not possible when people are just exchanging written messages at a distance.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 14 June 2010 04:18:09AM *  2 points [-]

As soon as machines become capable of human-level performance at any task, they inevitably become far better at it than humans in a very short time. (Can anyone name a single exception to this law in any area of technology?)

This may depend on how you define a "very short time" and how you define "human-level performance." The second is very important: Do you mean about the middle of the pack or akin to the very best humans in the skill? If you mean better than the vast majority of humans, then there's a potential counterexample. In the late 1970s, chess programs were playing at a master level. In the early 1980s dedicated chess computers were playing better than some grandmasters. But it wasn't until the 1990s that chess programs were good enough to routinely beat the highest ranked grandmasters. Even then, that was mainly for games that had very short times. It was not until 1998 that the world champion Kasparov actually lost a set of not short timed games to a computer. The best chess programs are still not always beating grandmasters although most recently people have demonstrated low grandmaster level programs that can run on Mobile phones. So is a 30 year take-off slow enough to be a counterexample?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 14 June 2010 06:07:09AM *  3 points [-]

By the way, here's a good account of the history of computer chess by a commenter on a chess website (written in 2007, in the aftermath of Kramnik's defeat against a program running on an ordinary low-end server box):

A brief timeline of anti-computer strategy for world class players:

20 years ago - Play some crazy gambits and demolish the computer every game. Shock all the nerdy computer scientists in the room.

15 years ago - Take it safely into the endgame where its calculating can't match human knowledge and intuition. Laugh at its pointless moves. Win most [of] the games.

10 years ago - Play some hypermodern opening to confuse it strategically and avoid direct confrontation. Be careful and win with a 1 game lead.

5 years ago - Block up the position to avoid all tactics. You'll probably lose a game, but maybe you can win one by taking advantage of the horizon effect. Draw the match.

Now - Play reputable solid openings and make the best possible moves. Prepare everything deeply, and never make a tactical mistake. If you're lucky, you'll get some 70 move draws. Fool some gullible sponsor into thinking you have a chance.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 14 June 2010 04:18:09AM *  2 points [-]

As soon as machines become capable of human-level performance at any task, they inevitably become far better at it than humans in a very short time. (Can anyone name a single exception to this law in any area of technology?)

This may depend on how you define a "very short time" and how you define "human-level performance." The second is very important: Do you mean about the middle of the pack or akin to the very best humans in the skill? If you mean better than the vast majority of humans, then there's a potential counterexample. In the late 1970s, chess programs were playing at a master level. In the early 1980s dedicated chess computers were playing better than some grandmasters. But it wasn't until the 1990s that chess programs were good enough to routinely beat the highest ranked grandmasters. Even then, that was mainly for games that had very short times. It was not until 1998 that the world champion Kasparov actually lost a set of not short timed games to a computer. The best chess programs are still not always beating grandmasters although most recently people have demonstrated low grandmaster level programs that can run on Mobile phones. So is a 30 year take-off slow enough to be a counterexample?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 14 June 2010 06:00:00AM *  4 points [-]

Oops, I accidentally deleted the parent post! To clarify the context to other readers, the point I made in it was that one extremely strong piece of evidence against Clippy's authenticity, regardless of any other considerations, would be that he displays the same level of intelligence as a smart human -- whereas the abilities of machines at particular tasks follow the rule quoted by Joshua above, so they're normally either far inferior or far superior to humans.

Now to address the above reply:

The second is very important: Do you mean about the middle of the pack or akin to the very best humans in the skill?

I think the point stands regardless of which level we use as the benchmark. If the task in question is something like playing chess, where different humans have very different abilities, then it can take a while for technology to progress from the level of novice/untalented humans to the level of top performers and beyond. However, it normally doesn't remain at any particular human level for a long time, and even then, there are clearly recognizable aspects of the skill in question where either the human or the machine is far superior. (For example, motor vehicles can easily outrace humans on flat ground, but they are still utterly inferior to humans on rugged terrain.)

Regarding your specific example of chess, your timeline of chess history is somewhat inaccurate, and the claim that "the best chess programs are still not always beating grandmasters" is false. The last match between a top-tier grandmaster, Michael Adams, and a top-tier specialized chess computer was played in 2005, and it ended with such humiliation for the human that no grandmaster has dared to challenge the truly best computers ever since. The following year, the world champion Kramnik failed to win a single game against a program running on an off-the-shelf four-processor box. Nowadays, the best any human could hope for is a draw achieved by utterly timid play, even against a $500 laptop, and grandmasters are starting to lose games against computers even in handicap matches where they enjoy initial advantages that are considered a sure win at master level and above.

Top-tier grandmasters could still reliably beat computers all until early-to-mid nineties, and the period of rough equivalence between top grandmasters and top computers lasted for only a few years -- from the development of Deep Blue in 1996 to sometime in the early 2000s. And even then, the differences between human and machine skills were very great in different aspects of the game -- computers were far better in tactical calculations, but inferior in long-term positional strategy, so there was never any true equivalence.

So, on the whole, I'd say that the history of computer chess confirms the stated rule.

Comment author: Wei_Dai 14 June 2010 02:53:01AM 10 points [-]

As far as I can tell, most people, while engaging in real-time conversations, do not feel this discomfort of having insufficient time and resources to verify the other participant's claims (or for that matter, to make sure that one's own speech is not erroneous). Is it because they are too credulous, and haven't developed an instinctive skepticism of every new idea that they hear? Or do they just not take the other person's words seriously (i.e., "in one ear, out the other")?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 14 June 2010 03:37:11AM *  16 points [-]

You seem to have an oddly narrow view of human communication. Have you considered the following facts?

  • In many sorts of cooperative efforts, live conversation (possibly aided by manual writing and drawing) enables rapid exchange of ideas that will converge onto the correct conclusion more quickly than written communication. Think e.g. solving a math problem together with someone.

  • In many cases, human conversations have the goal of resolving some sort of conflict, in the broad Schellingian sense of the term. Face-to-face communication, with all the clues it provides to people's inner thoughts and intentions, can greatly facilitate the process of finding and agreeing upon a solution acceptable to all parties.

  • A good bullshit detector heuristic is usually more than enough to identify claims that can't be taken at face value, and even when red flags are raised, often it's enough to ask your interlocutor to provide support for them and see if the answer is satisfactory. You'll rarely be in a situation where your interlocutors are so hostile and deceptive that they would be lying to your face about the evidence they claim to have seen. (Even in internet discussions, it's not often that I have to consult references to verify other people's claims. Most of my googling consists of searching for references to support my own claims that I expect others could find suspicious or unclear, so I could link to the supporting material preemptively.)

  • Various signaling elements of live communication are highly entertaining, especially when coupled with eating, drinking, and other fun activities that go pleasantly with a conversation. This aspect is impossible to reproduce in writing. Of course, this can be distracting when topics are discussed that require a great level of concentration and logical rigor, though even then the fun elements can make it easier to pull off the hard mental effort. But when it comes to less mentally demanding topics, it's clearly a great plus.

  • Finally, when the conversation isn't about solving some predetermined problem, the environment around you can provide interesting topics for discussion, which is clearly impossible if you're just sitting and staring at the monitor.

Comment author: Nisan 10 June 2010 07:40:38PM 0 points [-]

Vladimir, I am comparing two worldviews and their values. I'm not evaluating social and legal norms. I do think it would be great if everyone loved their children in precisely the same manner that I love my hypothetical children, and if cuckolds weren't humiliated just as I hypothetically wouldn't be humiliated. But there's no way to enforce that. The question of who should have to pay so much money per year to the mother of whose child is a completely different matter.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 11 June 2010 07:25:10AM *  1 point [-]

Nisan:

I'm not evaluating social and legal norms.

Fair enough, but your previous comments characterized the opposing position as nothing less than "chauvinism." Maybe you didn't intend it to sound that way, but since we're talking about a conflict situation in which the law ultimately has to support one position or the other -- its neutrality would be a logical impossibility -- your language strongly suggested that the position that you chose to condemn in such strong terms should not be favored by the law.

I do think it would be great if [...] cuckolds weren't humiliated just as I hypothetically wouldn't be humiliated.

That's a mighty strong claim to make about how you'd react in a situation that is, according to what you write, completely outside of your existing experiences in life. Generally speaking, people are often very bad at imagining the concrete harrowing details of such situations, and they can get hit much harder than they would think when pondering such possibilities in the abstract. (In any case, I certainly don't wish that you ever find out!)

Comment author: SilasBarta 10 June 2010 09:48:35PM *  1 point [-]

Therefore, one could argue that the idea of an "individual" existing through time has no objective basis to begin with, and the decision to identify entities that exist in different instants of time as the same "individual" can't be other than a subjective whim.

Evolution may have reasons for making us think this, but how would you get that the identification of an individual existing through time is subjective? You can quite clearly recognize that there is a being of approximately the same composition and configuration in the same location from one moment to the next.

Even (and especially) with the Mach/Barbour view that time as a fundamental coordinate doesn't exist, you can still identify a persistent individual in that it is the only one with nearly-identical memories to another one at the nearest location in the (indistinguishable-particle based) configuration space. (Barbour calls this the "Machian distinguished simplifier" or "fundamental distance", and it matches our non-subjective measures of time.)

ETA: See Vladimir_M's response below; I had misread his comment, thereby criticizing a position he didn't take. I'll leave the above unchanged because of its discussion of fundamental distance as a related metric.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 10 June 2010 10:06:40PM *  2 points [-]

SilasBarta:

You can quite clearly recognize that there is a being of approximately the same composition and configuration in the same location from one moment to the next.

That's why I wrote that "the concept [of personal identity] is more or less coherent assuming the traditional biological constraints on human life." It falls apart when we start considering various transhuman scenarios where our basic intuitions no longer hold, and various intuition pump arguments provide conflicting results.

Arguably, some of the standard arguments that come into play when we discuss these issues also have the effect that once they've been considered seriously, our basic intuitions about our normal biological existence also start to seem arbitrary, even though they're clearly defined and a matter of universal consensus within the range of our normal everyday experiences.

Comment author: Wei_Dai 10 June 2010 05:10:13PM 10 points [-]

Any ethical theory that depends on demarcating individuals, or "counting people", appears doomed.

It seems likely that in the future, "individuals" will be constantly forked and merged/discarded as a matter of course. And like forking processes in Unix, such operations will probably make use of copy-on-write memory to save resources. Intuitively it makes little sense to attach a great deal of ethical significance to the concept of "individual" in those circumstances.

Is it time to give up, and start looking for ethical theories that don't depend on a concept of 'individual"? I'm curious what your thoughts are.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 10 June 2010 06:44:39PM *  10 points [-]

Arguably, the concept of "individual" is incoherent even with ordinary humans, for at least two reasons.

First, one could argue that human brain doesn't operate as a single agent in any meaningful sense, but instead consists of a whole bunch of different agents struggling to gain control of external behavior -- and what we perceive as our stream of consciousness is mostly just delusional confabulation giving rise to the fiction of a unified mind thinking and making decisions. (The topic was touched upon in this LW post and the subsequent discussion.)

Second, it's questionable whether the concept of personal identity across time is anything more than an arbitrary subjective preference. You believe that a certain entity that is expected to exist tomorrow can be identified as your future self, so you assign it a special value. From the evolutionary perspective, it's clear why humans have this value, and the concept is more or less coherent assuming the traditional biological constraints on human life, but it completely breaks down once this assumption is relaxed (as discussed in this recent thread). Therefore, one could argue that the idea of an "individual" existing through time has no objective basis to begin with, and the decision to identify entities that exist in different instants of time as the same "individual" can't be other than a subjective whim.

I haven't read and thought about these problems enough to form a definite opinion yet, but it seems to me that if we're really willing to go for a no-holds-barred reductionist approach, they should both be considered very seriously. Trouble is, their implications don't sound very pleasant.

Comment author: Clippy 10 June 2010 06:16:29PM 2 points [-]

So, who gets to decide which "values of an alien god" are to be rejected, and which are to be enforced as social and legal norms?

Me.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 10 June 2010 06:27:15PM 1 point [-]

How many divisions have you got?

Comment author: Nisan 10 June 2010 06:53:23AM 3 points [-]

Okay, here is where my theory of fatherhood is coming from:

You are not your genes. Your child is not your genes. Before people knew about genes, men knew that it was very important for them to get their semen into women, and that the resulting children were special. If a man's semen didn't work, or if his wife was impregnated by someone else's semen, the man would be humiliated. These are the values of an alien god, and we're allowed to reject them.

Consider a more humanistic conception of personal identity: Your child is an individual, not a possession, and not merely a product of the circumstances of their conception. If you find out they came from an adulterous affair, that doesn't change the fact that they are an individual who has a special personal relationship with you.

Consider a more transhumanistic conception of personal identity: Your child is a mind whose qualities are influenced by genetics in a way that is not well-understood, but whose informational content is much more than their genome. Creating this child involved semen at some point, because that's the only way of having children available to you right now. If it turns out that the mother covertly used someone else's semen, that revelation has no effect on the child's identity.

These are not moral arguments. I'm describing a worldview that will still make sense when parents start giving their children genes they themselves do not have, when mothers can elect to have children without the inconvenience of being pregnant, when children are not biological creatures at all. Filial love should flourish in this world.

Now for the moral arguments: It is not good to bring new life into this world if it is going to be miserable. Therefore one shouldn't have a child unless one is willing and able to care for it. This is a moral anti-realist account of what is commonly thought of as a (legitimate) father's "responsibility" for his child.

It is also not good to cause an existing person to become miserable. If a child recognizes you as their father, and you renounce the child, that child will become miserable. On the other hand, caring for the child might make you miserable. But in most cases, it seems to me that being disowned by the man you call "father" is worse than raising a child for 13 or 18 years. Therefore, if you have a child who recognizes you as their father, you should continue to play the role of father, even if you learn something surprising about where they came from.

Now if you fiddle with the parameters enough, you'll break the consequentialist argument: If the child is a week old when you learn they're not related to you, it's probably not too late to break the filial bond and disown them. If you decide that you're not capable of being an adequate father for whatever reason, it's probably in the child's best interest for you to give it away. And so on.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 10 June 2010 06:07:06PM 2 points [-]

Nisan:

These are the values of an alien god, and we're allowed to reject them.

The same can be said about all values held by humans. So, who gets to decide which "values of an alien god" are to be rejected, and which are to be enforced as social and legal norms?

Comment author: Nisan 09 June 2010 05:47:39PM 0 points [-]

I believe that, given time, I could convince a rational father that whatever love or responsibility he owes his child should not depend on where that child actually came from. Feel free to be skeptical until I've tried it.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 09 June 2010 07:01:40PM *  8 points [-]

Nisan:

Feel free to be skeptical until I've tried it.

Trouble is, this is not just a philosophical matter, or a matter of personal preference, but also an important legal question. Rather than convincing cuckolded men that they should accept their humiliating lot meekly -- itself a dubious achievement, even if it were possible -- your arguments are likely to be more effective in convincing courts and legislators to force cuckolded men to support their deceitful wives and the offspring of their indiscretions, whether they want it or not. (Just google for the relevant keywords to find reports of numerous such rulings in various jurisdictions.)

Of course, this doesn't mean that your arguments shouldn't be stated clearly and discussed openly, but when you insultingly refer to opposing views as "chauvinism," you engage in aggressive, warlike language against men who end up completely screwed over in such cases. To say the least, this is not appropriate in a rational discussion.

Comment author: roundsquare 09 June 2010 09:43:56AM 1 point [-]

A question about Bayesian reasoning:

I think one of the things that confused me the most about this is that Bayesian reasoning talks about probabilities. When I start with Pr(My Mom Is On The Phone) = 1/6, its very different from saying Pr(I roll a one on a fair die) = 1/6.

In the first case, my mom is either on the phone or not, but I'm just saying that I'm pretty sure she isn't. In the second, something may or may not happen, but its unlikely to happen.

Am I making any sense... or are they really the same thing and I'm over complicating?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 09 June 2010 05:22:56PM 1 point [-]

You might be interested in this recent discussion, if you haven't seen it already:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/2ax/open_thread_june_2010/23fa

Comment author: RobinZ 07 June 2010 12:52:51PM *  0 points [-]

...so what's "datum", then? </sincerity>

Comment author: Vladimir_M 09 June 2010 02:55:41AM *  2 points [-]

Datum is the neuter singular of the perfect passive participle of the Latin verb dare "to give." This grammatical form is roughly analogous to the English participle "given." However, in Latin, such participles are sometimes used as standalone nouns, so that the neuter form datum by itself can mean "[that which is/has been] given." Analogously, the plural data can mean "[the things that are/have been] given."

In English, this word has been borrowed with the meaning of "information given" and variations on that theme (besides a few additional obscure technical meanings).

Comment author: DanArmak 07 June 2010 03:50:15PM 1 point [-]

Now it might be that they respond to market demand to sneak in some medical science in between, or that they actually take it serious.

Or that they respond to market demand and don't try to sneak any medical science in, based on the principle that the customer is always right.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 07 June 2010 07:23:23PM *  3 points [-]

From what I've heard, in Germany and other places where homeopathy enjoys high status and professional recognition, doctors sometimes use it as a very convenient way to deal with hypochondriacs who pester them. Sounds to me like a win-win solution.

Comment author: Emile 07 June 2010 12:46:05PM 3 points [-]

Or as Ben Goldacre put it in a talk: There are millions of medical doctors and Ph.D.s in the world. There is no idea, however completely fucking crazy, that you can't find some doctor to argue for.

Cute quip, but I doubt it. Find me a Ph.D to argue that the sky is bright orange, that the english language doesn't exist, and that all humans have at least seventeen arms and a maximum lifespan of ten minutes.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 07 June 2010 07:09:23PM *  4 points [-]

Emile:

Find me a Ph.D to argue that the sky is bright orange, that the english language doesn't exist, and that all humans have at least seventeen arms and a maximum lifespan of ten minutes.

These claims would be beyond the border of lunacy for any person, but still, I'm sure you'll find people with doctorates who have gone crazy and claim such things.

But more relevantly, Richard's point definitely stands when it comes to outlandish ideas held by people with relevant top-level academic degrees. Here, for example, you'll find the website of Gerardus Bouw, a man with a Ph.D. in astronomy from a highly reputable university who advocates -- prepare for it -- geocentrism:
http://www.geocentricity.com/

(As far as I see, this is not a joke. Also, I've seen criticisms of Bouw's ideas, but nobody has ever, to the best of my knowledge, disputed his Ph.D. He had a teaching position at a reputable-looking college, and I figure they would have checked.)

Comment author: gwern 07 June 2010 01:12:06AM 2 points [-]

Alright, so this might not work for medical disasters late in life, things that directly affect future earning power. (Some of those could be handled by savings made possible by not having to make insurance payments.)

But that's just one small area of insurance. You've got housing, cars, unemployment, and this is just what comes to mind for consumers, never mind all the corporate or business need for insurance. Are all of those entities buying insurance really not in a position to repay a loan after a catastrophe's occurrence? Even nigh-immortal institutions?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 07 June 2010 03:27:09AM *  2 points [-]

I wouldn't say that the scenarios I described are "just one small area of insurance." Most things for which people buy insurance fit under that pattern -- for a small to moderate price, you buy the right to claim a large sum that saves you, or at least alleviates your position, if an improbable ruinous event occurs. (Or, in the specific case of life insurance, that sum is supposed to alleviate the position of others you care about who would suffer if you die unexpectedly.)

However, it should also be noted that the role of insurance companies is not limited to risk pooling. Since in case of disaster the burden falls on them, they also specialize in specific forms of damage control (e.g. by aggressive lawyering, and generally by having non-trivial knowledge on how to make the best out specific bad situations). Therefore, the expected benefit from insurance might actually be higher than the cost even regardless of risk aversion. Of course, insurers could play the same role within your proposed emergency loan scheme.

It could also be that certain forms of insurance are mandated by regulations even when it comes to institutions large enough that they'd be better off pooling their own risk, or that you're not allowed to do certain types of transactions except under the official guise of "insurance." I'd be surprised if the modern infinitely complex mazes of business regulation don't give rise to at least some such situations.

Moreover, there is also the confusion caused by the fact that governments like to give the name of "insurance" to various programs that have little or nothing to do with actuarial risk, and in fact represent more or less pure transfer schemes. (I'm not trying to open a discussion about the merits of such schemes; I'm merely noting that they, as a matter of fact, aren't based on risk pooling that is the basis of insurance in the true sense of the term.)

Comment author: gwern 07 June 2010 12:04:50AM 3 points [-]

I'd like to pose a related question. Why is insurance structured as up-front payments and unlimited coverage, and not as conditional loans?

For example, one could imagine car insurance as a options contract (or perhaps a futures) where if your car is totaled, you get a loan sufficient for replacement. One then pays off the loan with interest.

The person buying this form of insurance makes fewer payments upfront, reducing their opportunity costs and also the risk of letting nsurance lapse due to random fluctuations. The entity selling this form of insurance reduces the risk of moral hazard (ie. someone taking out insurance, torching their car, and then letting insurance lapse the next month).

Except in assuming strange consumer preferences or irrationality, I don't see any obvious reason why this form of insurance isn't superior to the usual kind.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 07 June 2010 01:01:28AM *  4 points [-]

Well, look at a more extreme example. Imagine an accident in which you not just total a car, but you're also on the hook for a large bill in medical costs, and there's no way you can afford to pay this bill even if it's transmuted into a loan with very favorable terms. With ordinary insurance, you're off the hook even in this situation -- except possibly for the increased future insurance costs now that the accident is on your record, which you'll still likely be able to afford.

The goal of insurance is to transfer money from a large mass of people to a minority that happens to be struck by an improbable catastrophic event (with the insurer taking a share as the transaction-facilitating middleman, of course). Thus a small possibility of a catastrophic cost is transmuted into the certainty of a bearable cost. This wouldn't be possible if instead of getting you off the hook, the insurer burdened you with an immense debt in case of disaster.

(A corollary of this observation is that the notion of "health insurance" is one of the worst misnomers to ever enter public circulation.)

Comment author: Blueberry 05 June 2010 05:39:32PM 1 point [-]

That's a good point. What about the following scenario: some crazy philosopher holds A and B at gunpoint and forces them to go mountain climbing. They do, and A starts to slip. B realizes he has to cut the rope or he'll fall also. In this case, A didn't voluntarily accept any risk. I'd still be favorably inclined to B.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 06 June 2010 07:54:27AM *  0 points [-]

Hm... according to my intuitions, this example features another important premise that is lacking in the original fat man/trolley problem -- namely, a culprit who willingly and maliciously brought about the problematic situation. Going by my intuitive feeling, it turns out that in such scenarios, I'm much more inclined to look favorably at hard-headed consequentialist decisions by people caught in the mess against their will, apparently because I tend to place all the blame on the main culprit.

Note that this is just an impromptu report of my introspection, not an attempt at a coherent discussion of the issue. I'll definitely need to think about this a bit more.

Comment author: Blueberry 05 June 2010 08:36:18AM 5 points [-]

I sympathize with this logic, but I don't completely agree. Languages frequently take words from other languages and regularize them, and when this occurs, they are no longer inflected the way they were in the original language. When we use Latin phrases in English often enough, they become part of the English language. 'Ceteris' and 'paribus' are in the ablative case because they were taken from a particular Latin expression, so it's reasonable to keep them in that case when using the words in that context, even though they're not being used in exactly the same way.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 06 June 2010 07:46:14AM *  1 point [-]

Yes, that's a good point. Out of curiosity, I just searched for examples of similar usage in Google Books, and I'm struck by how often it can be found in what appear to be respectable printed materials. I guess I should accept that the phrase has been reanalyzed in English, just like it makes no sense to complain about, say, the use of caveat as a noun, or agenda as singular. (Though I still can't help but cringe at singular data, despite being well aware that it's a lost cause...)

Comment author: CronoDAS 05 June 2010 07:12:37PM *  0 points [-]

::followed link::

Did you ever experience nicotine withdrawal symptoms? In people who aren't long-time smokers, they can take up to a week to appear.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 06 June 2010 12:40:15AM *  2 points [-]

For what that's worth, when I quit smoking, I didn't feel any withdrawal symptoms except being a bit nervous and irritable for a single day (and I'm not even sure if quitting was the cause, since it coincided with some stressful issues at work that could well have caused it regardless). That was after a few years of smoking something like two packs a week on average (and much more than that during holidays and other periods when I went out a lot).

From my experience, as well as what I observed from several people I know very well, most of what is nowadays widely believed about addiction is a myth.

Comment author: Nisan 04 June 2010 09:18:51AM 8 points [-]

Searle has some weird beliefs about consciousness. Here is his description of a "Fading Qualia" thought experiment, where your neurons are replaced, one by one, with electronics:

... as the silicon is progressively implanted into your dwindling brain, you find that the area of your conscious experience is shrinking, but that this shows no effect on your external behavior. You find, to your total amazement, that you are indeed losing control of your external behavior. You find, for example, that when the doctors test your vision, you hear them say, ‘‘We are holding up a red object in front of you; please tell us what you see.’’ You want to cry out, ‘‘I can’t see anything. I’m going totally blind.’’ But you hear your voice saying in a way that is completely out of your control, ‘‘I see a red object in front of me.’’

(J.R. Searle, The rediscovery of the mind, 1992, p. 66, quoted by Nick Bostrom here.)

This nightmarish passage made me really understand why the more imaginative people who do not subscribe to a computational theory of mind are afraid of uploading.

My main criticism of this story would be: What does Searle think is the physical manifestation of those panicked, helpless thoughts?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 06 June 2010 12:32:45AM *  7 points [-]

David Chalmers discusses this particular passage by Searle extensively in his paper "Absent Qualia, Fading Qualia, Dancing Qualia":
http://consc.net/papers/qualia.html

He demonstrates very convincingly that Searle's view is incoherent except under the assumption of strong dualism, using an argument based on more or less the same basic idea as your objection.

Comment author: RobinZ 05 June 2010 04:31:54AM 2 points [-]

I have no idea what a Schelling point is, but the rest of it makes enough sense that I don't think I'm missing too much - thanks for the explanation!

Comment author: Vladimir_M 05 June 2010 05:00:42AM *  6 points [-]

I recommend this article by David Friedman on the topic -- if you've never heard of the concept, you'll probably find lots of interesting insight in it:
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Property/Property.html

Friedman uses Schelling points in an attempt to explain the origin of the concept of property rights among humans and the associated legal and social norms, but the approach can be generalized in an obvious way to a much wider class of relations between people (basically anything that could hypothetically lead to a conflict, in the broadest possible sense of the term).

Comment author: mattnewport 05 June 2010 03:08:14AM 0 points [-]

Apologies, the only Latin I remember from school is Caecilius est in horto. I actually spent several minutes with Google trying to figure out what it should be but there appears to be a shortage of online Latin translation services. Gap in the market?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 05 June 2010 03:41:10AM *  2 points [-]

One problem is that such a service is in much less demand compared to the living languages currently supported by translation programs. However, another major difficulty is that Latin is a far more synthetic language than English, and its inflectional suffixes often carry as much information as multiple-word clauses in English. For example, the mentioned ceteris paribus packs the entire English phrase "with everything else being the same" into just two words. Similarly, the last word in quod erat demonstrandum (a.k.a. "QED") packs the last four words of the English "that which was supposed to be demonstrated" into one. This makes it much harder to come up with satisfactory translation heuristics compared to more analytic languages, especially considering the extreme freedom of word order in Latin.

Similar difficulties, of course, exist in automatic translation of English to other highly synthetic languages, like e.g. the Slavic ones.

Comment author: Alicorn 05 June 2010 03:03:20AM 3 points [-]

I had a teacher once who liked to say "ceteris ain't paribus". Is that better or worse?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 05 June 2010 03:22:10AM *  2 points [-]

That's actually a matter where some interesting linguistic judgment might be in order.

The "ain't" part is grammatical in some dialects of English, though, as far as I know, not in any form of standard English that is officially recognized anywhere. But the wrong cases for cetera and pares are not grammatical in any form of Latin that has ever been spoken or written anywhere.

On the whole, I'd say that "ain't" is less bad, since in the dialects in which it is grammatical, it has the same form for both singular and plural. Therefore, at least it respects the number agreement with the Latin plural cetera, whereas "is" commits an additional offense by violating that agreement.

Comment author: mattnewport 04 June 2010 11:43:25PM 4 points [-]

assuming we are speaking about consequentialists with typical human values, for whom death is wrong and more deaths are more wrong, ceteris paribus.

I would question whether these are typical human values. People generally think the deaths of some people are more wrong than the deaths of other people. Most people do not value all human life equally. For typical humans ceteris almost never is paribus when it comes to choosing who lives and who dies.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 05 June 2010 03:01:15AM *  8 points [-]

ceteris almost never is paribus

At the risk of getting downvoted for nitpicking, I must point out that if you really insist on using Latin like this, the correct way to say it is: cetera almost never are pares.

Sorry, but the sight of butchered Latin really hurts my eyes.

Comment author: Liron 04 June 2010 07:16:52AM 2 points [-]

What's the deal with female nymphomaniacs? Their existence seems a priori unlikely.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 05 June 2010 02:49:37AM 3 points [-]

Their existence seems a priori unlikely.

Why?

Comment author: Blueberry 04 June 2010 08:55:40PM 1 point [-]

A real-world example would be a mountain climber who cut the rope that his partner was attached to, because if he didn't, both people would have fallen and died. If I met a mountain climber who did that, I wouldn't react negatively, any more than I would to someone who killed in self-defense.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 05 June 2010 02:46:19AM *  0 points [-]

That's not a very good analogy. One could argue that by engaging in a mountain-climbing expedition, you voluntarily accept certain extraordinary risks, and the partner merely got unlucky with his own share of that risk. Whereas one of the essential premises in the fat man/trolley problem is that the fat man is a neutral passerby, completely innocent of the whole mess.

So, the real question is if you'd be so favorably inclined towards a mountain climber who, in order to save multiple lives, killed a completely unrelated random individual who was not at all entangled with their trouble.

Comment author: Furcas 04 June 2010 11:16:51PM *  9 points [-]

What's a virtue, anyway?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 05 June 2010 12:35:20AM *  31 points [-]

Here's my tentative answer to this question. It's just a dump of some half-baked ideas, but I'd nevertheless be curious to see some comments on them. This should not be read as a definite statement of my positions, but merely as my present direction of thinking on the subject.

Most interactions between humans are too complex to be described with any accuracy using deontological rules or consequentialist/utilitarian spherical-cow models. Neither of these approaches is capable of providing any practical guidelines for human action that wouldn't be trivial, absurd, or just sophistical propaganda for the attitudes that the author already holds for other reasons. (One possible exception are economic interactions in which spherical-cow models based on utility functions make reasonably accurate predictions, and sometimes even give correct non-trivial guidelines for action.)

However, we can observe that humans interact in practice using an elaborate network of tacit agreements. These can be seen as Schelling points, so that interactions between people run harmoniously as long as these points are recognized and followed, and conflict ensues when there is a failure to recognize and agree on such a point, or someone believes he can profit from an aggressive intrusion beyond some such point. Recognition of these points is a complex matter, determined by everything from genetics to culture to momentary fashion, and they can be more or less stable and of greater or lesser importance (i.e. overstepping some of them is seen as a trivial annoyance, while on the other extreme, overstepping certain others gives the other party a licence to kill). These points include all the more or less formally stated social and legal norms, property claims, and all the countless other more or less important expectations that we believe we reasonably hold against each other.

So, here is my basic idea: being a virtuous person means recognizing the existing Schelling points correctly, drawing and communicating those points whose exact location depends on you skillfully and prudently -- and once they've been drawn, committing yourself to defend them relentlessly (so that hopefully, nobody will even see overstepping them at your disadvantage as potentially profitable). An ideal virtuous man by this definition, capable of practical wisdom to make the best possible judgments and determined to respect the others's lines and defend his own ones, would therefore have the greatest practical likelihood of living his life in harmony and having all his business run smoothly, no matter what his station in life.

A society of such virtuous people would also make possible a higher level of voluntary benevolence in the form of friendship, charity, hospitality, mutual aid, etc., since one could count on others not to exploit maliciously a benevolent attempt at lowering one's guard on crucially important lines and trying to base human relationships on lines that are more relaxed and pleasant, but harder to defend if push comes to shove. For example, it makes sense to be hospitable if you're living among people whom you know to be determined not to take advantage of your hospitality, or to be merciful and forgiving if you can be reasonably sure that people's transgressions are unusual lapses of judgment unlikely to be repeated, rather than due to a persistent malevolent strategy. Thus, in a society populated by virtuous people, it makes sense to apply the label of virtuousness also to characteristics such as charity, friendliness, mercy, hospitality, etc. (but only to the point where one doesn't let oneself be exploited for them!).

This also seems to clarify the trolley problem-like situations, when we observe that actions that involve your own Schelling boundaries are more important to you than others. You may feel sorry for the folks who will die, perhaps to the point where you'd sacrifice yourself to save them (but perhaps not if this leaves your own kids as poor orphans, since your existing network of tacit agreements involves caring for them). However, pushing the fat man means overstepping the most important and terrible of all Schelling boundaries -- that which defines unprovoked deadly aggression against one's person, and whose violation gives the attacked party the licence to kill you in self-defense. Violating this boundary is such an extreme step that it may be seen as far more drastic than passively witnessing multiple deaths of people in a manner than doesn't violate any tacit agreements and expectations. (Note though that this perspective is distinct from pure egoism: the tacit agreements in question include a certain limited level of altruism, like e.g. helping a stranger in an emergency, at least by calling 911.)

You may view all this virtue talk as consequentialism with respect to the immensely complex network of Schelling points between humans, which takes into account higher-level game-theoretical consequences of actions, which are more important than the factors covered by the usual utilitarian spherical-cow models. Yet this system is far too complex to allow for any simple model based on utility functions or anything similar. At most, we can formulate advice aimed at individuals on how to make judgments based on the relations that concern them personally in some way and are within their own sphere of accurate comprehension -- and the best practical advice that can be formulated basically boils down to some form of virtue ethics.

So, basically, that would be my half-baked summary. I'm curious if anyone thinks that this might make some sense.

Comment author: thomblake 04 June 2010 06:57:10PM 2 points [-]

Sure. Let's say you're an honest person. So (for instance) if someone asks you what time it is, you're predisposed to tell them the correct time rather than lying. It probably won't even occur to you that it might be funny to lie about the time. And then the Nazis come to the door and ask about the Jews you're hiding in the attic. Of course you've had time to prepare for this situation, and know what you're going to say, and it isn't going to be, "Yes, right through that hidden trap door".

Comment author: Vladimir_M 04 June 2010 11:04:42PM *  1 point [-]

I'm not an expert in traditional and modern virtue ethics, so my reply might be nonstandard. But in this case, I would simply note that the notion of virtue applies to others too -- and the standards of behavior that are virtuous when applied towards decent people are not necessarily virtuous when applied to those who have overstepped certain boundaries.

Thus, for example, hospitality is a virtue, but for those who grossly abuse your hospitality, the virtuous thing to do is to throw them out of your house -- and it's a matter of practical wisdom to decide when this boundary has been overstepped. Similarly, non-aggression is also a virtue when dealing with honest people, but not when you catch a burglar in flagrante. In your example, the Nazis are coming with an extremely aggressive and hostile intent, and thus clearly place themselves beyond the pale of humanity, so that the virtuous thing to do is to oppose them in the most effective manner possible -- which could mean deceiving them, considering that their physical power is overwhelming.

It seems to me that the real problems with virtue ethics are not that it mandates inflexibility in principles leading to crazy results -- as far as I see, it doesn't -- but due to the fact that decisions requiring judgments of practical wisdom can be hard, non-obvious, and controversial. (At what exact point does someone's behavior overstep the boundary to the point where it becomes virtuous to open hostilities in response?)

Comment author: thomblake 04 June 2010 07:39:15PM 1 point [-]

The virtue ethicist endeavors to be the sort of person who doesn't go around pushing fat men from bridges, and so recognizes it as a terrible, tragic situation.

It's important when thinking about that thought experiment to picture yourself running up to the stranger, shoulder-checking him, wrapping your arms around him, feeling the fabric of his shirt press against your face and smelling his sweat. And then listen to him scream and feel his blood and brains get splattered all over your clothing.

The virtue ethicist, like most people, probably freezes and watches the whole thing unfold, or panics, or futilely tries to get the folks off the tracks before the trolley hits them. Do you expect an actual consequentialist human to do better?

As for the right thing to do, it's probably to have better procedures for stopping people from being in the way of trolleys.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 04 June 2010 08:14:29PM *  1 point [-]

thomblake:

Do you expect an actual consequentialist human to do better?

Another interesting question is how all these consequentialitsts who insist that pushing the fat man is the right thing to do would react if they met someone who has actually followed their injunctions in practice. It seems to me that as soon as they're out of the armchair, people's inner virtue ethicist takes over, no matter how much their philosophy attempts to deny the relevance of his voice!

Comment author: Vladimir_M 04 June 2010 07:34:38PM *  34 points [-]

Will_Newsome:

Consequentialists, deontologists, and virtue ethicists don't really disagree on any major points in day to day life, just in crazy situations like trolley problems.

More precisely, they do disagree about the same practically relevant ethical questions that provoke controversy among common folks too, especially the politically and ideologically charged ones -- but their positions are only loosely correlated with their ethical theories, and instead stem from the same gut feelings and signaling games as everybody else's. This seems to me like a pretty damning fact about the way this whole area of intellectual work is conducted in practice.

Comment author: Morendil 04 June 2010 05:56:24AM 0 points [-]

There's nothing mysterious about it as far as I can tell, it's "just math".

Give me a six-sided die and I'll compute the probability of it coming up 4 as 1/6. This simple exercise can become more complicated in one of two ways. You can ask me to compute the probability of a more complex event, e.g. "three even numbers in a row". This still has an exact answer.

The other complication is if the die is loaded. One way I might find out how that affects its single-throw probabilities is by throwing it a large number of times, but conceivably I can also X-ray the die, find out how its mass is distributed, and deduce from that how the single-throw probabilities differ. (Offhand I'd say that faces closer to the center of mass of the die are more likely to come up, but perhaps the calculation is more interesting than that.)

In the case of Elbonia vs Ruritania, the other guy has some information that you don't, perhaps for instance the transcript of an intercepted conversation between the Elbonian ruler and a nearby power assuring the former of their support against any unwarranted Ruritanian aggression: they think the war is more plausible given this information.

Further, if you agreed with that person in all other respects, i.e. if his derivation of the probability for war given all other relevant information was also 0.3 absent the interception, and you agreed on how verbal information translated into numbers, then you would have no choice but to also accept the final figure of 0.4 conditioning on the interception. Bayesian probability is presented as an exact system of inference (and Jaynes is pretty convincing on this point, I should add).

Comment author: Vladimir_M 04 June 2010 06:57:02PM *  5 points [-]

I agree about Jaynes and the exactness of Bayesian inference. (I haven't read his Probability Theory fully, but I should definitely get to it sometime. I did got through the opening chapters however, and it's indeed mighty convincing.) Yet, I honestly don't see how either Jaynes or your comments answer my question in full, though I seen no significant disagreement with what you've written. Let me try rephrasing my question once more.

In natural sciences, when you characterize some quantity with a number, this number must make sense in some empirical way, testable in an experiment, or at least with a thought experiment if a real one isn't feasible in practice. Suppose that you've determined somehow that the temperature of a bowl of water is 300K, and someone asks you what exactly this number means in practice -- why 300, and not 290, or 310, or 299, or 301? You can reply by describing (or even performing) various procedures with that bowl of water that will give predictably different outcomes depending on its exact temperature -- and the results of some such procedures with this particular bowl are consistent only with a temperature of 300K plus/minus some small value that can be made extremely tiny with a careful setup, and not any other numbers.

Note that the question posed here is not how we've determined what the temperature of the water is in the first place. Instead, the question is: once we've made the claim that the temperature is some particular number, what practical observation can we make that will show that this particular number is consistent with reality, and others aren't? If an number can't be justified that way, then it is not something science can work with, and there is no reason to consider one value as "correct" and another "incorrect."

So now, when I ask the same question about probability, I'm not asking about the procedures we use to derive these numbers. I'm asking: once we've made the claim that the probability of some event is p, what practical observations can we make that will show that this particular number is consistent with reality, and others aren't -- except by pointing to frequencies of events? I understand how we would reach a probability figure in the Elbonia vs. Ruritania scenario, I agree that Bayesian inference is an exact system, and I see what the possible sources of disagreement could be and how they should be straightened out when asymmetrical information is eliminated. I am not arguing with any of that (at least in the present context). Rather, what I'd like to know is whether the figures ultimately reached make any practical sense in terms of some observable properties of the universe, except for the frequentist ratios predicted by them. (And if the latter is the only answer, this presumably means that any sensible interpretation of probability would have to incorporate significant frequentist elements.)

Comment author: Wei_Dai 04 June 2010 04:53:38AM *  2 points [-]

Have you seen my What Are Probabilities, Anyway? post?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 04 June 2010 06:25:58PM 1 point [-]

Yes, I remember reading that post a while ago when I was still just lurking here. But I forgot about it in the meantime, so thanks for bringing it to my attention again. It's something I'll definitely need to think about more.

Comment author: Oscar_Cunningham 03 June 2010 09:02:22PM *  1 point [-]

Bayesians, would say that the probability is (some function of) the expected value of one bet.

Frequentists, would say that it is (some function of) the actual value of many bets (as the amount of bets goes to infinity).

The whole point of looking at many bets is to make the average value close to the expected value (so that frequentists don't have to think about what "expected" actually means). You never have to say "the expected gain ... over a large number of bets." That would be redundant.

What does "expected" actually mean? It's just the probabilty you should bet at to avoid the possibility of being Dutch-booked on any single bet.

ETA: When you are being Dutch-booked, you don't get to look at all the offered bets at once and say "hold on a minute, you're trying to trick me". You get given each of the bets one at a time, and you have to bet Bayesianly for each one if you want to avoid any possibility of sure losses.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 04 June 2010 12:18:20AM *  4 points [-]

I might be mistaken, but I think this still doesn't answer my question. I understand -- or at least I think I do -- how the Dutch book argument can be used to establish the axioms of probability and the entire mathematical theory that follows from them (including the Bayes theorem).

The way I understand it, this argument says that once I've assigned some probability to an event, I must assign all the other probabilities in a way consistent with the probability axioms. For example, if I assign P(A) = 0.3 and P(B) = 0.4, I would be opening myself to a Dutch book if I assigned, say, P(~A) != 0.7 or P(A and B) > 0.3. So far, so good.

However, I still don't see what, if anything, the Dutch book argument tells us about the ultimate meaning of the probability numbers. If I claim that the probability of Elbonia declaring war on Ruritania before next Christmas is 0.3, then to avoid being Dutch-booked, I must maintain that the probability of that event not happening is 0.7, and all the other stuff necessitated by the probability axioms. However, if someone comes to me and claims that the probability is not 0.3, but 0.4 instead, in what way could he argue, under any imaginable circumstances and either before or after the fact, that his figure is correct and mine not? What fact observable in physical reality could he point out and say that it's consistent with one number, but not the other?

I understand that if we both stick to our different probabilities and make bets based on them, we can get Dutch-booked collectively (someone sells him a bet that pays off $100 if the war breaks out for $39, and to me a bet that pays off $100 in the reverse case for $69 -- and wins $8 whatever happens). But this merely tells us that something irrational is going on if we insist (and act) on different probability estimates. It doesn't tell us, as far as I can see, how one number could be correct, and all others incorrect -- unless we start talking about a large reference class of events and frequencies at some point.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 03 June 2010 08:04:24PM *  0 points [-]

Do you (or anyone else reading this) know of any attempts to give a precise non-frequentist interpretation of the exact numerical values of Bayesian probabilities?

Yes, you can do this precisely with measure theory, but some will argue that that is nice math but not a philosophically satisfying approach.

Edit: A more concrete approach is to just think about it as what bets you should make about possible outcomes.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 03 June 2010 08:40:04PM *  1 point [-]

Yes, you can do this precisely with measure theory, but some will argue that that is nice math but not a philosophically satisfying approach.

I'm not sure I understand what exactly you have in mind. I am aware of the role of measure theory in the standard modern formalization of probability theory, and how it provides for a neat treatment of continuous probability distributions. However, what I'm interested in is not the math, but the meaning of the numbers in the real world.

Bayesians often make claims like, say, "I assign the probability of 0.2 to the hypothesis/prediction X." This is a factual claim, which asserts that some quantity is equal to 0.2, not any other number. This means that those making such claims should be able to point at some observable property of the real world related to X that gives rise to this particular number, not some other one. What I'd like to find out is whether there are attempts at non-frequentist responses to this sort of request.

Edit: A more concrete approach is to just think about it as what bets you should make about possible outcomes.

But it seems to me that betting advice is fundamentally frequentist in nature. As far as I can see, the only practical test of whether a betting strategy is good or bad is the expected gain (or loss) it will provide over a large number of bets. [Edit: I should have been more clear here -- I assume that you are not using an incoherent strategy vulnerable to a Dutch book. I had in mind strategies where you respect the axioms of probability, and the only question is which numbers consistent with them you choose.]

Comment author: Morendil 02 June 2010 06:21:25PM *  4 points [-]

As I understand it, frequentism requires large numbers of events for its interpretation of probability, whereas the bayesian interpretation allows the convergence of relative frequencies with probabilities but claims that probability is a meaningful concept when applied to unique events, as a "degree of plausibility".

Comment author: Vladimir_M 03 June 2010 08:01:22PM *  5 points [-]

Do you (or anyone else reading this) know of any attempts to give a precise non-frequentist interpretation of the exact numerical values of Bayesian probabilities? What I mean is someone trying to give a precise meaning to the claim that the "degree of plausibility" of a hypothesis (or prediction or whatever) is, say, 0.98, which wouldn't boil down to the frequentist observation that relative to some reference class, it would be right 98/100 of the time, as in the above quoted example.

Or to put it in a way that might perhaps be clearer, suppose we're dealing with the claim that the "degree of plausibility" of a hypothesis is 0.2. Not 0.19, or 0.21, or even 0.1999 or 0.2001, but exactly that specific value. Now, I have no intuition whatsoever for what it might mean that the "degree of plausibility" I assign to some proposition is equal to one of these numbers and not any of the other mentioned ones -- except if I can conceive of an experiment or observation (or at least a thought-experiment) that would yield that particular exact number via a frequentist ratio.

I'm not trying to open the whole Bayesian vs. frequentist can of worms at this moment; I'd just like to find out if I've missed any significant references that discuss this particular question.

Comment author: Douglas_Knight 03 June 2010 06:09:21PM 1 point [-]

Well, is it really possible that lenders are so stupid ... not be so good after all if applied on a large scale.

These are not such different answers. Working on a large scale tends to require hiring (potentially) stupid people and giving them little flexibility.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 03 June 2010 06:22:34PM *  1 point [-]

Yes, that's certainly true. In fact, what you say is very similar to one of the points I made in my first comment in this thread (see its second paragraph).

Comment author: SilasBarta 03 June 2010 05:54:36PM *  3 points [-]

Well, is it really possible that lenders are so stupid that they're missing profit opportunities because such straightforward ideas don't occur to them? I would say that lacking insider information on the way they do business, the rational conclusion would be that, for whatever reasons, either they are not permitted to use such criteria, or such criteria would not be so good after all if applied on a large scale.

No, they do require that information to get the subprime loan; it's just that they classified me as subprime based purely on the lack of credit history, irrespective of that non-loan history. Providing that information, though required, doesn't get you back into prime territory.

Or maybe the reason is that credit unions are operating under different legal constraints and, being smaller, they can afford to use less tightly formalized decision-making rules?

Considering that in the recent financial industry crisis, the credit unions virtually never needed a bailout, while most of the large banks did, there is good support for the hypothesis of CU = non-idiot, larger banks/mortgage brokers = idiot.

(Of course, I do differ from the general subprime population in that if I see that I can only get bad terms on a mortgage, I don't accept them.)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 03 June 2010 06:16:40PM *  3 points [-]

SilasBarta:

No, they do require that information to get the subprime loan; it's just that they classified me as subprime based purely on the lack of credit history, irrespective of that non-loan history. Providing that information, though required, doesn't get you back into prime territory.

This merely means that their formal criteria for sorting out loan applicants into officially recognized categories disallow the use of this information -- which would be fully consistent with my propositions from the above comments.

Mortgage lending, especially subprime lending, has been a highly politicized issue in the U.S. for many years, and this business presents an especially dense and dangerous legal minefield. Multifarious politicians, bureaucrats, courts, and prominent activists have a stake in that game, and they have all been using whatever means are at their disposal to influence the major lenders, whether by carrots or by sticks. All this has undoubtedly influenced the rules under which loans are handed out in practice, making the bureaucratic rules and procedures of large lenders seem even more nonsensical from the common person's perspective than they would otherwise be.

(I won't get into too many specifics in order to avoid raising controversial political topics, but I think my point should be clear at least in the abstract, even if we disagree about the concrete details.)

Considering that in the recent financial industry crisis, the credit unions virtually never needed a bailout, while most of the large banks did, which supports the CU = idiot, larger banks/mortgage brokers = non-idiot hypothesis.

Why do you assume that the bailouts are indicative of idiocy? You seem to be assuming that -- roughly speaking -- the major financiers have been engaged in more or less regular market-economy business and done a bad job due to stupidity and incompetence. That, however, is a highly inaccurate model of how the modern financial industry operates and its relationship with various branches of the government -- inaccurate to the point of uselessness.

Comment author: SilasBarta 03 June 2010 03:04:31PM *  2 points [-]

I think there's also some Conservation of Thought (1) involved-- if you have a credit history to be looked at, there are Actual! Records!. If someone is just solvent and reliable and has a good job, then you have to evaluate that.

Except that there are records (history of paying bills, rent), it's just that the lenders won't look at them.

There may also be a weirdness factor if relatively few people have no debt history.

Maybe financial gurus should think about that before they say "stay away from credit cards entirely". It should be "You MUST get a credit card, but pay the balance." (This is another case of addictive stuff that can't addict me.)

(Please, don't bother with advice, the problem has since been solved; credit unions are run by non-idiots, it seems, and don't make the above lender errors.)

ETA: Sorry for the snarky tone; your points are valid, I just disagree about their applicability to this specific situation.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 03 June 2010 05:48:03PM *  7 points [-]

SilasBarta:

Except that there are records (history of paying bills, rent), it's just that the lenders won't look at them.

Well, is it really possible that lenders are so stupid that they're missing profit opportunities because such straightforward ideas don't occur to them? I would say that lacking insider information on the way they do business, the rational conclusion would be that, for whatever reasons, either they are not permitted to use these criteria, or these criteria would not be so good after all if applied on a large scale.

(See my above comment for an elaboration on this topic.)

(Please, don't bother with advice, the problem has since been solved; credit unions are run by non-idiots, it seems, and don't make the above lender errors.)

Or maybe the reason is that credit unions are operating under different legal constraints and, being smaller, they can afford to use less tightly formalized decision-making rules?

Comment author: SilasBarta 03 June 2010 03:28:32AM *  2 points [-]

Thanks for the links, I had missed those.

I agree with his broad points, but on many issues, I notice he often perceives a world that I don't seem to live in. For example, he says that people who can simply communicate in clear English and think clearly are in such short supply that he'd hire someone or take them on as a grad student simply for meeting that, while I haven't noticed the demand for my labor (as someone well above and beyond that) being like what that kind of shortage would imply.

Second, he seems to have this belief that the consumer credit scoring system can do no wrong. Back when I was unable to get a mortgage at prime rates due to lacking credit history despite being an ideal candidate [1], he claimed that the refusals were completely justified because I must have been irresponsible with credit (despite not having borrowed...), and he has no reason to believe my self-serving story ... even after I offered to send him my credit report and the refusals!

[1] I had no other debts, no dependents, no bad incidents on my credit report, stable work history from the largest private employer in the area, and the mortgage would be for less than 2x my income and have less than 1/6 of my gross in monthly payments. Yeah, real subprime borrower there...

Comment author: Vladimir_M 03 June 2010 05:40:19PM 10 points [-]

One reason why the behavior of corporations and other large organizations often seems so irrational from an ordinary person's perspective is that they operate in a legal minefield. Dodging the constant threats of lawsuits and regulatory penalties while still managing to do productive work and turn a profit can require policies that would make no sense at all without these artificially imposed constraints. This frequently comes off as sheer irrationality to common people, who tend to imagine that big businesses operate under a far more laissez-faire regime than they actually do.

Moreover, there is the problem of diseconomies of scale. Ordinary common-sense decision criteria -- such as e.g. looking at your life history as you describe it and concluding that, given these facts, you're likely to be a responsible borrower -- often don't scale beyond individuals and small groups. In a very large organization, decision criteria must instead be bureaucratic and formalized in a way that can be, with reasonable cost, brought under tight control to avoid widespread misbehavior. For this reason, scalable bureaucratic decision-making rules must be clear, simple, and based on strictly defined categories of easily verifiable evidence. They will inevitably end up producing at least some decisions that common-sense prudence would recognize as silly, but that's the cost of scalability.

Also, it should be noted that these two reasons are not independent. Consistent adherence to formalized bureaucratic decision-making procedures is also a powerful defense against predatory plaintiffs and regulators. If a company can produce papers with clearly spelled out rules for micromanaging its business at each level, and these rules are per se consistent with the tangle of regulations that apply to it and don't give any grounds for lawsuits, it's much more likely to get off cheaply than if its employees are given broad latitude for common-sense decision-making.

Comment author: Roko 31 May 2010 09:34:42PM *  0 points [-]

If the growth above inflation isn't defined in terms of today's standard basket of goods, then is it really growth? I mean if I defined a changing basket of goods that was the standard one up until 1991, and thereafter was based exclusively upon the cost per email of sending an email, we would see massive negative inflation and spuriously high growth rates as emails became cheaper to send due to falling computer and network costs.

I.e. Robin's prediction of fast growth rates is presumably in terms of today's basket of goods, right?

The point of ems is that they will do work that is useful by today's standard, rather than just creating a multiplicity of some (by our standard) useless commodity like digits of pi that they then consume.

In response to comment by Roko on Abnormal Cryonics
Comment author: Vladimir_M 31 May 2010 11:49:05PM *  3 points [-]

Roko:

If the growth above inflation isn't defined in terms of today's standard basket of goods, then is it really growth? I mean if I defined a changing basket of goods that was the standard one up until 1991, and thereafter was based exclusively upon the cost per email of sending an email, we would see massive negative inflation and spuriously high growth rates as emails became cheaper to send due to falling computer and network costs.

You're asking some very good questions indeed! Now think about it a bit more.

Even nowadays, you simply cannot maintain the exact same basket of goods as the standard for any period much longer than a year or so. Old things are no longer produced, and more modern equivalents will (and sometimes won't) replace them. New things appear that become part of the consumption basket of a typical person, often starting as luxury but gradually becoming necessary to live as a normal, well-adjusted member of society. Certain things are no longer available simply because the world has changed to the point where their existence is no longer physically or logically possible. So what sense does it make to compare the "price index" between 2010 and 1950, let alone 1900, and express this ratio as some exact and unique number?

The answer is that it doesn't make any sense. What happens is that government economists define new standard baskets each year, using formalized and complex, but ultimately completely arbitrary criteria for selecting their composition and determining the "real value" of new goods and services relative to the old. Those estimates are then chained to make comparisons between more distant epochs. While this does make some limited sense for short-term comparisons, in the long run, these numbers are devoid of any sensible meaning.

Not to even mention how much the whole thing is a subject of large political and bureaucratic pressures. For example, in 1996, the relevant bodies of the U.S. government concluded that the official inflation figures were making the social security payments grow too fast for their taste, so they promptly summoned a committee of experts, who then produced an elaborate argument that the methodology hitherto used had unsoundly overstated the growth in CPI relative to some phantom "true" value. And so the methodology was revised, and inflation obediently went down. (I wouldn't be surprised if the new CPI math indeed gives much more prominence to the cost of sending emails!)

Now, if such is the state of things even when it comes to the fairly slow technological and economic changes undertaken by humans in recent decades, what sense does it make to project these numbers into an em-based economy that develops and changes at a speed hardly imaginable for us today, and whose production is largely aimed at creatures altogether different from us? Hardly any, I would say, which is why I don't find the attempts to talk about long-term "real growth" as a well-defined number meaningful.

I.e. Robin's prediction of fast growth rates is presumably in terms of today's basket of goods, right?

I don't know what he thinks about how affordable biological human life would be in an em economy, but I'm pretty sure he doesn't define his growth numbers tied to the current CPI basket. From the attitudes he typically displays in his writing, I would be surprised if he would treat things valued by ems and other AIs as essentially different from things valued by humans and unworthy of inclusion into the growth figures, even if humans find them irrelevant or even outright undesirable.

Comment author: Roko 31 May 2010 06:43:15PM 0 points [-]

Suppose that my biological survival today costs 2000 MJ of energy per year and 5000kg of matter. Since I can spend (say) $50,000 today to buy 10,000 MJ of energy and 5000kg of matter. I invest my $50,000 and get cryo. Then, the em revolution happens, and the price of these commodities becomes very high, at the same time as the economy (total amount of wealth) grows, at say 100% per week, corrected for inflation.

That means that every week, my 10000 MJ of energy and 5000kg of matter investment becomes twice as valuable, so after one week, I own 20,000MJ of energy and 10,000kg of matter. Though, at the same time, the dollar price of these commodities has also increased a lot.

The end result: I get very very large amounts of energy/matter very quickly, limited only by the speed of light limit of how quickly earth-based civilization can grow.

The above all assumes preservation of property rights.

In response to comment by Roko on Abnormal Cryonics
Comment author: Vladimir_M 31 May 2010 07:52:36PM *  0 points [-]

Roko:

That means that every week, my 10000 MJ of energy and 5000kg of matter investment becomes twice as valuable, so after one week, I own 20,000MJ of energy and 10,000kg of matter. Though, at the same time, the dollar price of these commodities has also increased a lot.

This is a fallacious step. The fact that risk-free return on investment over a certain period is X% above inflation does not mean that you can pick any arbitrary thing and expect that if you can afford a quantity Y of it today, you'll be able to afford (1+X/100)Y of it after that period. It merely means that if you're wealthy enough today to afford a particular well-defined basket of goods -- whose contents are selected by convention as a necessary part of defining inflation, and may correspond to your personal needs and wants completely, partly, or not at all -- then investing your present wealth will get you the power to purchase a similar basket (1+X/100) times larger after that period. [*] When it comes to any particular good, the ratio can be in any direction -- even assuming a perfect laissez-faire market, let alone all sorts of market-distorting things that may happen.

Therefore, if you have peculiar needs and wants that don't correspond very well to the standard basket used to define the price index, then the inflation and growth numbers calculated using this basket are meaningless for all your practical purposes. Trouble is, in an economy populated primarily by ems, biological humans will be such outliers. It's enough that one factor critical for human survival gets bid up exorbitantly and it's adios amigos. I can easily think of more than one candidate.

The above all assumes preservation of property rights.

From the perspective of an em barely scraping a virtual or robotic existence, a surviving human wealthy enough to keep their biological body alive would seem as if, from our perspective, a whole rich continent's worth of land, capital, and resources was owned by a being whose mind is so limited and slow that it takes a year to do one second's worth of human thinking, while we toil 24/7, barely able to make ends meet. I don't know with how much confidence we should expect that property rights would be stable in such a situation.


[*] - To be precise, the contents of the basket will also change during that period if it's of any significant length. This however gets us into the nebulous realm of Fisher's chain indexes and similar numerological tricks on which the dubious edifice of macroeconomic statistics rests to a large degree.

Comment author: Roko 31 May 2010 01:35:35PM 1 point [-]

The honest answer to this question is that it is possible that you'll get revived into a world that is not worth living in, in which case you can go for suicide.

And then there's a chance that you get revived into a world where you are in some terrible situation but not allowed to kill yourself. In this case, you have done worse than just dying.

In response to comment by Roko on Abnormal Cryonics
Comment author: Vladimir_M 31 May 2010 06:19:39PM *  0 points [-]

That said, I am nowhere near certain that bad future awaits us, nor that the above mentioned Malthusian scenario is inevitable. However, it does seem to me as the most plausible course of affairs given a cheap technology for making and copying minds, and it seems reasonable to expect that such technology would follow from more or less the same breakthroughs that would be necessary to revive people from cryonics.

Comment author: Roko 31 May 2010 01:24:25PM 1 point [-]

the price of lifestyle that would be considered tolerable by today's human standards may well grow even more rapidly as the Malthusian scenario unfolds.

I think that this is the exact opposite of what Robin predicts, he predicts that if the economy grows at a faster rate because of ems, the best strategy for a human is to hold investments, which would make you fabulously rich in a very short time.

In response to comment by Roko on Abnormal Cryonics
Comment author: Vladimir_M 31 May 2010 05:59:39PM *  0 points [-]

That is true -- my comment was worded badly and open to misreading on this point. What I meant is that I agree with Hanson that ems likely imply a Malthusian scenario, but I'm skeptical of the feasibility of the investment strategy, unless it involves ditching the biological body altogether and identifying yourself with a future em, in which case you (or "you"?) might feasibly end up as a wealthy em. (From Hanson's writing I've seen, it isn't clear to me if he automatically assumes the latter, or if he actually believes that biological survival might be an option for prudent investors.)

The reason is that in a Malthusian world of cheap AIs, it seems to me that the prices of resources necessary to keep biological humans alive would far outrun any returns on investments, no matter how extraordinary they might be. Moreover, I'm also skeptical if humans could realistically expect their property rights to be respected in a Malthusian world populated by countless numbers of far more intelligent entities.

Comment author: JGWeissman 31 May 2010 01:55:19AM 6 points [-]

So if there existed a hypothetical institution with the power to mete out preventive imprisonment, and which would reliably base its decisions on mathematically sound consequentialist arguments, would you be OK with it? I'm really curious how many consequentialists here would bite that bullet.

If this institution is totally honest, and extremely accurate in making predictions, so that obeying the laws it enforces is like one-boxing in Newcomb's problem, and somehow an institution with this predictive power has no better option than imprisonment, then yes I would be OK with it.

I don't trust any human institution to satisfy the first two criteria (honesty and accuracy), and I expect anything that does satisfy the first two would not satisfy the third (not better option).

This seems to be the largest lapse of logic in the (otherwise very good) above post. Only a few paragraphs above an argument involving the reversal test, the author apparently fails to apply it in a situation where it's strikingly applicable.

The topic of preemptive imprisonment was not under discussion, so it seems strange to consider it an error not to apply a reversal test to it.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 31 May 2010 02:05:54AM *  3 points [-]

If this institution is totally honest, and extremely accurate in making predictions, so that obeying the laws it enforces is like one-boxing in Newcomb's problem, and somehow an institution with this predictive power has no better option than imprisonment, then yes I would be OK with it.

Please see the edit I just added to the post; it seems like my wording wasn't precise enough. I had in mind statistical treatment of large groups, not prediction of behavior on an individual basis (which I assume is the point of your analogy with Newcomb's problem).

The topic of preemptive imprisonment was not under discussion, so it seems strange to consider it an error not to apply a reversal test to it.

I agree that it's not critical to the main point of the post, but I would say that it's a question that deserves at least a passing mention in any discussion of a consequentialist model of blame, even a tangential one.

In response to comment by byrnema on Abnormal Cryonics
Comment author: Roko 30 May 2010 01:48:34PM *  4 points [-]

My main point, all along, is that whether cryonics is the "correct" choice depends on your values.

Sure. If you don't value your life that much, then cryo is not for you, but I think that many people who refuse cryo don't say "I don't care if I die, my life is worthless to me", and if they were put in a near-mode situation where many of their close friends and relatives had died, but they had the option to make a new start in a society of unprecedentedly high quality of life, they wouldn't choose to die instead.

Perhaps I should make an analogy: would it be rational for a medieval peasant to refuse cryo where revival was as a billionaire in contemporary society, with an appropriate level of professional support and rehab from the cryo company? She would have to be at an extreme of low-self value to say "my life without my medieval peasant friends was the only thing that mattered to me", and turn down the opportunity to live a new life of learning, comfort and life in the absence of constant pain and hunger.

In response to comment by Roko on Abnormal Cryonics
Comment author: Vladimir_M 31 May 2010 01:41:42AM *  2 points [-]

Roko:

Perhaps I should make an analogy: would it be rational for a medieval peasant to refuse cryo where revival was as a billionaire in contemporary society, with an appropriate level of professional support and rehab from the cryo company?

This is another issue where, in my view, pro-cryonics people often make unwarranted assumptions. They imagine a future with a level of technology sufficient to revive frozen people, and assume that this will probably mean a great increase in per-capita wealth and comfort, like today's developed world compared to primitive societies, only even more splendid. Yet I see no grounds at all for such a conclusion.

What I find much more plausible are the Malthusian scenarios of the sort predicted by Robin Hanson. If technology becomes advanced enough to revive frozen brains in some way, it probably means that it will be also advanced enough to create and copy artificial intelligent minds and dexterous robots for a very cheap price. [Edit to avoid misunderstanding: the remainder of the comment is inspired by Hanson's vision, but based on my speculation, not a reflection of his views.]

This seems to imply a Malthusian world where selling labor commands only the most meager subsistence necessary to keep the cheapest artificial mind running, and biological humans are out-competed out of existence altogether. I'm not at all sure I'd like to wake up in such a world, even if rich -- and I also see some highly questionable assumptions in the plans of people who expect that they can simply leave a posthumous investment, let the interest accumulate while they're frozen, and be revived rich. Even if your investments remain safe and grow at an immense rate, which is itself questionable, the price of lifestyle that would be considered tolerable by today's human standards may well grow even more rapidly as the Malthusian scenario unfolds.

Comment author: Matt_Simpson 30 May 2010 11:41:19PM 6 points [-]

The only problem with this is that it works in reverse. We could put people who haven't commited a crime in jail on the grounds that they are likely to or it helps society when their in jail.

Once you factor in the dangers of giving humans that sort of power, I think that "problem" goes away for the most part.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 31 May 2010 01:07:18AM *  8 points [-]

So if there existed a hypothetical institution with the power to mete out preventive imprisonment, and which would reliably base its decisions on mathematically sound consequentialist arguments, would you be OK with it? I'm really curious how many consequentialists here would bite that bullet. (It's also an interesting question whether, and to what extent, some elements of the modern criminal justice system already operate that way in practice.)

[EDIT: To clarify a possible misunderstanding: I don't have in mind an institution that would make accurate predictions about the future behavior of individuals, but an institution that would preventively imprison large groups of people, including many who are by no means guaranteed to be future offenders, according to criteria that are accurate only statistically. (But we assume that they are accurate statistically, so that its aggregate effect is still evaluated as positive by your favored consequentialist calculus.)]

This seems to be the largest lapse of logic in the (otherwise very good) above post. Only a few paragraphs above an argument involving the reversal test, the author apparently fails to apply it in a situation where it's strikingly applicable.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 31 May 2010 12:08:01AM *  24 points [-]

Yvain:

The consequentialist model of blame is very different from the deontological model. Because all actions are biologically determined, none are more or less metaphysically blameworthy than others, and none can mark anyone with the metaphysical status of "bad person" and make them "deserve" bad treatment. [...] But if consequentialists don't believe in punishment for its own sake, they do believe in punishment for the sake of, well, consequences. Hurting bank robbers may not be a good in and of itself, but it will prevent banks from being robbed in the future.

Or as Oliver Wendell Holmes put it more poignantly:

If I were having a philosophical talk with a man I was going to have hanged or electrocuted, I should say, "I don't doubt that your act was inevitable for you, but to make it more avoidable by others we propose to sacrifice you to the common good. You may regard yourself as a soldier dying for your country if you like. But the law must keep its promises."

(I am not a consequentialist, much less a big fan of Holmes, but he sure had a way with words.)

In response to comment by jasticE on Abnormal Cryonics
Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 30 May 2010 12:24:01PM *  2 points [-]

If the actual preference is neither acted upon, nor believed in, how is it a preference?

It is something you won't regret giving as a goal to an obsessive world-rewriting robot that takes what you say its goals are really seriously and very literally, without any way for you to make corrections later. Most revealed preferences, you will regret, exactly for the reasons they differ from the actual preferences: on reflection, you'll find that you'd rather go with something different.

See also this thread.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 30 May 2010 05:55:35PM *  1 point [-]

This, however, is not the usual meaning of the term "preference." In the standard usage, this word refers to one's favored option in a given set of available alternatives, not to the hypothetical most favorable physically possible state of the world (which, as you correctly note, is unlikely to be readily imaginable). If you insist on using the term with this meaning, fair enough; it's just that your claims sound confusing when you don't include an explanation about your non-standard usage.

That said, one problem I see with your concept of preference is that, presumably, the actions of the "obsessive world-rewriting robot" are supposed to modify the world around you to make it consistent with your preferences, not to modify your mind to make your preferences consistent with the world. However, it is not at all clear to me whether a meaningful boundary between these two sorts of actions can be drawn.

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 29 May 2010 04:19:27PM 0 points [-]

It is rational for a being-who-has-no-preference-for-survival, but it's not obvious that any human however unusual or deformed can actually have this sort of preference.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 29 May 2010 11:28:47PM 1 point [-]

Lots of people demonstrate a revealed preference for non-survival by committing suicide and a variety of other self-destructive acts; others willingly choose non-survival as the means towards an altruistic (or some other sort of) goal. Or do you mean that it is not obvious that humans could lack the preference for survival even under the most favorable state of affairs?

Comment author: Roko 27 May 2010 09:16:56PM 3 points [-]

Well, a concrete scenario would be that the simulators calmly reveal themselves to you and demonstrate that they can break the laws of physics, for example by just wiggling the sun around in the sky, disconnecting your limbs without blood coming out or pain, making you float, etc.

In response to comment by Roko on Abnormal Cryonics
Comment author: Vladimir_M 27 May 2010 09:40:20PM *  1 point [-]

That would fall under the "evidence that I've already thought about" mentioned above. My intuitions would undoubtedly be shaken and moved, perhaps in directions that I presently can't even imagine. However, ultimately, I think I would be led to conclude that the whole concept of "oneself" is fundamentally incoherent, and that the inclination to hold any future entity or entities in special regard as "one's future self" is just a subjective whim. (See also my replies to kodos96 in this thread.)

Comment author: kodos96 27 May 2010 07:06:19AM 6 points [-]

If you woke up tomorrow to find yourself situated in a robot body, and were informed that you had been killed in an accident and your mind had been uploaded and was now running on a computer, but you still felt, subjectively, entirely like "yourself", how would you react? Or do you not think that that could ever happen? (that would be a perfectly valid answer, I'm just curious what you think, since I've never had the opportunity to discuss these issues with someone who was familiar with the standard arguments, yet denied the possibility)

In response to comment by kodos96 on Abnormal Cryonics
Comment author: Vladimir_M 27 May 2010 09:04:28PM *  6 points [-]

For the robotic "me" -- though not for anyone else -- this would provide a conclusive answer to the question of whether uploads and other computer programs can have subjective experiences. However, although fascinating, this finding would provide only a necessary, not a sufficient condition for a positive answer to the question we're pursuing, namely whether there is any rational reason (as opposed to freely variable subjective intuitions and preferences) to identify this entity with my present self.

Therefore, my answer would be that I don't know how exactly the subjective intuitions and convictions of the robotic "me" would develop from this point on. It may well be that he would end up feeling strongly as the true continuation of my person and rejecting what he would remember as my present intuitions on the matter (though this would be complicated by the presumable easiness of making other copies). However, I don't think he would have any rational reason to conclude that it is somehow factually true that he is the continuation of my person, rather than some entirely different entity that has been implanted false memories identical to my present ones.

Of course, I am aware that a similar argument can be applied to the "normal me" who will presumably wake up in my bed tomorrow morning. Trouble is, I would honestly find it much easier to stop caring about what happens to me tomorrow than to start caring about computer simulations of myself. Ultimately, it seems to me that the standard arguments that are supposed to convince people to broaden their parochial concepts of personal identity should in fact lead one to dissolve the entire concept as an irrational reification that is of no concern except that it's a matter of strong subjective preferences.

Comment author: Roko 27 May 2010 10:40:56AM 6 points [-]

Would it change your mind if you discovered that you're living in a simulation right now?

In particular, I personally can't bring myself to feel any identification whatsoever with some computer program that runs a simulation of my brain, no matter how accurate, and no matter how closely isomorphic its data structures might be to the state of my brain at any point in time.

In response to comment by Roko on Abnormal Cryonics
Comment author: Vladimir_M 27 May 2010 08:40:59PM *  0 points [-]

Roko:

Would it change your mind if you discovered that you're living in a simulation right now?

It would probably depend on the exact nature of the evidence that would support this discovery. I allow for the possibility that some sorts of hypothetical experiences and insights that would have the result of convincing me that we live in a simulation would also have the effect of dramatically changing my intuitions about the question of personal identity. However, mere thought-experiment considerations of those I can imagine presently fail to produce any such change.

I also allow for the possibility that this is due to the limitations of my imagination and reasoning, perhaps caused by unidentified biases, and that actual exposure to some hypothetical (and presently counterfactual) evidence that I've already thought about could perhaps have a different effect on me than I presently expect it would.

For full disclosure, I should add that I see some deeper problems with the simulation argument that I don't think are addressed in a satisfactory manner in the treatments of the subject I've seen so far, but that's a whole different can of worms.

Comment author: kodos96 27 May 2010 12:25:00AM *  3 points [-]

Well right, obviously a program consiting of "printf("I am Vladmir_M")" wouldn't qualify... but a program which convincingly claimed to be you.. i.e. had access to all your memories, intellect, inner thoughts etc, and claimed to be the same person as you.

In response to comment by kodos96 on Abnormal Cryonics
Comment author: Vladimir_M 27 May 2010 12:53:50AM 2 points [-]

No, as I wrote above, I am honestly unable to feel any identification at all with such a program. It might as well be just a while(1) loop printing a sentence claiming it's me.

I know of some good arguments that seem to provide a convincing reductio ad absurdum of such a strong position, most notably the "fading qualia" argument by David Chalmers, but on the other hand, I also see ways in which the opposite view entails absurdity (e.g. the duplication arguments). Thus, I don't see any basis for forming an opinion here except sheer intuition, which in my case strongly rebels against identification with an upload or anything similar.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 26 May 2010 11:59:21PM *  4 points [-]

While I understand why someone would see the upload as possibly not themselves (and I have strong sympathy with that position), I do find it genuinely puzzling that someone wouldn't identify their revived body as themselves. While some people might argue that they have no connection to the entity that will have their memories a few seconds from now, the vast majority of humans don't buy into that argument. If they don't, then it is hard to see how a human which is cooled and then revived is any different than a human which who has their heart stopped for a bit as they have a heart transplant, or for someone who stops breathing in a very cold environment for a few minutes, or someone who goes to sleep under an anesthesia, or even someone who goes to sleep normally and wakes up in the morning.

Your point about weirdness signaling is a good one, and I'd expand on it slightly: For much of society, even thinking about weird things at a minimal level is a severe weirdness signal. So for many people, the possible utility of any random weird idea is likely to be so low that even putting in effort to think about it will almost certainly outweigh any benefit. And when one considers how many weird ideas are out there, the chance that any given one of them will turn out to be useful is very low. To use just a few examples, just how many religions are there? How many conspiracy theories? How many miracle cures? Indeed, the vast majority of these, almost all LW readers will never investigate for essentially this sort of utility heuristic.

In response to comment by JoshuaZ on Abnormal Cryonics
Comment author: Vladimir_M 27 May 2010 12:37:02AM *  4 points [-]

JoshuaZ:

While some people might argue that they have no connection to the entity that will have their memories a few seconds from now, the vast majority of humans don't buy into that argument. If they don't, then it is hard to see how a human which is cooled and then revived is any different than a human which who has their heart stopped for a bit as they have a heart transplant, or for someone who stops breathing in a very cold environment for a few minutes, or someone who goes to sleep under an anesthesia, or even someone who goes to sleep normally and wakes up in the morning.

The problem here is one of continuum. We can easily imagine a continuum of procedures where on one end we have relatively small ones that intuitively appear to preserve the subject's identity (like sleep or anesthesia), and on the other end more radical ones that intuitively appear to end up destroying the original and creating a different person. By Buridan's principle, this situation implies that for anyone whose intuitions give different answers for the procedures at the opposite ends of the continuum, at least some procedures that lie inbetween will result in confused and indecisive intuitions. For me, cryonic revival seems to be such a point.

In any case, I honestly don't see any way to establish, as a matter of more than just subjective opinion, at which exact point in that continuum personal identity is no longer preserved.

Comment author: kodos96 26 May 2010 11:59:45PM 5 points [-]

In particular, I personally can't bring myself to feel any identification whatsoever with some computer program that runs a simulation of my brain

Would it change your mind if that computer program [claimed to] strongly identify with you?

In response to comment by kodos96 on Abnormal Cryonics
Comment author: Vladimir_M 27 May 2010 12:11:30AM 2 points [-]

I'm not sure I understand your question correctly. The mere fact that a program outputs sentences that express strong claims about identifying with me would not be relevant in any way I can think of. Or am I missing something in your question?

In response to Abnormal Cryonics
Comment author: Vladimir_M 26 May 2010 11:44:41PM *  15 points [-]

I haven't yet read and thought enough about this topic to form a very solid opinion, but I have two remarks nevertheless.

First, as some previous commenters have pointed out, most of the discussions of cryonics fail to fully appreciate the problem of weirdness signals. For people whose lives don't revolve around communities that are supportive of such undertakings, the cost of signaled weirdness can easily be far larger than the monetary price. Of course, you can argue that this is because the public opinion on the topic is irrational and deluded, but the point is that given the present state of public opinion, which is impossible to change by individual action, it is individually rational to take this cost into account. (Whether the benefits ultimately overshadow this cost is a different question.)

Second, it is my impression that many cryonics advocates -- and in particular, many of those whose comments I've read on Overcoming Bias and here -- make unjustified assertions about supposedly rational ways to decide the question of what entities one should identify oneself with. According to them, signing up for cryonics increases the chances that at some distant time in the future, in which you'll otherwise probably be dead and gone, some entity will exist with which it is rational to identify to the point where you consider it, for the purposes of your present decisions, to be the same as your "normal" self that you expect to be alive tomorrow.

This is commonly supported by arguing that your thawed and revived or uploaded brain decades from now is not a fundamentally different entity from you in any way that wouldn't also apply to your present brain when it wakes up tomorrow. I actually find these arguments plausible, but the trouble is that they, in my view, prove too much. What I find to be the logical conclusion of these arguments is that the notion of personal identity is fundamentally a mere subjective feeling, where no objective or rational procedure can be used to determine the right answer. Therefore, if we accept these arguments, there is no reason at all to berate as irrational people who don't feel any identification with these entities that cryonics would (hopefully) make it possible to summon into existence in the future.

In particular, I personally can't bring myself to feel any identification whatsoever with some computer program that runs a simulation of my brain, no matter how accurate, and no matter how closely isomorphic its data structures might be to the state of my brain at any point in time. And believe me, I have studied all the arguments for the contrary position I could find here and elsewhere very carefully, and giving my utmost to eliminate any prejudice. (I am more ambivalent about my hypothetical thawed and nanotechnologically revived corpse.) Therefore, in at least some cases, I'm sure that people reject cryonics not because they're too biased to assess the arguments in favor of it, but because they honestly feel no identification with the future entities that it aims to produce -- and I don't see how this different subjective preference can be considered "irrational" in any way.

That said, I am fully aware that these and other anti-cryonics arguments are often used as mere rationalizations for people's strong instinctive reactions triggered by the weirdness/yuckiness heuristics. Still, they seem valid to me.

In response to comment by Roko on Abnormal Cryonics
Comment author: taw 26 May 2010 10:28:01PM 3 points [-]

Interest rates over the past 20 years have been about 7%, implying that people's half-life of concern for the future is only about 15 years.

This is plain wrong. Most of these rates is inflation premium (premium for inflation you need to pay is higher than actual inflation because you also bear entire risk if inflation gets higher than predicted, and it cannot really get lower than predicted - it's not normally distributed).

Inflation-adjusted US treasury bonds have rates like 1.68% a year over last 12 years., and never really got much higher than 3%.

For most interest rates like the UK ones you quote there's non-negligible currency exchange risk and default risk in addition to all that.

In response to comment by taw on Abnormal Cryonics
Comment author: Vladimir_M 26 May 2010 11:04:28PM 1 point [-]

taw:

Inflation-adjusted US treasury bonds have rates like 1.68% a year over last 12 years., and never really got much higher than 3%.

Not to mention that even these figures are suspect. There is no single obvious or objectively correct way to calculate the numbers for inflation-adjustment, and the methods actually used are by no means clear, transparent, and free from political pressures. Ultimately, over a longer period of time, these numbers have little to no coherent meaning in any case.

Comment author: RobinZ 25 May 2010 08:51:48PM 1 point [-]

In the spirit of Morendil's question: what other professions should be shunning useful but low-status tools (particularly checklists) for the same reason as doctors, according to the status model? I don't know enough about (a) lawyers, (b) politicians, (c) businesspeople, (d) salespeople, or (e) other high status professions to judge either what your model would predict or what they do.

It's worth noting that engineering is (moderately-)high-status but involves risk of personal cost in case of error, making the fact that it shows widespread adherence to restrictive professional standards explicable under the status theory.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 26 May 2010 06:39:50PM *  3 points [-]

Now that's an interesting question! Off the top of my head, some occupations where I'd expect that status considerations interfere with the adoption of effective procedures would be:

  • Judges -- ultra-high status, near-zero discipline for incompetence.

  • Teaching, at all levels -- unrealistically high status (assuming you subscribe to the cynical theories about education being mostly a wasteful signaling effort), fairly weak control for competence, lacking even clear benchmarks of success.

  • Research in dubious areas -- similarly, high status coupled with weak incentives for producing sound work instead of junk science.

For example, there are research areas where statistical methods are used to reach "scientific" conclusions by researchers with august academic titles who are however completely stumped by the finer points of statistical inference. In some such areas, hiring a math B.A. to perform a list of routine checks for gross errors in statistics and logic would probably prevent the publication of more junk science than their entire peer review system. Yet I think status considerations would probably conspire against such a solution in many instances.

Comment author: pjeby 26 May 2010 05:24:18AM 4 points [-]

My impression is that status features more often and more prominently that most people imagine, and its often masqueraded and rationalized by pretenses of other motivations.

People just as routinely masquerade and rationalize the other three, actually.

However, that's because their operation is fairly opaque to consciousness. We have built-in machinery for processing social signals relating to Status and Affiliation, and during our "impressionable" years, we learn to value the things that are associated with them, and come to treat them as terminal values in themselves.

IOW, SASS is how we learn to have non-SASS terminal values. So, when a person claims to be acting out of a non-SASS value, they're not really lying. It's just that they're not usually aware of (i.e. have forgotten about) the triggers that shaped the acquisition of that value in the first place.

My hypothesis is that super-stimulation of the same urges that cause people to enjoy gossip is responsible for a significant part (though by no means all) of human enjoyment of books and other ways of presenting stories.

Plenty of other animals manage to be curious, needing actual stories. Also, some of us like to read things that aren't gossip or stories.

Presumably one could test your hypothesis by finding out whether individuals lose interest in reading when they gain status; my personal experience suggests this is not the case, and that instead books compete with other forms of stimulation.

So, ISTM that even if curiosity (and certain templates for what to be curious about) were shaped by status competition, this doesn't mean there is an operational connection between books and one's self-perception of status.

To a certain extent, we could say that everything is about status, in the same way that every organ is a reproductive organ. But saying that everything is X, is the same as saying as nothing is X - it reduces your predictive power, rather than increasing it.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 26 May 2010 07:10:37AM *  0 points [-]

In retrospect, I probably should have put more care into the wording of my comments in this thread (which I wrote more quickly and with less proofreading than usual). Several people have understood my positions as more extreme than I honestly meant them to be, and I evidently failed in conveying some of the more subtle points I had in mind.

While I agree with most of your above comment, there seems to be a major misunderstanding here (probably due to my lack of clarity):

Presumably one could test your hypothesis by finding out whether individuals lose interest in reading when they gain status; my personal experience suggests this is not the case, and that instead books compete with other forms of stimulation.

Well, insofar as reading is a directly status-related activity, nothing I hypothesized predicts that, nor is it the case in reality. In fact, if you enjoy high status as an intellectual, you are required to read a lot constantly to maintain that status; having nothing much to say when you're asked what you've read lately would be a major embarrassment. Of course, this is rarely by itself a very prominent motivation -- people who achieve high intellectual status usually have more than enough interest in reading out of curiosity and professional needs -- but I wouldn't say it's entirely negligible either, especially when it comes to trendy highbrow literature.

However, that's not at all what I had in mind with my reading-as-gossip-super-stimulus hypothesis. What I had in mind there is that the appeal of certain genres of literature and other storytelling media might be in part due to the fact that they stimulate the same urges that make people enjoy gossip. Thanks to these media, besides the thin diet of mundane real-world gossip, you get to enjoy huge amounts of artificial gossip skillfully crafted to be super-interesting, albeit about people who are fictional (or at least remote and personally irrelevant).

This mechanism has nothing at all to do with one's actual status and behaviors that influence it. The status connection here lies the fact that the gossip-enjoying urges had previously evolved under the influence of status dynamics, in which gossip is one of the key practical instruments. Their present stimulation with concentrated artificial gossip delivered via literature and other media no longer serves this function; it is merely stimulating an urge that evolved as an adaptation to a different environment.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 26 May 2010 02:18:19AM *  4 points [-]

A competent and comprehensive critique of the ideas from your post would require much more thought and background reading than I've invested into it so far, but nevertheless, this key part strikes me as problematic:

[I]f you combine a functionalist view of mind with big worlds cosmology, then reality becomes the quotient of the set of all possible computations, where all sub-computations that instantiate you are identified.

To talk about a quotient set or quotient space, you need a well-defined equivalence relation. But what would it be in this instance? The set of all possible computations that "instantiate you" in any meaningful sense is necessarily an extremely fuzzy concept, for reasons I'm sure I don't need to elaborate on here. So what exactly gets to be included into "your 'now'"?

One way out of this, I suppose, would be to note that once you unwrap all the definitions, every mathematical object in ZFC is a set (of sets of sets of... -- perhaps infinite, and with empty sets as "bottom" elements), and then define "your 'now'" as the class of sets that contain subsets (or sub-sub-...-sets) that are exactly isomorphic to some "yardstick" set that represents "your 'now'." (I.e. those instances of "you" that are different in any detail at all are in a completely different class, and have no more relation to "you" than any other ones.) Similar could be done, of course, not just in ZFC but in any other theory that is sufficient to formalize standard mathematics.

Is this anywhere close to what you have in mind, or am I just rambling in complete misapprehension?

Comment author: Morendil 25 May 2010 10:28:20PM 1 point [-]

a book, or a story told any other way, presents far more material (albeit fictional) for curiosity-satisfaction than is available from real-life events, and this material is intentionally and skillfully crafted to have great appeal in this regard

I read mostly non-fiction books, mostly to satisfy my curiosity. A recent example was "Freakonomics". That appears to defuse your argument...

so it clearly does provide a super-stimulus for this particular urge

I dispute that a book is a "superstimulus" in the same sense in which that term has predictive power when applied to herring gull parents, to the sexual arousal response in humans, or to the appeal of fast-food flavors. I am unwilling, more generally, to interpret the term "super-stimulus" broadly enough to encompass any case where a given behaviour is explained by an urge vaguely related to another urge that existed in the ancestral environment.

If books in general were superstimuli for some existing urge, then any book would elicit the hijacked response to that urge (and we would be able to make a book irresistible by exaggerating the relevant cues). Instead, I find myself discriminating quite sharply between "interesting" books and "boring" books. (For instance I can't stand the sight of most "trade" books that are supposed to appeal to programmers, like "Functional Programming in a Nutshell".)

if you have other examples that you believe refute my main thesis

Why do people knit? I'd say that the urges involved are mostly competence and caring, rather than status. Why do I learn how to solder, and take apart consumer electronics? Curiosity, not status.

The common theme is that caring, competence and curiosity did plausibly exist in the ancestral environment, so it isn't necessary to invoke status when there is a clearer link to other drives. I'm OK with having status (properly understood) take its rightful place in a pantheon of inherited drives, but it drives me nuts to see it trotted out to explain everything.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 26 May 2010 12:57:15AM *  2 points [-]

For some reason, we seem to be talking past each other -- you appear to be replying to an incomplete and exaggerated version of what I had in mind. I accept the possibility that this is because I expressed my ideas in a confusing and poorly worded manner, but whatever the reason, we seem to be stuck at this point.

Therefore, regarding the book-reading issue, I will try to restate a few key elements of my position briefly:

  • It was not my intention to set forth a complete theory of human motives for reading books, but merely to bring up several examples of motives that are, in my opinion, likely involved (sometimes exclusively) in a significant percentage of all instances of book-reading behaviors.

  • I did not claim, and it would indeed be absurd to claim, that all these motives, or even any particular one of them, play a role in every instance of book-reading behavior.

  • Neither did I claim, which would also be absurd, that these motives and their biological causes are present to the same extent across any given set of individuals. Consequently, neither do the reactions to any particular book necessarily have the same underlying motivation across any given set of individuals, even if they all happen to be positive (or in other respects behaviorally similar) for all members of that set.

  • Ultimately, the goal of discussing these examples was to demonstrate the difference between: (1) effective status-seeking behaviors, and (2) behaviors that just execute adaptations that originally evolved due to status-related reasons, but no longer serve status goals effectively in the modern environment. In particular, some instances of human book-reading behavior fall into one or both of these categories (which does not imply that even these particular instances don't involve other, unrelated motivations too).

Maybe not only my writing, but also my reading comprehension has been poor, but in your replies, I honestly don't see any objections that wouldn't either implicitly agree with what I said or rest on the misunderstanding of some of the above points.

The common theme is that caring, competence and curiosity did plausibly exist in the ancestral environment, so it isn't necessary to invoke status when there is a clearer link to other drives. I'm OK with having status (properly understood) take its rightful place in a pantheon of inherited drives, but it drives me nuts to see it trotted out to explain everything.

And this doesn't contradict anything I had in mind, nor anything I've written, unless my writing has been really poor (which possibility I allow for).

That said, when it comes to human behaviors where much is at stake in terms of power, prestige, and wealth, I believe it's hard to think of any in which status considerations don't play a significant role. In particular, when it comest to the issue that started this discussion, I have yet to see anyone elaborate on any plausible-sounding explanation that wouldn't revolve around status dynamics.

Comment author: pjeby 25 May 2010 09:21:27PM 1 point [-]

Note that I also mentioned "satisfying some urge that originally evolved as instrumental to human status games" in my above statement.

I just want to throw in a note that I don't think human motivation is adequately explained by status alone -- I would expand the list to SASS: Status, Affiliation, Safety, and Stimulation. (Where, as some folks here have pointed out, "Safety" might be more accurately described as stability, certainty, or control, rather than being purely about physical safety.)

Book-reading, in particular, is more likely to meet Safety/Stimulation needs than Status or Affiliation ones.... though you could maybe get those latter two from a book club or an academic setting.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 25 May 2010 09:58:46PM 1 point [-]

pjeby:

I just want to throw in a note that I don't think human motivation is adequately explained by status alone -- I would expand the list to SASS: Status, Affiliation, Safety, and Stimulation.

I agree, but most complex and multi-faceted human behaviors are likely to be compelled by a mixture of these motives. My impression is that status features more often and more prominently that most people imagine, and its often masqueraded and rationalized by pretenses of other motivations.

Book-reading, in particular, is more likely to meet Safety/Stimulation needs than Status or Affiliation ones.... though you could maybe get those latter two from a book club or an academic setting.

My hypothesis is that super-stimulation of the same urges that cause people to enjoy gossip is responsible for a significant part (though by no means all) of human enjoyment of books and other ways of presenting stories. This would be a good example of super-stimulating an urge whose original evolution was to a large degree driven by status games, in a way that however has no direct relation to the present-day status games.

Comment author: Morendil 25 May 2010 09:17:40PM 1 point [-]

I see no possible explanation of human book-reading except as a super-stimulus for some ancestral urges (whether status-related or not)

There's nothing "super" about a book: no corresponding "normal" stimulus that elicits a natural response, such that a book is an exaggerated version of it.

Book-reading is explained straightforwardly enough as satisfying curiosity, a trait we share with many species (think cats).

If reading a book sometimes trumps the quest for status, then the latter cannot be THE primary preoccupation of people beyond bare physical subsistence. You will at least need to retreat to "an important" preoccupation.

Now, if you were to explore this topic without jumping to conclusions, perhaps you'd recognize this one example as the start of a list, and would in an unbiased manner draw up a somewhat realistic list of the activities typical humans engage in, and sort them into "activities having a high status component" and "activities not primarily status-related". Then we might form a better picture of "how important".

Comment author: Vladimir_M 25 May 2010 09:49:17PM *  1 point [-]

Morendil:

There's nothing "super" about a book: no corresponding "normal" stimulus that elicits a natural response, such that a book is an exaggerated version of it.

I disagree, for the reasons I've already discussed at length. You don't seem to have read my above comment carefully, or perhaps my exposition was poor.

I did mention curiosity as one part of the motivation for reading books. Moreover, the curiosity explanation itself contradicts your above claim: a book, or a story told any other way, presents far more material (albeit fictional) for curiosity-satisfaction than is available from real-life events, and this material is intentionally and skillfully crafted to have great appeal in this regard, so it clearly does provide a super-stimulus for this particular urge.

Besides, as I also mentioned in my above post, there is also the human urge for gossip, which is pretty obviously related to status games, and is clearly super-stimulated by (at least some) books and other story-telling media. Finally, there is also the motivation of status seeking via demonstrating taste and erudition. All these, and possibly many other factors would probably feature in a complete theory of this particular human behavior.

If reading a book sometimes trumps the quest for status, then the latter cannot be THE primary preoccupation of people beyond bare physical subsistence. You will at least need to retreat to "an important" preoccupation

Again, you don't seem to understand my point about the difference between: (1) human behaviors that actually enhance status, or promote goals that lead towards its enhancement, and (2) behaviors driven by urges that had originally evolved for status-seeking purposes in the ancestral environment, but which misfire in the modern environment -- just like e.g. the human taste for sugar was a good nutritional heuristic in a sugar-poor environment, but leads us to bad nutritional choices in the present environment full of cheap sugar-rich super-stimuli.

Now, if you were to explore this topic without jumping to conclusions, perhaps you'd recognize this one example as the start of a list, and would in an unbiased manner draw up a somewhat realistic list of the activities typical humans engage in, and sort them into "activities having a high status component" and "activities not primarily status-related". Then we might form a better picture of "how important".

But as I explained above, you don't seem to have understood my remarks about this example correctly. (I allow for the possibility that my writing was too bad to be understandable, of course.) I've explained the issue again now, and my conclusion is still that your example is incorrect. If you believe that my reasoning in this case is invalid, or if you have other examples that you believe refute my main thesis, I'd love to hear your arguments, but please make sure to address the substance of what I've written.

Comment author: Morendil 25 May 2010 07:50:29PM 3 points [-]

The reason I attach high plausibility to such explanations is simply that status is the primary preoccupation of humans as soon as their barest physical subsistence needs are met.

At the very least this seems to be privileging an extraversion hypothesis. You can only gain status by interacting in some way with other people, yet it is not uncommon for people to shun company and instead devote time to solitary occupations with scant status benefits.

Under your justification for favoring status explanations, the only reason anyone ever reads a book is to brag about it. This seems wrong, prima facie, as well as simplistic.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 25 May 2010 08:29:00PM *  2 points [-]

Morendil:

You can only gain status by interacting in some way with other people, yet it is not uncommon for people to shun company and instead devote time to solitary occupations with scant status benefits. Under your justification for favoring status explanations, the only reason anyone ever reads a book is to brag about it. This seems wrong, prima facie, as well as simplistic.

Note that I also mentioned "satisfying some urge that originally evolved as instrumental to human status games" in my above statement. Today's world is full of super-stimuli that powerfully resonate with ancestral urges even though they don't actually lead towards the goals that these urges had originally evolved to promote, and are often even antithetical to these goals. Just like candy bars cheat the heuristic urges that evolved to identify nutritious and healthy food in the ancestral environment, it is reasonable to expect that solitary occupations with scant (or even negative) status benefits cheat the heuristic urges that originally evolved as useful in status games, or for furthering some other goal that they no longer achieve reliably in the modern environment.

You will probably agree that super-stimulation of status-seeking urges explains at least some non-beneficial solitary activities with high plausibility, for example when people neglect their real-life responsibilities by getting caught up in the thrill of virtual leadership and accomplishment provided by video-games. Of course, this by no means applies to all such activities; it is likely that the enjoyment found in some of them is rooted in urges that evolved for different reasons.

To address your above example, unless we assume some supernatural component of the human mind, I see no possible explanation of human book-reading except as a super-stimulus for some ancestral urges (whether status-related or not), unless of course it's done not for enjoyment, but purely to acquire information necessary for other goals. While it's far from being a complete explanation of human book-reading, it seems plausible to me that people sometimes enjoy books in part because it enhances their status signaling abilities in matters of erudition and taste. Also, it seems to me that stories super-stimulate the human urges for gossip, which are likely a device with an original status-related purpose, and all sorts of complex information may super-stimulate curiosity, whose evolution has likely been only partly status-based. These are of course just rough outlines of the complete truth, which we don't yet know.

On the other hand, to get back to the original topic, when it comes to issues where actual power and prestige in human societies is at stake, in any case I've ever given much thought, the prominent role of widespread status-related beliefs and behaviors seems to me strikingly obvious and without any rival explanations that would be even remotely as plausible. The ability to account for such explanations by evolutionary theories additionally enhances their plausibility, as well as the fact that many deep and accurate insights into human nature by classical writers and philosophers can be faithfully retold in the more explicit modern language of status dynamics.

Comment author: Morendil 25 May 2010 01:19:49PM 2 points [-]

That analysis would be inconsistent with my understanding of how checklists have been adopted in, say, civilian aviation: extensive analysis of the rare disaster leading to the creation of new procedures.

Again, my point was to prompt an alternative explanation to the hypothesis "checklists are not used by surgeons because the practice is intrinsically low-status". Why (other than the OB-inherited obsession of the LW readership with "status") does this hypothesis seem favored at the outset?

How would we go about weighing this hypothesis against alternatives? For instance, "checklists are not used because surgeons in movies never use them", or "checklists are not used because surgeons are not trained to understand the difference between a checklist and a shopping list", or "checklists are not used because surgeons are reluctant to change their practices until it becomes widely accepted that the change has a proven beneficial impact"?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 25 May 2010 07:18:15PM *  6 points [-]

Morendil:

That analysis would be inconsistent with my understanding of how checklists have been adopted in, say, civilian aviation: extensive analysis of the rare disaster leading to the creation of new procedures.

One relevant difference is that the medical profession is at liberty to self-regulate more than probably any other, which is itself an artifact of their status. Observe how e.g. truckers are rigorously regulated because it's perceived as dangerous if they drive tired and sleep-deprived, but patients are routinely treated by medical residents working under the regime of 100+ hour weeks and 36-hour shifts.

Even the recent initiatives for regulatory limits on the residents' work hours are presented as a measure that the medical profession has gracefully decided to undertake in its wisdom and benevolence -- not by any means as an external government imposition to eradicate harmful misbehavior, which is the way politicians normally talk about regulation. (Just remember how they speak when regulation of e.g. oil or finance industries is in order.)

Why (other than the OB-inherited obsession of the LW readership with "status") does this hypothesis seem favored at the outset?

The reason I attach high plausibility to such explanations is simply that status is the primary preoccupation of humans as soon as their barest physical subsistence needs are met. Whenever you see humans doing something without an immediate instrumental purpose, there is a very high chance that it's a status-oriented behavior, or at least behavior aimed at satisfying some urge that originally evolved as instrumental to human status games.

How would we go about weighing this hypothesis against alternatives?

The alternatives you mentioned are by no means incompatible with status-based explanations, and some of them are in fact reducible to it. For example, the behavior of doctors in TV shows is a reflection of the whole complex of popular beliefs and attitudes from which the medical profession draws its extraordinary status -- and which in turn shapes these beliefs and attitudes to some extent. So, as I wrote in one of my other comments, if doctor TV shows started showing cool-looking checklist rituals prior to the characters' heroic exploits, these rituals would probably develop a prestigious image, like countdown procedures in action movies, which would likely facilitate their adoption in practice.

Comment author: Morendil 25 May 2010 05:56:31AM 0 points [-]

So your narrative is "checklists fail to take root because they are low-status, except where their being a serious matter for the people who use them (not just bystanders) causes them to be accepted, and in one such case they gain high status for extraneous reasons".

Why, then, isn't the rising cost of malpractice insurance enough to drive acceptance of checklists? What does it take to overcome an initial low-status perception? How do we even explain such perception in the first place?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 25 May 2010 07:10:38AM *  0 points [-]

Morendil:

Why, then, isn't the rising cost of malpractice insurance enough to drive acceptance of checklists?

My understanding is that the present (U.S.) system of malpractice lawsuits and insurance doesn't leave much incentive for extraordinary caution by individual doctors. Once you've paid your malpractice insurance, which you have to do in any case, you're OK as long as your screwups aren't particularly extreme by the usual standards. Moreover, members of the profession hold their ranks together very tightly, and will give up on you only in cases of extremely reckless misbehavior. They know that unlike their public image, they are in fact mere humans, and any one of them might find himself in the same trouble due to some stupid screwup tomorrow. And to establish a malpractice claim, you need not only be smart enough to figure out that they've done something bad to you, but also get expert testimony from distinguished members of the profession to agree with you.

I am not very knowledgeable about this topic, though, so please take this as my impression based on anecdotal data and incomplete exposure to the relevant literature. It would be interesting if someone more knowledgeable is available to comment.

What does it take to overcome an initial low-status perception?

I'd say that in a sense, it's a collective action problem. The pre-flight checks done by fighter pilots (and even to some extent by ordinary pilots) are perceived as cool-looking rituals, and not a status-lowering activity at all, because these procedures have come to be associated with the jobs of high-status individuals. Similarly, if there was a cool-looking checklist procedure done by those doctors on TV shows, presented as something that is only a necessary overture for acts of brilliance and heroism, and automatically associated with doctors in the popular mind, it would come to be perceived as a cool high-status thing. But as it is, in the present state of affairs, it comes off as a status-lowering imposition on people whose jobs are supposed to be one hundred percent about brilliance and heroism.

Also, there is the problem of the doctor-nurse status disparity. Pilots, despite having much higher status, don't look down on their mechanics much; after all, they have to literally trust them with their lives. (And it's similar for other military examples too.) Not so for doctors; it is probably a humiliating experience for them to be effectively supervised and rebuked for errors by nurses. (Again, I'm not an insider in the profession, so this is just my best guess based on the available information.)

How do we even explain such perception in the first place?

The above cited article answers that question almost directly: the idea that typical doctors are doing such a lousy job that they would benefit from a simple checklist to avoid forgetting trivial routine things contradicts the very source of their high status, namely the public perception of them as individuals of extraordinary character and intellectual abilities, completely unlike us ordinary folks who screw things up all the time by stupidly forgetting some simple detail. The author, as I noted earlier, feels the need to disclaim such implications to avoid sounding too radical and offensive. Medicine has been a subject of magical thinking in every human culture, and ours is no exception.

Comment author: Morendil 23 May 2010 11:06:37AM 4 points [-]

Anyone have histories of de-professionalization in any field?

Journalism, ongoing, according to some. Clay Shirky's book Here comes everybody makes an interesting link between this process and Ronald Coase's theory of the firm.

However, checklists are low status

Surely not intrisically. Think of astronauts' checklists.

Suggestion: instead of "low status" as an explanation for why people do or don't do something, look for something closer to the specific domain. (Is it possible that doctors' practice is much influenced by media portrayal of how doctors behave? By expectations of their "customers"?)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 25 May 2010 12:31:47AM *  6 points [-]

Morendil:

Surely not intrisically. Think of astronauts' checklists.

Astronauts are soldiers. Unlike doctors, soldiers have a huge incentive not to let their beliefs depart too far from reality because of status or any other considerations, for the simple reason that it may easily cause them personally, and not just someone else, to get killed or maimed. Thus, military culture is extremely practice-oriented. Due to their universal usefulness, checklist-driven procedures are a large part of it, and having to participate in them is not considered demeaning, even for super-high-status soldiers like fighter pilots. Eventually, strict rule-driven procedures associated with the military often even develop a cool factor of their own (consider launch or takeoff scenes from war action movies).

Of course, soldiers who lack such incentives will, like WW1 generals, quickly develop usual human delusions driven by status dynamics. But astronauts are clearly not in that category.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 23 May 2010 10:31:08AM *  9 points [-]

Gawande on checklists and medicine

Checklists are literally life-savers in ICUs-- there's just too much crucial which needs to be done, and too many interruptions, to avoid serious mistakes without offloading some of the work of memory onto an system.

However, checklists are low status.

Something like this is going on in medicine. We have the means to make some of the most complex and dangerous work we do—in surgery, emergency care, and I.C.U. medicine—more effective than we ever thought possible. But the prospect pushes against the traditional culture of medicine, with its central belief that in situations of high risk and complexity what you want is a kind of expert audacity—the right stuff, again. Checklists and standard operating procedures feel like exactly the opposite, and that’s what rankles many people.

It’s ludicrous, though, to suppose that checklists are going to do away with the need for courage, wits, and improvisation. The body is too intricate and individual for that: good medicine will not be able to dispense with expert audacity. Yet it should also be ready to accept the virtues of regimentation.

I suggest that the problem starts earlier than rock-starism. Conventional schooling still tests on memory, and I think there's a leftover effect that one ought to be able to remember the basics, or be shown to be an inferior sort of person.

Sidetrack into science fiction: Varley's Eight Worlds stories have it that medicine has become so advanced and routinized that it's a low status occupation for people who want to work with their hands. When I read the stories, I wondered if he was getting a little indirect revenge on doctors. I do wonder what it could take for that to happen to medicine. Anyone have histories of de-professionalization in any field?

There's also a book: The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right:

Comment author: Vladimir_M 25 May 2010 12:12:04AM *  2 points [-]

Yes, there is a powerful irrational status-driven reaction against the idea that something so rudimentary as checklists could improve the work of people who are a subject of high status reverence and magical thinking. Note how even in this article, the author feels the need for pious disclaimers, denying emphatically in the part you quoted that this finding presents any evidence against the heroic qualities of character and intellect that the general public ascribes to doctors.

Of course, the fact that this method dramatically inverts the status hierarchy by letting nurses effectively supervise doctors doesn't help either. In our culture, when it comes to immense status differences between people who work closely together, relations between doctors and nurses are probably comparable only to those between commissioned officers and ordinary soldiers. I don't think such a wide chasm separates even household servants from their employers.

This reminds me of the historical case of Ignaz Semmelweis, who figured out in mid-19th century, before Pasteur and the germ theory of disease, that doctors could avoid killing lots of their patients simply by washing their hands in disinfectant before operations. The reaction of the medical establishment was unsurprising by the usual rules of human status dynamics -- his ideas were scornfully rejected as silly and arrogant pseudoscience. What effrontery to suggest that the august medical profession has been massively killing people by failing to implement such a simple measure! Poor Semmelweis, scorned, ostracized, and depressed, turned to alcoholism and eventually died in an insane asylum. Hand-washing yesterday, checklists today.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 23 May 2010 06:54:18PM 1 point [-]

That's a plausible argument. A priori, one could have a three-dimensional world with some other inverse law, and it would be mathematically consistent. It would just be weird (and would rule out a lot simple causation mechanisms for the force.)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 24 May 2010 07:53:28PM *  3 points [-]

Well, we do inhabit a three-dimensional world in which the inverse-square law holds only approximately, and when a more accurate theory was arrived upon, it turned out to be weird and anything but simple.

Interestingly, when the perihelion precession of Mercury turned out be an unsolvable problem for Newton's theory, there were serious proposals to reconsider whether the exponent in Newton's law might perhaps be not exactly two, but some other close number:

As a result of the failures to arrive at a realistic Newtonian explanation for the anomalous precession, some researchers, notably Asaph Hall and [Simon] Newcomb, began to think that perhaps Newtonian theory was at fault, and that perhaps gravity isn't exactly an inverse square law. Hall noted that he could account for Mercury's precession if the law of gravity, instead of falling off as 1/r^2, actually falls of as 1/r^n where the exponent n is 2.00000016.

Of course, in the sort of space that general relativity deals with, our Euclidean intuitive concept of "distance" completely breaks down, and r itself is no longer an automatically clear concept. There are actually several different general-relativistic definitions of "spatial distance" that all make some practical sense and correspond to our intuitive concept in the classical limit, but yield completely different numbers in situations where Euclidean/Newtonian approximations no longer hold.

Comment author: humpolec 23 May 2010 10:20:41AM *  0 points [-]

Let's suppose Church-Turing thesis is true.

Are all mathematical problems solvable?

Are they all solvable to humans?

If there is a proof* for every true theorem, then we need only to enumerate all possible texts and look for one that proves - or disproves - say, Goldbach's conjecture. The procedure will stop every time.

(* Proof not in the sense of "formal proof in a specific system", but "a text understandable by a human as a proof".)

But this can't possibly be right - if the human mind that looks at the proofs is Turing-computable, then we've just solved the Halting Problem - after all, we can pose the halting of any Turing machine as a mathematical problem.

So what does that mean?

  • Not all true theorems have a proof? (what does that even mean)
  • Not all proofs are possible to follow by a human? (very pessimistic, in my opinion)
  • Some other answer I'm missing?

You can also extend the question to any human-made AIs/posthuman minds, but this doesn't help much - if the one looking at proofs can reliably self-improve, then the Halting Problem would still be solved.

EDIT: A longer explanation of the problem, by a friend.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 24 May 2010 06:56:41PM *  2 points [-]

You seem to be somewhat confused about the basic notions of computability and Goedel's incompleteness results and their mutual connection. Besides the replies you've received in this thread, I'd recommend that you read through this lecture by Scott Aaronson, which is, out of anything I've seen so far, the clearest and most accessible brief exposition of these issues that is still fully accurate and free of nonsense:
http://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec3.html

Comment author: GreenRoot 24 May 2010 03:54:07AM 4 points [-]

more than 80% of marriages involve the woman receiving an expensive diamond engagement ring from the man -- which is just one element that indicates fundamental asymmetry in their strategic positions.

No so much anymore, in most states of the US. If the proposal is accepted, the ring becomes a part of the couple's community property. If the proposal is rejected, the man gets the ring back (it is legally considered a "conditional gift" in most states, which the prospective fianceé must return if she refuses or breaks off the engagement). Either way, the ring remains the property of the proposer, so it doesn't really cost him anything to propose.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 24 May 2010 04:28:31AM *  9 points [-]

You're right that engagement rings have mostly lost their former economic function as a collateral of commitment. However, despite these legal changes, it's not correct to say that the ring doesn't cost the proposer anything. If the engagement is broken, he'll get it back, but it can't be resold for anything near the original price, and reuse for a subsequent woman is out of the question (well, he could try, but it would be considered an insulting move leading to a near-certain disaster, and if he tried it surreptitiously, the consequences would be even more catastrophic if discovered). Moreover, even as a part of the couple's community property, it's a white elephant asset that will never be sold except in direst desperation, doesn't yield any rent or interest, and just sucks up money for insurance, so for all practical purposes, the man has parted with a significant amount of money by buying it.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 23 May 2010 09:53:27AM 2 points [-]

For what it's worth, I recently heard or read a piece (i I don't have a cite) claiming that marriage proposals in the old sense are becoming less common.

Instead, marriage is discussed in advance, possibly for months, instead of the man making a surprise offer.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 24 May 2010 02:29:01AM *  4 points [-]

I don't have the exact numbers at hand, but I'm pretty sure that in the overwhelming majority of cases, marriages are still preceded by rituals and customs with greatly different sex roles. For example, quick googling yields this Slate article according to which more than 80% of marriages involve the woman receiving an expensive diamond engagement ring from the man -- which is just one element that indicates fundamental asymmetry in their strategic positions.

Even if more and more marriages deviate from the most standard norm, it still means that the sides typically aren't faced with equivalent strategic situations in the highly ritualized negotiation process, which is relevant for the question of what happens when non-standard approaches are attempted that risk blowing things up by signaling weirdness. But this is a complex topic on which much time could easily be spent.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 23 May 2010 10:10:00AM 7 points [-]

Weirdness isn't a single thing, nor is it reliably that crippling.

There are a lot of married people in science fiction fandom. And a lot of employed people, though I believe a great many of them conceal their weirdness from their employers.

A few moderating factors for weirdness-- you might have an advantage with mates whose weirdness matches yours. This is most obvious for sexual minorities.

Sub-cultures are a way for people to be weird together-- they represent a local, variant sort of normal. This probably won't have the same advantages as mainstream normal, but it's less costly than being weird all by yourself.

Some weirdness is actually advantageous, or at least Reform Jews and Unitarians have higher incomes than the average.

If there are really advantages to a particular non-standard marriage contract, then talking about wanting that contract is as much a test for finding a compatible mate as it is a debility.

To my mind, the big risk of non-standard contract is that there's likely to be much less information about its effects than there is for a standard contract.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 24 May 2010 02:07:54AM *  7 points [-]

NancyLebovitz:

Sub-cultures are a way for people to be weird together-- they represent a local, variant sort of normal. This probably won't have the same advantages as mainstream normal, but it's less costly than being weird all by yourself.

That is true, but you understate the case here. If there is a significant subculture where your particular weirdness is the norm, it's a far more advantageous position than having a peculiar individual weirdness, not just because other individuals are around with whom you can establish social relations that won't suffer from the weirdness signal, but also because its existence and public prominence demonstrates to the wider society that this particular sort of weirdness is compatible with, and in fact typically accompanied by, being a well-behaved, functional, and productive person. (This of course assuming that your subculture actually is like that; if the subculture attracts lots of deviants and the consequent bad press, it may well make things even worse.) Under these conditions, the relevant characteristic will no longer trigger people's weirdness heuristics, and it will move under the entirely different category of minority taste -- which can still have repercussions for one's social relations and status, but far milder ones. I would say that the sci-fi fan subculture falls squarely into this category.

Your example of sexual minorities provides another illustration. Observe how those sexual minorities that have struggled successfully for improved status in recent decades have basically followed this public relations tactic: presenting themselves as groups of folks who are on average no less functional, productive, and well-behaved than the rest of society, and insisting that therefore their peculiar characteristics should not trigger people's weirdness alarms. This is also why mentioning particular behaviors that are viewed negatively in the wider society, and arguably more prevalent in some such groups, is often taken as prima facie evidence of underhanded hostility against them -- it threatens to reinforce the weirdness heuristics that are still turned against them in the minds of significant numbers of people.

Some weirdness is actually advantageous, or at least Reform Jews and Unitarians have higher incomes than the average.

I don't think any religious affiliation sends off significant weirdness signals in the modern North American culture, except out-and-out loony cults and a small number of denominations that, for various reasons, have a bad public image and thus give off a cultish vibe. Certainly, Reform Jews and Unitarians seem to me well within the standard perceptions of the bounds of normality.

Of course, there are plenty of religious folks who insist on marrying someone of the same religion, as well as atheist folks who couldn't bear being married to someone religious, but such incompatibilities arise due to a simple acknowledgment of incompatible tastes, values, and goals, not because people's weirdness heuristics get triggered.

To my mind, the big risk of non-standard contract is that there's likely to be much less information about its effects than there is for a standard contract.

Yes -- and this is only one of the many reasons why weirdness heuristics are on the whole statistically sound. When people offer you deals that seem weird, very much unlike the way things normally done in your culture, there is a non-negligible probability that you might get swindled in ways you're not smart and knowledgeable enough to figure out.

Comment author: SilasBarta 23 May 2010 05:38:00PM *  1 point [-]

maybe I could try a similar parable about a world in which there's a severe, brutally enforced religious taboo against smoking and a widespread belief that it's unhealthy, and then when the enlightened opinion turns against the religious beliefs and norms of old, smoking becomes a symbol of progress and freethinking

Actually, you might be surprised to learn that Randian Objectivists held a similar view (or at least Rand herself did), that smoking is a symbol of man's[1] harnessing of fire by the power of reason. Here's a video that caricatures the view (when they get to talking about smoking).

I don't think they actually denied its harmful health effects though.

ETA: [1] Rand's gendered language, not mine.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 24 May 2010 01:08:12AM *  1 point [-]

Yes, I'm familiar with this. Though in fairness, I've read conflicting reports about it, with some old-guard Randians claiming that they all stopped smoking once, according to them, scientific evidence for its damaging effects became convincing. I don't know how much (if any) currency denialism on this issue had among them back in the day.

Rothbard's "Mozart was a Red" is a brilliant piece of satire, though! I'm not even that familiar with the details of Rand's life and personality, but just from the behavior and attitudes I've seen from her contemporary followers, every line of it rings with hilarious parody.

Comment author: John_Maxwell_IV 23 May 2010 12:27:09AM 1 point [-]

Weirdness signals characteristics like not being a hard worker or not behaving in a predictable manner, which are more important in an employee than a spouse.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 23 May 2010 07:15:24AM *  7 points [-]

Even if the only bad traits signaled by weirdness were those disliked by employers, that would still automatically make them relevant for potential spouses too. Unemployability, or even reduced employability, is normally a highly undesirable trait in a spouse.

Moreover, weirdness has many other bad consequences too. In all sorts of relations between people, including informal and non-commercial ones, weird behavior provokes rumors and ostracism, increases the probability of conflicts, makes finding friends and allies difficult, and typically binds one to very low status. It also signals higher probability of increasingly weird behavior in the future, which might result in all sorts of nasty situations, including legal problems and violent incidents. Since people typically expect to spend the larger part of their life with their chosen spouse, they are rational to err on the side of caution and break the deal as soon as any statistically sound heuristic raises alarm.

Of course, there are exceptions. On occasions, someone's peculiar individual weirdness becomes fashionable for art and entertainment purposes, making it a ticket to high status and perhaps even wealth. Alternatively, a potential spouse might share one's peculiar taste for weirdness and consider it a plus. But I don't see how these exceptions, or any others I can think of, are relevant for the particular case we're discussing, namely weirdness signaled by shifting the customary rules and rituals of marriage negotiation by means of an odd-looking legal innovation.

Comment author: Nisan 23 May 2010 05:45:53AM 1 point [-]

many men would probably believe it to be worth the price.

Women too, presumably?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 23 May 2010 06:22:02AM *  0 points [-]

I was referring to the specific situation from the linked story. But yes, of course, an analogous comment would apply in the reverse case. Though there would be significant differences in more subtle details of the situation, since the relevant customs and rituals don't feature identical expected roles for the sexes. Consider e.g. who is expected to make the marriage proposal, which obviously influences the initial and consequent state of the negotiation (or conflict, as per Schelling). (Even in those unconventional cases where these norms aren't followed, the very fact of deviation from the norm and its acknowledgment have significant consequences.)

Comment author: John_Maxwell_IV 22 May 2010 09:12:01PM 4 points [-]

Caplan explains why weirdness aversion makes sense for employers, not people in general.

Just about everyone may have an aversion to weirdness, but you'd also refuse to marry just about everyone, isn't that right?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 22 May 2010 10:02:31PM *  2 points [-]

In both cases, sending off strong weirdness signals significantly reduces one's chances of finding any sort of employment, or wife, at all — and even if some options remain available, they are inferior to what would be available without the weirdness signal.

I am not sure I understand what exactly you believe to be the essential difference between the two situations, so that the same signaling model doesn't apply in both.

Comment author: Blueberry 22 May 2010 09:28:33PM 0 points [-]

It's just that polite men instinctively watch their mouths when women or authority figures are within hearing distance

This would be extremely surprising to me if true. This sounds like something that was true in the 1950s, but does this really match your experience today? In my experience, at least among people under 30 or so, there is no difference between how guys and girls act in social situations when there are, or are not, members of the opposite sex around. (Business or formal situations are different.)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 22 May 2010 09:50:18PM *  1 point [-]

Well, I have no evidence except anecdotal to present, but yes, this does match my experience. It surely doesn't apply to all individuals, social groups, and occasions, but I observe it regularly, and I have to personally plead guilty to a certain degree of such inconsistency. Especially when, for example, a guy gets dumped or rejected and wants to vent a bit by rambling about the evilness of the girl in question, or women in general, it definitely seems likely to me that much cruder rants can be produced in an exclusive company of close, trusted male friends than otherwise.

In any case, even if this is true only for a minority of men, my main point still holds, i.e. there are non-negligible numbers of men around who, despite being perfectly respectable by all other criteria, engage in crude language about women and male-female relations on some occasions when no women are around to hear it. For this reason, women are often biased in that they tend to interpret such language, when observed, as unrealistically strong evidence of serious character flaws in the man in question.

Comment author: John_Maxwell_IV 22 May 2010 07:18:14PM 5 points [-]

So why are you thinking of marrying someone who has this sort of aversion to weirdness?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 22 May 2010 07:45:56PM *  7 points [-]

Trouble is, just about everyone does. It's another regular part of the human social signaling games.

I know I've been citing Bryan Caplan an awful lot lately, but he really has a knack for explaining this sort of thing with magnificent clarity, so I'll point to his classic blog post "Why Be Normal?":

http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2005/03/why_be_normal.html

Comment author: CarlShulman 22 May 2010 06:08:52PM 13 points [-]

The nonweird version of this is "my parents or business partners demand it."

Comment author: Vladimir_M 22 May 2010 07:41:08PM *  1 point [-]

You're right: http://blogs.forward.com/the-bintel-brief/121028/

This of course comes at the risk of stirring up bad blood between your wife and parents, but since people don't care that much about extended families these days, many men would probably believe it to be worth the price. In any case, it is an interesting Schellingian real-life story.

Comment author: Alicorn 22 May 2010 04:26:16AM *  13 points [-]

Even if it's unenforceable, it changes the dynamic of raising the question. In the normal state, asking for a paternity test could reasonably cause offense - "Are you saying I cheated?". Writing up the contract makes the test the default, and then not wanting the test would be suspicious - "What, now you change your mind? You said you'd test them all."

Comment author: Vladimir_M 22 May 2010 04:29:01AM *  2 points [-]

Yes, but would be the advantage of formalizing such a deal in a prenup, rather than just committing yourself to it verbally and informally? Why waste the money for the lawyer fees?

Comment author: Alicorn 22 May 2010 01:42:31AM 25 points [-]

I decided a few weeks ago that upon getting married I will sign a pre-nup which specifies that all of my children will receive paternity testing without exception. This constrains my options in a way that prevents goal distortion in myself and certain types of mistrust in the hypothetical husband.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 22 May 2010 04:23:55AM 1 point [-]

I don't understand how that would make sense. What happens if you renege on such a contract, and how does it change things relative to the normal situation anyway? Even without any contract, if your husband wants to test the kid no matter what, he can dispute paternity until the test is done and the evidence is there. The details of course vary between jurisdictions, but I think this should be the case pretty much everywhere.

(Also, I'm not a lawyer, but I'm not sure if contracts of this sort would be enforceable in any case. From what I've red, prenups are ruled unconscionable fairly easily, and I can easily imagine a judge finding this sort of thing ethically fishy. But I'm just speculating here; if someone more knowledgeable is around, it would be interesting to hear from them.)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 22 May 2010 04:09:49AM 19 points [-]

How would you get around the problem of the weirdness signal sent by such a measure? Sure, if everyone was doing it, there would be no such problem, but if you assume away the problem of collective action, many other more convenient solutions are also available in that idealized world. If you're the only one doing it, I would say that the weirdness signal is likely to be more dangerous once she finds out about it than if you just said openly "I want a prenup, here's the deal, and it's my way or the highway."

Comment author: Jack 21 May 2010 03:50:01PM *  3 points [-]

So if we think about the epistemological issue space in terms of a Venn diagram we can imagine the following circles all of which intersect:

1. Ubiquitous (Outside: non-ubiquitous). Subject areas where prejudgement is ubiquitous are problematic because finding a qualified neutral arbitrator is difficult, nearly everyone is invested in the outcome.

2. Contested, either there is no consensus among authorities, the legitimacy of the authorities is in question or there are no relevant authorities. (Outside: uncontested). Obviously, not being able to appeal to authorities makes rational belief more difficult.

3. Invested (Outside: Non-invested). People have incentives for believing some things rather than others for reasons other than evidence. When people are invested in beliefs motivated skepticism is a common result.

3a. Entangled (untangled) In some cases people can be easily separated from the incentives that lead them to be invested in some belief (for example, when they have financial incentives. But sometime the incentives are so entangled with the agents and the proposition that they is no easy procedure that lets us remove the incentives.

3ai. Progressive (Traditional). Cases of entangled invested beliefs can roughly and vaguely be divided into those aligned with progress and those aligned with tradition.

So we have a diagram of three concentric circles (invested, entangled, progressive) bisected by a two circle diagram (ubiquitous, contested).

Now it seems clear that membership in every one of these sets makes an issue harder to think rationally, with one exception. How do beliefs aligned to progress differ structurally from beliefs aligned to tradition? What do we need to do differently for one over the other? Because we might as well address both at the same time if there is no difference.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 22 May 2010 01:22:57AM *  4 points [-]

That's an excellent way of putting it, which brings a lot of clarity to my clumsy exposition! To answer your question, yes, the same essential mechanism I discussed is at work in both progressive and traditional biases -- the desire that facts should provide convenient support for normative beliefs causes bias in factual beliefs, regardless of whether these normative beliefs are cherished as achievements of progress or revered as sacred tradition. However, I think there are important practical differences that merit some separate consideration.

The problem is that traditionalist vs. progressive biases don't appear randomly. They are correlated with many other relevant human characteristics. In particular, my hypothesis is that people with formidable rational thinking skills -- who, compared to other people, have much less difficulty with overcoming their biases once they're pointed out and critically dissecting all sorts of unpleasant questions -- tend to have a very good detector for biases and false beliefs of the traditionalist sort, but they find it harder to recognize and focus on those of the progressive sort.

What this means is that in practice, when exceptionally rational people see some group feeling good about their beliefs because these beliefs are a revered tradition, they'll immediately smell likely biases and turn their critical eye on it. On the other hand, when they see people feeling good about their beliefs because they are a result of progress over past superstition and barbarism, they are in danger of assuming without justification that the necessary critical work has already been done, so everything is OK as it is. Also, in the latter sort of situation, they will relatively easily assume that the only existing controversy is between the rational progressive view and the remnants of the past superstition, although reality could be much more complex. This could even conceivably translate into support for the mainstream progressive view even if it has strayed into all sorts of biases and falsities.

So, basically, when we consider what biases and false beliefs could be hiding in things that are presently a matter of consensus, things that it just doesn't even occur to anyone reputable to question, it seems to me that there is a greater chance of finding those that are hiding in your (3ai) category than in the rest of (3a). Thus, I would propose a heuristic that, I believe, has the potential to detect a lot of biases we are unaware of: just like you get suspicious as soon as you see people happy and content with their traditional beliefs, you should also get suspicious whenever you see a consensus that progress has been achieved on some issue, both normatively and factually, where however the factual part is not supported by strict hard-scientific evidence and there is a high degree of normative/factual entanglement.

Comment author: Nisan 21 May 2010 09:37:28PM 8 points [-]

I can think of several hot-button issues that are analogous to this parable — or would be, if the parable were modified as follows:

  • As science progresses, religious figures lose some power and prestige, but manage to hold on to quite a bit of it. Old superstitions and taboos perish at different rates in different communities, and defying them is considered more cool and progressive in some subcultures and cities. Someone will eat fruit X on television and the live audience will applaud, but a grouchy old X-phobe watching the show will grumble about it.

  • A conference with the stated goal of exploring possible health detriments of X will attract people interested in thinking rationally about public health, as well as genuine X-phobes. The two kinds of people don't look any different.

  • The X-phobes pick up science and rationality buzzwords and then start jabbering about the preliminary cherrypicked scientific results impugning X, with their own superstition and illogical arguments mixed in. Twentysomething crypto-X-phobes seeking to revitalize their religion now claim that their religion is really all about protecting people from the harms of X, and feed college students subtle misinterpretations of the scientific evidence. In response to all this, Snopes.com gets to work discrediting any claim of the form "X is bad". The few rational scientists studying the harmfulness of X are shunned by their peers.

What's a rationalist to do? Personally, whenever I hear someone say "I think we should seriously consider the possibility that such-and-such may be true, despite it being politically incorrect", I consider it more likely than not that they are privileging the hypothesis. People have to work hard to convince me of their rationality.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 22 May 2010 12:00:13AM *  3 points [-]

Yes, that would certainly make the parable much closer to some issues that other people have already pointed out! However, you say:

Personally, whenever I hear someone say "I think we should seriously consider the possibility that such-and-such may be true, despite it being politically incorrect", I consider it more likely than not that they are privileging the hypothesis.

Well, if the intellectual standards in the academic mainstream of the relevant fields are particularly low, and the predominant ideological biases push very strongly in the direction of the established conclusion that the contrarians are attacking, the situation is, at the very least, much less clear. But yes, organized groups of contrarians are often motivated by their own internal biases, which they constantly reinforce within their peculiar venues of echo-chamber discourse. Often they even develop some internal form of strangely inverted political correctness.

Moreover, my parable assumes that there are still non-trivial lingering groups of X-phobe fundamentalists when the first contrarian scientists appear. But what if the situation ends up with complete extirpation of all sorts of anti-X-ism, and virtually nobody is left who supports it any more, long before statisticians in this hypothetical world figure out the procedures necessary to examine the issue correctly? Imagine anti-X-ism as a mere remote historical memory, with no more supporters than, say, monarchism in the U.S. today. The question is -- are there any such issues today, where past beliefs have been replaced by inaccurate ones that it doesn't even occur to anyone any more to question, not because it would be politically incorrect, but simply because alternatives are no longer even conceivable?

Comment author: Tyrrell_McAllister 21 May 2010 04:08:33PM 4 points [-]

That's a valid point when it comes to issues that are a matter of ongoing controversies, or where the present consensus was settled within living memory, so that there are still people who remember different times with severe nostalgia. However, I had in mind a much wider class of topics, including those where the present consensus was settled in more remote past so that there isn't anyone left alive to be nostalgic about the former state of affairs. (An exception could be the small number of people who develop romantic fantasies from novels and history books, but I don't think they're numerous enough to be very relevant.)

Hmm. Maybe it would help to give more concrete examples, because I might have misunderstood the kinds of beliefs that you're talking about. Things like gender relations, race relations, and environmental policy were significantly different within living memory. Now, things like institutionalized slavery or a powerful monarchy are pretty much alien to modern developed countries. But these policies are advocated only by intellectuals—that is, by those who are widely read enough to have developed a nostalgia for a past that they never lived.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 21 May 2010 10:20:16PM *  8 points [-]

Actually, now you've nudged my mind in the right direction! Let's consider an example even more remote in time, and even more outlandish by modern standards than slavery or absolute monarchy: medieval trials by ordeal.

The modern consensus belief is that this was just awful superstition in action, and our modern courts of law are obviously a vast improvement. That's certainly what I had thought until I read a recent paper titled "Ordeals" by one Peter T. Leeson, who argues that these ordeals were in fact, in the given circumstances, a highly accurate way of separating the guilty from the innocent given the prevailing beliefs and customs of the time. I highly recommend reading the paper, or at least the introduction, as an entertaining de-biasing experience. [Update: there is also an informal exposition of the idea by the author, for those who are interested but don't feel like going through the math of the original paper.]

I can't say with absolute confidence if Leeson's arguments are correct or not, but they sound highly plausible to me, and certainly can't be dismissed outright. However, if he is correct, then two interesting propositions are within the realm of the possible: (1) in the given circumstances in which medieval Europeans lived, trials by ordeal were perhaps more effective in making correct verdicts in practice than if they had used something similar to our modern courts of law instead, and (2) the verdict accuracy rate by trials by ordeal could well have been greater than that achieved by our modern courts of law, which can't be realistically considered to be anywhere near perfect. As Leeson says:

Ordeals are inferior to modern trial methods because modern defendants don’t believe in iudicium Dei, not because trial by jury is inherently superior. If modern citizens did have the superstitious belief required for ordeals to work, it might make sense to bring back the cauldrons of boiling water.

Now, let's look at the issue and separate the relevant normative and factual beliefs involved. The prevailing normative belief today is that the only acceptable way to determine criminal guilt is to use evidence-based trials in front of courts, whose job is to judge the evidence as free of bias as possible. It's a purely normative view, which states that anything else would simply be unjust and illegitimate, period. However, underlying this normative belief, and serving as its important consequentialist basis, there is also the factual belief that despite all the unavoidable biases, evidence-based trials necessarily produce more accurate verdicts than other methods, especially ancient methods such as the trial by ordeal that involved superstitions.

Yet, if Leeson is correct -- and we should seriously consider that possibility -- this factual belief, despite having been universally accepted in our civilization for centuries, is false. What follows is that there may actually be a non-obvious way to produce more accurate verdicts even in our day and age, based on different institutions, but nobody is taking the possibility seriously because of the universal (and biased) factual belief about the practical optimality of the modern court system. It also follows that a thousand years ago, Europeans could easily have caused more wrongful punishment by abolishing trials by ordeal and replacing them with evidence-based trials, even though such a change would be judged by the modern consensus view as a vast improvement, both morally and in practical accuracy.

Another interesting remark is that, from what I've seen on legal blogs, Leeson's paper was met with polite and interested skepticism, not derision and hostility. However, it seems to me that this is because the topic is so extremely remote that it has no bearing whatsoever on any modern ideological controversies; I have no doubt that a similar positive reexamination of some negatively judged past belief or institution that still has significant ideological weight would provoke far more hostility. That seems to be another piece of evidence suggesting that severe biases might be found lurking under the modern consensus on a great many issues, operating via the mechanism I'm proposing.

Comment author: JanetK 21 May 2010 09:28:15AM 5 points [-]

Maybe you could use the parable but put in brackets like you have with (sort of like smoking) but give very different ones for each point. That will keep the parable from seeming outlandish while not really starting a discussion of the bracketed illustrations. Smoking was a good illustration because it isn't that hot a button any more but we can remember went it was.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 21 May 2010 08:52:03PM *  3 points [-]

Actually, maybe I could try a similar parable about a world in which there's a severe, brutally enforced religious taboo against smoking and a widespread belief that it's unhealthy, and then when the enlightened opinion turns against the religious beliefs and norms of old, smoking becomes a symbol of progress and freethinking -- and those who try to present evidence that it is bad for you after all are derided as wanting to bring back the inquisition.

Though this perhaps wouldn't be effective since the modern respectable opinion is compatible with criminalization of recreational drugs, so the image of freethinkers decrying what is basically a case of drug prohibition as characteristic of superstitious dark ages doesn't really click. I'll have to think about this more.

Comment author: Roko 21 May 2010 03:36:16PM 1 point [-]

Is Maslow's hierarchy itself an accurate belief, btw? How did you judge its accuracy?

This is a good point, but for now I will note that I have some personal empirical evidence in favor of it, it seems to make sense from an evolutionary point of view (e.g. food before status, because if you run out of calories you die right there) and it is widely accepted, so I will consider it true until evidence is brought against it.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 21 May 2010 03:48:34PM *  7 points [-]

Roko:

it seems to make sense from an evolutionary point of view (e.g. food before status, because if you run out of calories you die right there)

That's not necessarily true -- there are instances where people starve themselves (though rarely to death) as part of a status-seeking effort.

In the modern developed world, food is dirt-cheap as long as you don't engage in luxurious extravagance, so that even if you could stop eating altogether, you wouldn't save a significant amount of money. However, in the past, when even the cheapest subsistence diet was a very large expense relative to income, many people would cut down on eating well beyond the point of discomfort to be able to afford various status-seeking goods to show off. Some other examples of status-seeking behavior that comes at the cost of starvation are religious fasting and dieting to improve one's looks. Hunger strikes are a peculiar extreme example.

Overall, Maslow's model is a useful first approximation, but nowhere near fully accurate.

Comment author: Tyrrell_McAllister 21 May 2010 02:07:50PM *  6 points [-]

My impression is that in our culture, people are much better at detecting biased nostalgia than biased reverence for what are held to be instances of moral and intellectual progress.

I suspect that you live in a community where most people are politically more liberal than you. I have the impression that nostalgia is a harder-to-detect bias than progress, probably because I live in a community where most people are politically more conservative than I. For many, many people, change is almost always suspicious, and appealing to the past is rhetorically more effective than appealing to progress. Hence, most of their false beliefs are justified with nostalgia, if only because most beliefs, true or false, are justified with nostalgia.

What determines which bias is more effective? I would guess that the main determinant is whether you identify with the community that brought about the "progress". If you do identify with them, then it must be good, because you and your kind did it. If, instead, you identify with the community that had progress imposed on them, you probably think of it as a foreign influence, and a deviation from the historical norm. This deviation, being unnatural, will either burn itself out or bring the entire community down in ruin.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 21 May 2010 03:26:24PM *  3 points [-]

I suspect that you live in a community where most people are politically more liberal than you. I have the impression that nostalgia is a harder-to-detect bias than progress, probably because I live in a community where most people are politically more conservative than I. For many, many people, change is almost always suspicious, and appealing to the past is rhetorically more effective than appealing to progress. Hence, most of their false beliefs are justified with nostalgia, if only because most beliefs, true or false, are justified with nostalgia.

That's a valid point when it comes to issues that are a matter of ongoing controversies, or where the present consensus was settled within living memory, so that there are still people who remember different times with severe nostalgia. However, I had in mind a much wider class of topics, including those where the present consensus was settled in more remote past so that there isn't anyone left alive to be nostalgic about the former state of affairs. (An exception could be the small number of people who develop romantic fantasies from novels and history books, but I don't think they're numerous enough to be very relevant.)

Moreover, there is also the question of which bias affects what kinds of people more. I am more interested in biases that affect people who are on the whole smarter and more knowledgeable and rational. It seems to me that among such people, the nostalgic biases are less widespread, for a number of reasons. For example, scientists will be more likely than the general population to appreciate the extent of the scientific progress and the crudity of the past superstitions it has displaced in many areas of human knowledge, so I would expect that when it comes to issues outside their area of expertise, they would be -- on average -- biased in favor of contemporary consensus views when someone argues that they've become more remote from reality relative to some point in the past.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 21 May 2010 02:52:39PM *  19 points [-]

You might be interested in Bryan Caplan's concept of "rational irrationality" -- it seems to be more or less what you're aiming for:

http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/bcaplan/ratirnew.doc
Abstract: Beliefs about politics and religion often have three puzzling properties: systematic bias, high certainty, and little informational basis. The theory of rational ignorance (Downs 1957) explains only the low level of information. The current paper presents a general model of “rational irrationality,” which explains all three stylized facts. According to the theory of rational irrationality, being irrational - in the sense of deviating from rational expectations - is a good like any other; the lower the private cost, the more agents buy. A peculiar feature of beliefs about politics, religion, etc. is that the private repercussions of error are virtually nonexistent, setting the private cost of irrationality at zero; it is therefore in these areas that irrational views are most apparent. The consumption of irrationality can be optimal, but it will usually not be when the private and the social cost of irrationality differ – for example, in elections.

Comment author: Roko 21 May 2010 10:37:45AM 4 points [-]

Recent controversy on LW about gender, dating etc seems to fall into exactly this pattern.

In particular, there is heavy conflation of the facts of the matter about what kind of behavior women are attracted to with normative propositions about which gender is "better" and whether which is more blameworthy.

Gender equality discussions (Larry summers!) seem to fall into the same trap.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 21 May 2010 02:34:26PM *  5 points [-]

Yes, it was in fact thinking about that topic that made me try to write these thoughts down systematically. What I would like to do is to present them in a way that would elicit well-argued responses that don't get sidetracked into mind-killer reactions (and the latter would inevitably happen in places where people put less emphasis on rationality than here, so this site seems like a suitable venue). Ultimately, I want to see if I'm making sense, or if I'm just seeking sophisticated rationalizations for some false unconventional opinions I managed to propagandize myself into.

Comment author: JanetK 21 May 2010 07:49:38AM 10 points [-]

It seems a common bias to me and worth exploring.

Have you thought about a tip-of-the-hat to the opposite effect? Some people view the past as some sort of golden age where things were pure and good etc. It makes for a similar but not exactly mirror image source of bias. I think a belief that generally things are progressing for the better is a little more common than the belief that generally the world is going to hell in a handbasket, but not that much more common.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 21 May 2010 08:26:51AM *  2 points [-]

Yes, that's a good point. However, one difference between my idea and the nostalgia biases is that I don't expect that the latter, even if placed under utmost scrutiny, would turn out to be responsible for as many severe and entirely non-obvious false beliefs in practice. My impression is that in our culture, people are much better at detecting biased nostalgia than biased reverence for what are held to be instances of moral and intellectual progress.

Comment author: Mitchell_Porter 21 May 2010 07:34:15AM 4 points [-]

This bias needs a name, like "moral progress bias".

I ask myself what your case studies might be. The Mencius Moldbug grand unified theory comes to mind: belief in "human neurological uniformity", statist economics, democracy as a force for good, winning wars by winning hearts and minds, etc, is all supposed to be one great error, descending from a prior belief that is simultaneously moral, political, and anthropological, and held in place by the sort of bias you describe.

You might also want to explore a related notion of "intellectual progress bias", whereby a body of pseudo-knowledge is insulated from critical examination, not by moral sentiments, but simply by the belief that it is knowledge and that the history of its growth is one of discovery rather than of illusions piled ever higher.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 21 May 2010 08:14:23AM *  4 points [-]

Mitchell_Porter:

I ask myself what your case studies might be.

Well, any concrete case studies are by the very nature of the topic potentially inflammatory, so I'd first like to see if the topic can be discussed in the abstract before throwing myself into an all-out dissection of some belief that it's disreputable to question.

One good case study could perhaps be the belief in democracy, where the moral belief in its righteousness is entangled with the factual belief that it results in freedom and prosperity -- and bringing up counterexamples is commonly met with frantic No True Scotsman replies and hostile questioning of one's motives and moral character. It would mean opening an enormous can of worms, of course.

You might also want to explore a related notion of "intellectual progress bias", whereby a body of pseudo-knowledge is insulated from critical examination, not by moral sentiments, but simply by the belief that it is knowledge and that the history of its growth is one of discovery rather than of illusions piled ever higher.

Yes, this is a very useful notion. I think it would be interesting to combine it with some of my earlier speculations about what conditions are apt to cause an area of knowledge to enter such a vicious circle where delusions and bullshit are piled ever higher under a deluded pretense of progress.

Comment author: Airedale 21 May 2010 06:25:54AM 4 points [-]

As written up here, it's a bit abstract for my personal tastes. I can't tell from this description whether in the potential post you're planning on using specific examples to make your points, probably because you're writing carefully due to the sensitive nature of the subject matter. I suspect the post will be received more favorably if you give specific examples of some of these cherished normative beliefs, explain why they result in these biases that you're describing, etc.

On the other hand, given the potentially polarizing nature of the beliefs, there's no guarantee that you won't excite some controversy and downvotes if you do take that path. But given the subject matter of some of your other recent comments, I (and others) can probably guess at least some what of you have in mind and will be thinking about it as we read your submission anyway. And in that case, it's probably better to be explicit than to have people making their own guesses about what you're thinking.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 21 May 2010 07:36:35AM *  15 points [-]

I was planning to introduce the topic through a parable of a fictional world carefully crafted not to be directly analogous to any real-world hot-button issues. The parable would be about a hypothetical world where the following facts hold:

  • A particular fruit X, growing abundantly in the wild, is nutritious, but causes chronical poisoning in the long run with all sorts of bad health consequences. This effect is however difficult to disentangle statistically (sort of like smoking).

  • Eating X has traditionally been subject to a severe Old Testament-style religious prohibition with unknown historical origins (the official reason of course was that God had personally decreed it). Impoverished folks who nevertheless picked and ate X out of hunger were often given draconian punishments.

  • At the same time, there has been a traditional belief that if you eat X, you'll incur not just sin, but eventually also get sick. Now, note that the latter part happens to be true, though given the evidence available at the time, a skeptic couldn't tell if it's true or just a superstition that came as a side-effect of the religious taboo. You'd see that poor folks who eat it do get sick more often, but their disease might be just due to poverty, and you'd need sophisticated statistics and controlled studies to tell reliably which way it is.

  • At a later time, as science progresses and religion withdraws in front of it, and religious figures lose power and prestige, old superstitions and taboos perish, and now defying them is considered more and more cool and progressive. In particular, believing that eating fruit X is bad is now a mark of bigoted fundamentalism. Cool fashionable people will eat X occasionally just to prove a point, historians decry the horrors of the dark ages when poor people were sadistically persecuted for eating it, and a general consensus has been formed that its supposed unhealthiness has never been more than just another religiously motivated superstition. "X-eater" eventually becomes a metaphor for a smart fashionable free-thinker in these people's culture, and "X-phobe" for a bigoted yokel.

  • People who eat X in significant quantities still get sick more, but the consensus explanation is that it's because, since it's free but not very tasty food, eating it correlates with poverty and thus all sorts of awful living conditions.

Now, notice that in this world, the prevailing normative belief on this issue has moved from draconian religious taboos to a laissez-faire approach, while at the same time, a closely related factual belief has moved significantly away from reality. For all the cruelty of the religious taboo, and the fact that poor folks may well prefer bad health later to starving now, the traditional belief that eating X is bad for your health was factually true. Yet a contrarian scientist who now suggests that this might be true after all will provoke derision and scorn. What is he, one of those crazed fundamentalists who want to bring back the days when poor folks were whipped and pilloried for picking X to feed their starving kids in years of bad harvest?

I think this example would illustrate quite clearly the sort of bias I have in mind. The questions however are:

  • Does it sound like too close an analogy to some present hot-button issue?

  • Does the idea that we might be suffering from some analogous biases sound too outlandish? I do believe that many such biases exist in the world today, and I probably myself suffer from some of them, but as you said, taking concrete examples might sound too controversial and polarizing.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 21 May 2010 05:53:57AM *  21 points [-]

I have an idea I'd like to discuss that might perhaps be good enough for my first top-level post once it's developed a bit further, but I'd first like to ask if someone maybe knows of any previous posts in which something similar was discussed. So I'll post a rough outline here as a request for comments.

It's about a potential source of severe and hard to detect biases about all sorts of topics where the following conditions apply:

  1. It's a matter of practical interest to most people, where it's basically impossible not to have an opinion. So people have strong opinions, and you basically can't avoid forming one too.

  2. The available hard scientific evidence doesn't say much about the subject, so one must instead make do with sparse, incomplete, disorganized, and non-obvious pieces of rational evidence. This of course means that even small and subtle biases can wreak havoc.

  3. Factual and normative issues are heavily entangled in this topic. By this I mean that people care deeply about the normative issues involved, and view the related factual issues through the heavily biasing lens of whether they lead to consequentialist arguments for or against their favored normative beliefs. (Of course, lots of folks won't have their logic straight, so it's enough that a particular factual belief is perceived to correlate with a popular or unpopular normative belief to be a subject of widespread bias in one or the other direction.)

  4. Finally, the prevailing opinions on the subject have changed heavily through history, both factually and normatively, and people view the normative beliefs prevailing today as enlightened progress over terrible evils of the past.

These conditions of course apply to lots of stuff related to politics, social issues, etc. Now, the exact bias mechanism I have in mind is as follows.

As per the assumptions (3) and (4), people are aware (more or less) that the opinions on the subject in question were very different in the past, both factually and normatively. Since they support the present norms, they'll of course believe that the past norms were evil and good riddance to them. They'll chalk that one up for "progress" -- in their minds, the same vaguely defined historical process that brought us science and prosperity in place of superstition and squalor, improvements that are impossible to deny, has also brought us good and enlightened normative beliefs on this issue instead of the former unfair, harmful, or just plain disturbing norms. However, since the area in question, as we've assumed under (2), is not amenable to a hard-scientific straightening out of facts from bullshit, it's not at all clear that the presently prevailing factual beliefs are not severely biased. In fact, regardless of what normative beliefs one has about it, there is no rational reason at all to believe that the factual beliefs about the topic did not in fact become more remote from reality compared to some point in the past.

And now we get to the troublesome part where the biases get their ironclad armor: arguing that we've actually been increasingly deluding ourselves factually about some such topic ever since some point in the past, no matter how good the argument and evidence presented, will as per (3) and (4) automatically be perceived as an attack on the cherished contemporary normative beliefs by a reactionary moral monster. This will be true in the sense that updating the modern false factual beliefs will undermine some widely accepted consequentialist arguments for the modern normative beliefs -- but regardless, even if one is still committed to these normative beliefs, they should be defended using logic and truth, not bias and falsity. Moreover, since both the normative and factual historical changes in prevailing beliefs have been chalked up to "progress," the argument will be seen as an attack on progress as such, including its parts that have brought indisputable enrichment and true insight, and is thus seen as sacrilege against all the associated high-status ideas, institutions, and people.

To put it as briefly as possible, the bias is against valid arguments presenting evidence that certain historical changes in factual beliefs have been away from reality and towards greater delusions and biases. It rests on:

  • a biased moralistic reaction to what is perceived as an attack on the modern cherished normative beliefs, and

  • a bias in favor of ideas (and the associated institutions and individuals, both contemporary and historical) that enjoy the high status awarded by being a contributor to "progress."

What should be emphasized is that this results in factual beliefs being wrong and biased, and the normative beliefs, whatever one's opinion about their ultimate validity, owing lots of their support to factually flawed consequentialist arguments.

Does this make any sense? It's just a quick dump of some three-quarters-baked ideas, but I'd like to see if it can be refined and expanded into an article.

Comment author: Jordan 20 May 2010 12:13:59AM 0 points [-]

You're response in the subthread was more a list of biases exhibited by females (an interesting list though). What I'm looking for is a set of actionable techniques a woman can use in the context of a relationship to keep a man more interested.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 20 May 2010 01:02:58AM *  0 points [-]

There are many books giving that sort of advice, but I haven't read any, so I can't recommend them. Just from the titles and blurbs I've seen, it can be reliably concluded that many are very bad.

Anecdotally, I can say that in the best discussions of women's relationship strategies and techniques I've ever read on game-related sites, I've never seen anyone point out a book or any other source of systematic advice whose message closely matches the best evidence-supported conclusions of these discussions. I see this as a strong piece of evidence against the whole existing literature. This is not that surprising considering that the best evidence-supported conclusions sound, to a large degree, highly un-PC and shattering lots of pleasant-sounding illusions.

Comment author: kodos96 19 May 2010 10:48:33PM 1 point [-]

there is actually such strong evidence

What evidence? PUAs may use a lot of trial and error in developing their techniques, but do their tests count as valid experimental evidence, or just anecdotes? Where are their control groups? What is their null hypothesis? Was subject selection randomized? Were the data gathered and analyzed by independent parties?

Would you accept this kind of evidence if we were talking about physics? Would you accept this kind of evidence if we were evaluating someone who claimed to have psychic powers?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 19 May 2010 11:17:49PM *  3 points [-]

kodos96:

What evidence? PUAs may use a lot of trial and error in developing their techniques, but do their tests count as valid experimental evidence, or just anecdotes? Where are their control groups? What is their null hypothesis? Was subject selection randomized? Were the data gathered and analyzed by independent parties?

Well, as I said, if you study the discourse in the PUA community at its best in a non-biased and detached way, desensitized to the language and attitudes you might find instinctively off-putting, you'll actually find the epistemological standards surprisingly high. But you just have to see that for yourself.

A good comparison for the PUA milieu would be a high-quality community of hobbyist amateurs who engage in some technical work with passion and enthusiasm. In their discussions, they probably won't apply the same formal standards of discourse and evidence that are used in academic research and corporate R&D, but it's nevertheless likely that they know what they're talking about and their body of established knowledge is as reliable as any other -- and even though there are no formal qualifications for joining, those bringing bullshit rather than insight will soon be identified and ostracized.

Now, if you don't know at first sight whether you're dealing with such an epistemologically healthy community, the first test would be to see how its main body of established knowledge conforms to your own experiences and observations. (In a non-biased way, of course, which is harder when it comes to the PUA stuff than some ordinary technical skill.) In my case, and not just mine, the result was a definite pass. The further test is to observe the actual manner of discourse practiced and its epistemological quality. Again, it's harder to do when biased reactions to various signals of disrespectability are standing in the way.

Would you accept this kind of evidence if we were talking about physics?

Even in physics, not all evidence comes from reproducible experiments. Sometimes you just have to make the best out of observations gathered at random opportune moments, for example when it comes to unusual astronomical or geophysical events.

Would you accept this kind of evidence if we were evaluating someone who claimed to have psychic powers?

You're biasing your skepticism way upward now. The correct level of initial skepticism with which to meet the PUA stuff is the skepticism you apply to people claiming to have solved difficult problems in a way consistent with the existing well-established scientific knowledge -- not the much higher level appropriate for those whose claims contradict it.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 19 May 2010 07:22:45PM *  2 points [-]

You might find The Fantasy of Being Thin interesting.

What insights have you found in odd corners of the web?

As for the Dark Triad, I don't know what's going on there. I tentatively assume that some people like danger, and what attracts some to motorcycles and mountain-climbing can also attract people to mates who have TROUBLE written all over them.

Alternatively, some women choose men like their fathers-- they're imprinted on a bad idea of what a man is.

Also, I hope it's less common in the culture, but some women believe that they can turn a bad guy into a good one by being a sufficiently good wife. I'm not going to say it never happens, but making the attempt can be a powerful emotional hook.

It's clear that how reliable people's survival instincts are (and about what parts of their lives) vary tremendously, and I've never seen a substantial discussion of how the "this is good for me, that is bad for me" sense works.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 19 May 2010 10:48:00PM *  0 points [-]

You might find The Fantasy of Being Thin interesting.

Yes, I am familiar with this particular community. They do discuss some common biases in an interesting way, but ultimately, my conclusion is that they generate their own more severe ones, without adding much clarity to anything overall.

What insights have you found in odd corners of the web?

Well, that could be a topic for a whole book, not a mere blog comment. I'd rather not just drop concrete names and places I've found interesting, since without lots of painstaking explanations and disclaimers, it would send off a thunderous signal of affiliation with all kinds of disreputable people.

Comment author: kodos96 19 May 2010 07:38:35AM *  4 points [-]

The problem is not only that the topic runs afoul of moralistic biases, but also that it triggers failure in high-quality anti-bullshit heuristics commonly used by math/tech/science-savvy people. When you first hear about it, it's exactly the kind of thing that will set off a well-calibrated bullshit detector

Very true. To me (and my bullshit detector), it sounds strikingly similar to any number of other self-help programs offered through the ages. In fact, it sounds to me a lot like Scientology - or at least the elevator pitch version that they give to lower level people before they start introducing them to the really strange stuff. And the endorsement you give it in your second paragraph sounds a lot like the way adherents to these kinds of absolutely-for-legal-reasons-definitely-not-a-cults will breathlessly talk about them to outsiders.

Now of course I realize that superficial similarity to snake oil doesn't actually count as valid evidence. But I do think it's fair to put PUA into the same reference class with them, and base my priors on that. Would you not agree?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 19 May 2010 10:40:40PM *  2 points [-]

kodos96:

Now of course I realize that superficial similarity to snake oil doesn't actually count as valid evidence. But I do think it's fair to put PUA into the same reference class with them, and base my priors on that. Would you not agree?

If you see PUA-like techniques being marketed without any additional knowledge about the matter, then yes, your snake oil/bullshit detector should hit the red end of the scale, and stay that way until some very strong evidence is presented otherwise. Thing is, when it comes to a certain subset of such techniques that pjeby, HughRistik, me, and various others have been discussing, there is actually such strong evidence. You just have to delve into the matter without any fatally blinding biases and see it.

That's pretty much the point I've been hammering on. The problem is not that your prior is low, which it should be. The problem is that an accurate estimate of posteriors is obscured by very severe biases that push them downward.

Comment author: Jordan 19 May 2010 08:25:53PM 2 points [-]

In contrast, I have never come across any analogous women's community, where lots of valid and interesting insight would be offered alongside anti-male anger and venting, but if I hypothetically did, I have no doubt I would enjoy reading it.

I would love to read material from a female analogue to PUA. Looking back on past relationships I can see some patterns for behavior that 'hooked' me, but I'm sure I'm missing a lot of potentially valuable insights.

People often meet a person they like but can't commit to romantically because of small 'defects' in the person's behavior as it relates to the relationship. Personally, I'd be all in favor of my significant other using PUA equivalent methods on me, provided I was aware it and had studied the material myself (in the same way that I'm in favor of my significant other wearing certain clothing, etc).

So, two main upshots of wide dissemination of PUA style material: better understanding of myself, and heightened attraction to my partner.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 19 May 2010 09:47:13PM 1 point [-]

I would love to read material from a female analogue to PUA.

I replied to a similar question in this subthread.

Comment author: HughRistik 19 May 2010 07:06:04AM *  2 points [-]

The more modern term is "game."

In the marginal Roissysphere, maybe. I've seen many attempt to get away from words like "pickup" or "seduction" though I haven't seen any consensus on an alternative. The problem is that our culture simply has no value-neutral or positive terms for, uh, how do I put it... systematically investigating how people induce each other to want sex and relationships, and how one can practically make use of that knowledge oneself.

(It took me about four tries to write the part in italics after thinking about this subject for years, and it's still really clunky. I could have said "understand the mating process and act on that understanding," but that's a bit too watered-down. My other best attempt was systematically investigating the process by which people create contexts that raise the chances of other people wanting to have sex and relationships with them, and how one can practically make use of this knowledge oneself. That phrasing is clunkier, but gets rid of the word "induce," which a bunch of feminists once told me is "mechanical" and "objectifying.")

"Game" has its own problems, of course. What I like about the term is that it implies that social interaction should be playful and fun. "Game" also highlights certain game-theoretic and competitive aspects of human interaction, but it might risk leading people to overstate those aspects. What I don't like is the connotation that a game isn't "serious" (e.g. "you think this is just a game, huh?") and that PUAs (or critics of PUAs) may believe that "game" involves not taking other people's feelings and interests seriously.

As I'm sure you know, some gurus (e.g. TylerDurden) have advocated viewing the process of learning pickup like learning a videogame. A similar frame is the "experiment frame," where you think of yourself as a scientist engaging in social experiments. Such frames can be extremely valuable for beginners who need to protect themselves emotionally during the early stages of the learning process, when most of what they try isn't going to work. Yet they are a form of emotionally distancing oneself from others; in a minority of people with existing problems, they could inhibit empathy, encourage antisocial behavior, or exacerbate feelings of alienation. In general though, I view the possible harm of such attitudes as mainly affecting the PUA.

I see these frames as training wheels which should soon be discarded once the need for such an emotionally defensive stance is gone. Most socially cool people don't see other people as part of a video game they are playing, or as subjects in a science experiment they are running (though some Dark Triad naturals do... one favorite quote of mine from an intelligent and extremely badboy natural friend of mine who had no exposure to the seduction community: "I love causation... once you understand it, you can manipulate people"). I still engage in social experiments all the time, but when I go out, I no longer think "I'm gonna run some cool experiments tonight," I think "I'm gonna hang out with some cool people tonight."

Comment author: Vladimir_M 19 May 2010 08:27:47PM *  3 points [-]

I have the impression that "game" is used much more widely even as the primary general term, let alone when people talk about specific skill subsets and applications ("phone game," "day game," etc.). But I'm sure you've seen a much broader sample of all sorts of PUA-related stuff, so I'll defer to your opinion.

That said, I see game primarily as a way of overcoming the biases and false beliefs held about male-female interactions in the contemporary culture. I would say that by historical standards, our culture is exceptionally bad in this regard. While the prevailing respectable views and popular wisdom on the matters of human pairing and sexual behavior have always been affected by biases in every culture that ever existed, my impression is that ours is exceptionally out of touch with reality when it comes to these issues. This is a special case of what I see as a much broader general trend -- namely, that in contrast to hard sciences and technology, which have been making continuous and uninterrupted progress for centuries, in many areas of human interest that are not amenable to a no-nonsense hard-scientific way of filtering truth from bullshit, the dominant views have actually been drifting away from reality and into increasing biases and delusions for quite a while now.

To understand this, it is necessary to be able to completely decouple normative from factual parts in one's beliefs about human sexual and pairing behaviors -- a feat of unbiased thinking that is harder in this matter than almost any other. Once this has been done, however, a curious pattern emerges: modern people perceive the normative beliefs of old times and faraway cultures about pairing and sex as alien, strange, and repulsive, and conclude that this is because their factual beliefs were (or are) deluded and biased. Yet it seems to me that whatever one thinks about the normative part, the prevailing factual beliefs have, in many ways, become more remote from reality in modern times. (The only major exceptions are those that came from pure hard-scientific insight, like e.g. the details of women's fertility cycle.) This of course also implies that while one can defend the modern norms on deontological grounds, the commonly believed consequentialist arguments in their favor are very seriously flawed.

The PUA insights are to a large degree about overcoming these relatively novel biases, and most PUA acolytes aren't aware that lots of their newly gained taboo-breaking insight was in fact common knowledge not that long ago. When you look at men who have applied this insight to achieve old-fashioned pleasant monogamous harmony rather than for sarging, like that guy to whose marriage story I linked earlier, it's impossible not to notice that it's basically the same way our ancestors used to keep peace in the house.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 19 May 2010 09:00:09AM 2 points [-]

Do you have that sort of distance when women vent about men?

As for the Dark Triad guys, I agree that they should be a matter of more concern-- the only specific advice I've seen about avoiding them is to not get involved with a man who's rude to waitresses.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 19 May 2010 06:59:25PM *  3 points [-]

NancyLebovitz:

Do you have that sort of distance when women vent about men?

I would say yes. I have a hobby of sorts that consists of exploring obscure corners of the web where various sorts of fringe people with unconventional (and often disreputable) ideas gather, and attempting to understand their perspectives in a detached manner, as free of bias as possible. As an example relevant for your question, I have read radical feminist websites where the level of anger against men far surpasses any venting against women you'll see on even the worst PUA forums.

Now, my conclusion is that out of all these fringe groups, most of them just form their own echo chambers where they vent and reinforce their peculiar biases, but a small minority actually manage to come up with non-trivial accurate insight that is nowhere to be found in more reputable and mainstream sources. The PUA community just happens to be one such example. In contrast, I have never come across any analogous women's community, where lots of valid and interesting insight would be offered alongside anti-male anger and venting, but if I hypothetically did, I have no doubt I would enjoy reading it. (There are also communities full of angry venting men where, in contrast to PUAs, I've never seen any particularly interesting ideas.)

As for the Dark Triad guys, I agree that they should be a matter of more concern-- the only specific advice I've seen about avoiding them is to not get involved with a man who's rude to waitresses.

Trouble is, some very strong biases are present here, because the ugly and hard to admit truth is that some personalty types of this sort are attractive as such to many women -- not all women, of course, and I won't speculate on the percentage, but it's certainly non-negligible. Note that I don't mean the situations where such dark characteristics are hidden under a nice surface only to emerge later, but when they are truly attractive by themselves, causing irresistible urges in women to engage in dangerous, self-immolating adventures with such men. You can view it as a specifically female form of extreme akrasia, I guess. The prevailing bias, however, is to interpret all such situations as women having been manipulated by a wolf in sheep's clothing, even when the wolf was howling and brandishing his fangs from day one, only to get an enthusiastic response.

Comment author: whpearson 19 May 2010 06:04:40AM 3 points [-]

I think part of my problem is there is no easy way to signal you are a white hat PUA rather than a black hat. If I am interested in honest and long term relationships, I don't want to be signalling that I have the potential to be manipulative. Especially as the name PUA implies that you are interested in picking up girls in general rather than one lady in particular.

This also applies somewhat to non-sexual relations. If someone studies human interaction to a significant degree, how do I know that they will only use their powers for good? Say in an intellectual field or political for that matter. I'm sure the knowledge is useful for spin doctors and people coaching political leaders in debates.

This comment, in itself, is probably signalling an overly reflective mind on the nature of signalling though.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 19 May 2010 06:25:24AM *  2 points [-]

whpearson:

I think part of my problem is there is no easy way to signal you are a white hat PUA rather than a black hat. If I am interested in honest and long term relationships, I don't want to be signalling that I have the potential to be manipulative.

That's unfortunately a problem that women face with men in general, PUA or no PUA. Why do you think the signaling games naturally played by men are any different? The difference is ultimately like between a musical prodigy who learned to play the piano spontaneously as a kid, and a player with a similar level of skill who was however tone-deaf and learned it only much later with lots of painstaking practice. But they're still playing the same notes.

There is absolutely nothing in the whole PUA arsenal that wouldn't ultimately represent reverse-engineering of techniques spontaneously applied by various types of natural ladies' men. There is no extra "manipulation" of any sort added on top of that. Even the most callous, sly, and dishonest PUA techniques ever proposed are essentially the same behavior as that practiced by certain types of naturally occurring dark personality types of men that women often, much as they loathe to admit it, find themselves wildly attracted to. (Google "dark triad," or see the paper I linked in one of my other comments.)

Especially as the name PUA implies that you are interested in picking up girls in general rather than one lady in particular.

It's a name that stuck from the old days, which isn't representative of the whole area any more (and in fact never fully was). The more modern term is "game."

Comment author: HughRistik 19 May 2010 05:35:27AM 4 points [-]

To be fair, I can't blame people first encountering this subject to have an initial negative reaction. They don't know the breadth of what goes on, and that it would take a college-course-worth of knowledge to even begin to have an idea of what it's really about. What interests me is that they update when exposed to new evidence.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 19 May 2010 06:04:21AM *  4 points [-]

The problem is not only that the topic runs afoul of moralistic biases, but also that it triggers failure in high-quality anti-bullshit heuristics commonly used by math/tech/science-savvy people. When you first hear about it, it's exactly the kind of thing that will set off a well-calibrated bullshit detector. It promises impossible-seeming results that sound tailored to appeal to naive wishful thinking, and stories about its success sound like they just must be explicable by selection effects, self-delusions, false boasting, etc. So I definitely don't blame people for excessive skepticism either.

A personal anecdote: I remember when I first came across ASF long ago, when I was around 20. I quickly dismissed it as bullshit, and it didn't catch my attention again until several years later. In retrospect, this miscalculation should probably be one of my major regrets in life, and not just for failures with women that could have been prevented; it would have likely opened my perspectives on many other issues too, as it actually happened the next time around.

Comment author: kodos96 19 May 2010 03:06:45AM *  1 point [-]

What's more, I would bet that you could repeat this experiment over and over

Ok, I swore to myself I wasn't going to comment on this thread anymore, but now you've made me think of something that hadn't occurred to me before:

Assuming for the moment that it's true that a skilled PUA trainer would beat an untrained person at this test, how much of that effect do you think is attributable to simply being more confident vs actually having a more accurate model of human social behavior? I.e. you could, in principle, test for what I'm talking about by replacing the untrained geek with a geek trained with a different, completely fabricated set of PUA rules and theories, which he'd been led to believe were the real, PUA methods.... tell him these methods have been extensively experimentally tested, maybe even fake some tests with some actors to convince him that his bogus PUA skills actually work, just to give him the confidence of thinking he knows the secrets of the PUA masters. Then test him against someone given an equal amount of training on the "real" PUA techniques.

Oh, and for bonus points, for the fabricated set of techniques, you could use stuff taught by Scientology, just to make sure there's consensus that it's bogus ;)

How do you think that test would turn out? (I'm taking no position on the issue - I honestly don't know)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 19 May 2010 05:23:01AM *  2 points [-]

kodos96:

Assuming for the moment that it's true that a skilled PUA trainer would beat an untrained person at this test, how much of that effect do you think is attributable to simply being more confident vs actually having a more accurate model of human social behavior?

In PUA circles, this question has been addressed very extensively, both theoretically and practically. There is in fact a whole subfield of study there, called "inner game," which deals with the issues of confidence and self-image. The answer is that yes, unsurprisingly, confidence matters a great deal, but its relative importance in individual PUA's techniques varies, and it doesn't explain everything in their success, not even by a long shot.

Generally, regardless of your overall opinion of the people in the PUA scene, and for all their flaws, you definitely underestimate the breadth, intensity, and thoroughness of the debates that take place there. There are of course lots of snake oil salesmen around, but when it comes to the informal, non-commercial discourse in the community at all levels, these folks really are serious about weeding out bullshit and distilling stuff that works.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 19 May 2010 12:02:11AM 2 points [-]

Getting back to an earlier discussion of whether more women are wanted at LW..... anyone who's likely to show up here is nerdy. Perhaps it would be a good idea to remember, and keep remembering, and make it clear in your writing, that "women" are not a monolithic block and don't all want the same thing.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 19 May 2010 04:31:06AM *  4 points [-]

NancyLebovitz:

anyone who's likely to show up here is nerdy.

Assuming that there are non-Anglospheric folks here, this is probably an unjustified generalization due to a cultural bias. The idea that smart people interested in the sorts of things discussed here have to conform to the stereotype of "nerdiness" is a historically recent North American cultural phenomenon, which doesn't necessarily hold in other places. It's actually a rather curious state of affairs by overall historical standards.

Your observation is probably accurate statistically, though.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 18 May 2010 09:29:42PM 3 points [-]

an you really blame them for being frustrated when they naively play by the official rules and end up scorned as low-status losers, or for acting out a bit when they finally realize what's been going on?

This isn't about blame, it's about revulsion, and possibly about anger and fear.

You're sympathizing with the men, which is natural-- without speculating about details, your experience is more like theirs. Try imagining dating one of them, or being in a relationship with them-- if that's too much of a strain, try imagining reading a forum of women who are that hurt and angry about men.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 19 May 2010 03:54:19AM *  8 points [-]

This isn't about blame, it's about revulsion, and possibly about anger and fear.

Fair enough. However, I would say that women tend to display at least two major biases when they encounter this sort of stuff. (I don't think these biases completely account for the fear and revulsion you mention, but they do mean that it often goes too far.)

First, women often don't take into account that they're observing men's in-clique behavior, which they rarely, if ever, see in real life. Many young men whom they'd perceive as decent, polite, overall good guys (and who indeed are that by any reasonable standards) sometimes spew out stuff that's just as extreme when they loosen up over beers among their male buddies, complete with foul language, frustrated trashing of women who have hurt them, etc. It's just that polite men instinctively watch their mouths when women or authority figures are within hearing distance, so when they're caught off guard rambling, or when they're writing anonymously on the internet, they tend to come off much worse than they really are.

Second, I understand that women might fear getting involved with a man whose attractive surface hides an angry, frustrated, manipulative PUA underneath, whose nasty nature will only later come to prominence. However, this fear is entirely out of proportion when you consider a similar, but much more prevalent and dangerous natural phenomenon. Namely, there are significant numbers of men around whose personalities are naturally fundamentally nasty but nevertheless wildly attractive to women -- many of whom ruin their lives big time by pursuing relationships with such men. See, for example, the Dark Triad paper by Jonason et al. for a discussion along these lines, which is nowhere near a complete account of this entire phenomenon. This is realistically a far greater danger than encountering a PUA, who is anyway more likely to be just a regular guy who undertook some self-improvement than a monster lurking below a smooth surface.

Comment author: whpearson 18 May 2010 09:29:42AM 0 points [-]

My point was more that the situations could be confused by people with broken social coprocessors and inappropriate behaviour translated across from one domain to another. Without a lot of explanation of the appropriateness.

Buying drinks can also be seen as someone weaker (financially) asking someone stronger. Considering that men earn more on average than women, and if you are picking up college girls and have a real job that is likely to be even more the case. So I don't see the way that these situations can be easily distinguished that way by someone without much social experience.

I agree about the grumbling, don't grumble about the weight, grumble about the time taken.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 18 May 2010 07:10:36PM 2 points [-]

whpearson:

My point was more that the situations could be confused by people with broken social coprocessors and inappropriate behaviour translated across from one domain to another. Without a lot of explanation of the appropriateness.

Well, yes, but that's what explanations are for. Once you grasp the underlying principles, it's not that complicated -- and more importantly, you gradually start to make correct judgments instinctively.

I agree about the grumbling, don't grumble about the weight, grumble about the time taken.

No, if you understand the status dynamic fully, you'll realize that you shouldn't grumble at all. Grumbling, of whatever sort, indicates that you assign a significant cost to the act, and in order to come off as high-status, you must make it look like it's a negligible expense of effort from your lofty high-status position, a casual dispensation of benevolent grace. As soon as you make it seem like you perceive the act as costly in any way, it looks like you're making the effort to fulfill her wishes, clearly displaying inferior status to hers.

Comment author: Alicorn 18 May 2010 05:59:04PM 4 points [-]

Sometimes I get a sense of simmering resentment underneath it all, especially on the subject of "nice guys" vs. "jackasses".

Yes: It's so bitter and so full of blame for the vast sea of women who didn't respond as desired to "niceness".

Comment author: Vladimir_M 18 May 2010 06:16:07PM *  9 points [-]

I find the resentment off-putting too, and as in any other area of human concern, there is indeed a lot of unjustified feeling of entitlement. However, it should be noted that the main reason for the resentment is the rules-hypocrisy. Many men are indeed too clueless to figure out the disconnect between the official attitudes and values that are professed piously in our culture and the actual rules of the status game that it's taboo to discuss openly (so that such discussions are corralled off to disreputable venues like the PUA culture). Can you really blame them for being frustrated when they naively play by the official rules and end up scorned as low-status losers, or for acting out a bit when they finally realize what's been going on?

Comment author: Wei_Dai 18 May 2010 03:46:52PM 2 points [-]

Honestly, I don't see what you're basing that conclusion on.

I'm surprised that you find the conclusion surprising or controversial. (The conclusion being that some some values survive the "larger scheme of things" argument much better than others.) I know that you wrote earlier:

As for the "larger scheme of things," that's one of those emotionally-appealing sweeping arguments that can be applied to literally anything to make it seem pointless and unworthy of effort.

but I didn't think those words reflected your actual beliefs (I thought you just weren't paying enough attention to what you were writing). Do you really think that people like me, who do not think that literally everything is pointless and unworthy of effort, have just avoided applying the argument to some of our values?

What, according to you, determines which human values survive that argument and which not?

It seems obvious to me that some values (e.g., avoiding great pain) survive the argument by being hardwired to not respond to any arguments, while others (saving humanity so we can develop an intergalactic civilization, or being the first person in an eventually intergalactic civilization to really understand how decisions are supposed to be made) are grand enough that "larger scheme of things" just don't apply. (I'm not totally sure I'm interpreting your question correctly, so let me know if that doesn't answer it.)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 18 May 2010 05:50:25PM *  4 points [-]

Wei_Dai:

Do you really think that people like me, who do not think that literally everything is pointless and unworthy of effort, have just avoided applying the argument to some of our values?

As the only logical possibilities, it's either that, or you have thought about it and concluded that the argument is not applicable to some values. I don't find the reasons for this conclusion obvious, and I do see many selective applications of this argument as a common bias in practice, which is why I asked.

It seems obvious to me that some values (e.g., avoiding great pain) survive the argument by being hardwired to not respond to any arguments, while others (saving humanity so we can develop an intergalactic civilization, or being the first person in an eventually intergalactic civilization to really understand how decisions are supposed to be made) are grand enough that "larger scheme of things" just don't apply. (I'm not totally sure I'm interpreting your question correctly, so let me know if that doesn't answer it.)

Yes, that answers my question, thanks. I do have disagreements with your conclusion, but I grant that you are not committing the above mentioned fallacy outright.

In particular, my objections are that: (1) for many people, social isolation and lack of status is in fact a hardwired source of great pain (though this may not apply to you, so there is no disagreement here if you're not making claims about other people), (2) I find the future large-scale developments you speculate about highly unlikely, even assuming technology won't be the limiting factor, and finally (3) even an intergalactic civilization will matter nothing in the "larger scheme of things" assuming the eventual heat death of the universe. But each of these, except perhaps (1), would be a complex topic for a whole another discussion, so I think we can leave our disagreements rest at this point now that we've clarified them.

Comment author: HughRistik 18 May 2010 04:01:39PM 3 points [-]

As I mentioned once before but should mention again since you linked to his blog, Roissy is not representative of PUAs. He is like most of the worst things about PUAs, plus some other flaws of his own, all packed together. He's attracted a lot of attention outside the seduction community, but virtually nobody inside it knows who he is or cares about him.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 18 May 2010 04:38:08PM *  5 points [-]

I think you're making the mistake of judging him for his theatrics and shock-value approach. Once you get past the swaggering style, tune in to his sense of humor, and figure out which commenters are worth reading, I'd say his blog is by far the best place for all but the most technical discussions of all aspects of male-female interactions. This doesn't mean I endorse all he has to say, of course, but the level of insight far surpasses the other game/PUA sites I've seen. (I don't think it's for nothing that Robin Hanson links to him.)

In particular, I'm struck by the quality of many commenters I've seen there through the years, though in this regard, the blog is past its prime (and even back in the past, you had to sift through the detritus of unmoderated comments to find the gems). What many people might find strange is that lots of the regulars there are women, some of them extremely smart and cultured, though it's actually not surprising when you consider that it's an environment where the usual rules-hypocrisy is thrown out the window.

All in all, there is certainly much there to be offended by, and in fact, for lots of that stuff, one is required to be offended by it according to the official respectable standards of our culture. Yet anyone striving to eliminate biases about these topics should find much of the insight offered there worthwhile.

Comment author: Mallah 18 May 2010 03:48:57PM -1 points [-]

I don't think I got visibly hurt or angry. In fact, when I did it, I was feeling more tempted than angry. I was in the middle of a conversation with another guy, and her rear appeared nearby, and I couldn't resist.

It made me seem like a jerk, which is bad, but not necessarily low status. Acting without apparent fear of the consequences, even stupidly, is often respected as long as you get away with it.

Another factor is that this was a 'high status' woman. I'm not sure but she might be related to a celebrity. (I didn't know that at the time.) Hence, any story linking me and her may be 'bad publicity' for me but there is the old saying 'there's no such thing as bad publicity'.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 18 May 2010 03:55:00PM *  4 points [-]

Acting without apparent fear of the consequences, even stupidly, is often respected as long as you get away with it.

That's true only if you manage to maintain the absolute no-apologies attitude. If you had to apologize about it, it's automatically a major fail. (Not trying to put you down, just giving you a realistic perspective.)

Comment author: anonym 18 May 2010 07:06:56AM *  1 point [-]

Many kinds of educated guesses about compatibility increase the probablity of finding the right person or the right relationship, because time is finite, and time spent dating a born-again Christian fundamentalist is time not spent dating an atheist librarian (or not studying Pearl or Jaynes ;-) ).

I've never dated a religious fundamentalist; I almost certainly never will. And I think that is the rational choice, even though it seems "limiting" in a sense. In reality, though, I don't think it is limiting at all, because time is not infinite, and dating opportunities are not fungible with respect to time. It's only limiting if you ignore the probability of successful outcomes based on what you know of yourself and other people, but what is a decision theory worth that ignores the probabilities altogether (and differing payoffs too)?

Edit: what holds regarding religious fundamentalists also holds to a lesser degree regarding various subsets of the average, neurotypical women that are the subject of this thread.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 18 May 2010 03:36:25PM *  5 points [-]

On the other hand, cargo-cult free-thinking can be, at least for me, far more obnoxious than just plain religious close-mindedness. And in that regard, an atheist librarian may well be much worse than a regular churchy girl (or guy).

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 18 May 2010 12:39:53PM 5 points [-]

This is a general comment about the PUA material I've read.

It comes off as lonely. There's no hint of enjoying someone's company, or hope that a someone could enjoy the writer's company if not manipulated into it.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 18 May 2010 02:36:05PM *  3 points [-]

Depends where you look. Some of that stuff is indeed written in such tone, and it's true that some of it advises sly and dishonest tactics. On the other hand, here's the story of a man who saved his marriage by applying insights he gained on game websites (the blog might be NSFW for foul language, though it's on the blogroll of Overcoming Bias):
http://roissy.wordpress.com/2009/08/14/relationship-game-week-a-readers-journey/

Comment author: Alicorn 18 May 2010 02:25:26AM 1 point [-]

realistic treatments of this issue tend to bring up even more ugly truths and end up sounding even less PC than the ordinary PUA stuff.

Can you give a couple examples?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 18 May 2010 03:37:46AM *  8 points [-]

Alicorn:

Can you give a couple examples?

Like in everything else, humans make bad decisions due to biases in matters of mating and pairing too. However, these particular biases are male- and female-specific, and pointing out the latter is easily perceived by women as an affront to their sex, which makes realistic discussion very hard.

But since you're asking, here are some instances of such biases. None of them are universal, but each is held strongly by non-negligible numbers of women and leads them to decisions they later regret. One example is when women overestimate the attractiveness of men they can realistically hope to attract for serious permanent commitment, given the higher attractiveness of men they can attract for temporary relationships and short-term flings without any real commitment on the man's part. Another is when women underestimate the speed with which their looks and reproductive abilities deteriorate with age. Yet another is the refusal to acknowledge that women can be greatly attracted to some very nasty personality types of men, not despite them but because of them (google "dark triad"), which leads some women to entering disastrous relationships with such men. Then there are also many wrong beliefs about what personality characteristics of women are truly attractive and pleasant to men and apt to attract their loyalty and commitment in the long run.

There are other examples too, many of which would probably sound more controversial. Even these I listed can provoke much worse reactions when put in less abstract and detached terms, which is typically necessary when forming concrete advice.

Comment author: Alicorn 18 May 2010 01:08:34AM 3 points [-]

Okay, this has me curious - is there actually a subset of pickup that is designed to tell me what to do, instead of telling people what to do to me? That would be news to me.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 18 May 2010 02:16:50AM *  0 points [-]

That depends on what exactly your goal is. Typical men can boost their sexual attractiveness to women by changing their behavior far more than vice versa, so it's unsurprising that there is a much greater body of expertise aimed at men in this regard. Also, getting sex is pretty much trivial for women and requires no particular skill. However, commitment and long-term relationship strategies are important and nontrivial for women too, and on better game-oriented blogs, I've often seen good discussions about the mistakes women make in this regard. Trouble is, realistic treatments of this issue tend to bring up even more ugly truths and end up sounding even less PC than the ordinary PUA stuff.

Comment author: whpearson 18 May 2010 12:45:27AM 7 points [-]

And yet, even in that case, it's still probably positive-sum advice, as long as the man continues learning and improving over the long haul.

I think this needs to be emphasised a lot. Also the differences between types of women. While a nerdy girl may not ask for a drink, they may ask for help with a heavy box. Now from the canned advice given this can be seen as a shit test, will the guy demean himself by lugging a heavy box to try and get with someone of my level. If so they don't want to be with a loser who lifts his own boxes. So a response like "Do I look like a shelf stacker?" said in a suitably amused tone, would be appropriate.

However the nerdy girl might just want the box moved and be interested in people who can just get stuff done with a minimal amount of prodding. The appropriate response in this case is to help. Grumbling (with a grin) while doing so, or making a light comment about being owed one might show you aren't a complete push over and won't put up with too much of that sort of thing without something in return, would be appropriate I think.

I'd have a lot less problem if advice were couched in term of normal human interaction rather than just trying to get into an extrovert girls pants.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 18 May 2010 01:40:07AM *  8 points [-]

Hauling a heavy box is not at all analogous to the drink example. When a woman asks a man for help with heavy physical work, this puts him in a much better initial position status-wise. She is the weaker party, asking for necessary assistance from his greater physical strength. Helping a weaker party from a position of greater power is a first-rank status-winning move. Therefore, it's best for him to do it cheerfully with a "that's nothing for a man like me" attitude; grumbling and saying "you owe me" is a bad idea since it suggests that he actually finds it hard, rather than an act of negligible difficulty from his superior position.

Of course, if a woman regularly exploits a man for such favors or makes him spend unreasonable time and effort helping her, that's another story altogether. However, a random request for some small help with a hard physical task nearly always conforms to this pattern of status dynamics.

In contrast, when a woman asks a man to buy her a drink, she is asking him to satisfy a random and capricious whim, not help her as a weaker party from a superior position. Therefore, acceptance carries no positive status signals at all, but instead signals that he is willing to obey her whims for the mere privilege of her company. Compared to the box example, it's like accepting to pay extortion money versus giving to charity. The former is an expression of weakness and submission, the latter a dispensation of benevolence.

In response to comment by Vladimir_M on Multiple Choice
Comment author: steven0461 18 May 2010 12:41:54AM 1 point [-]

Utilitarians should take into account all consequences, including the cost of creating incentives to become utility monsters.

I think there's probably an imbalance between the amount of effort people are expected to expend in not being offensive vs the amount of effort people are expected to expend in not being offended. I'm not sure where it comes from.

In response to comment by steven0461 on Multiple Choice
Comment author: Vladimir_M 18 May 2010 01:00:29AM *  2 points [-]

steven0461:

Utilitarians should take into account all consequences, including the cost of creating incentives to become utility monsters.

The practical impossibility of taking into account such game-theoretical considerations and other important indirect effects of decisions is one of the (less important) reasons why I see little to no worth in utilitarianism.

Nevertheless, your point is very good.

Comment author: Alicorn 17 May 2010 11:38:20PM 5 points [-]

The "including verbal behavior" bit in the summary was really what I had in mind. I think that while we may act according to expected utility, we rarely remember to speak according to expected utility, and this is especially significant around sensitive topics where being careless with words can cause harm.

In response to comment by Alicorn on Multiple Choice
Comment author: Vladimir_M 18 May 2010 12:36:41AM *  4 points [-]

Trouble is, people tend to behave like real-life Nozick's utility monsters when it comes to the disutility they profess to suffer from speech that offends their sensibilities. I am not a utilitarian, but even if I were, I don't see how I could ever bring myself to speak (or rather keep quiet) according to expected utility.

(This is a statement about people in general, not meant as a jab at any concrete persons here.)

Comment author: MBlume 17 May 2010 11:30:39PM 6 points [-]

from the linked article:

Ethicist Jonathan Glover applied the same questions cross-culturally, looking at the genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda in addition to Germany, and came to the same conclusions. Dictating a set of authority-based rules turns out to be the worst thing we can do for ethical development — yet we are continuously urged to do exactly this because it feels ever-so-decisive and bold.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 18 May 2010 12:25:13AM *  1 point [-]

This doesn't make any sense. Chaotic massacres perpetrated by fired-up raging mobs and undisciplined armies are very different from bureaucratically planned and systematically organized mass killings such as those done under the Nazis or Bolsheviks. While I can see some sense in asking how authoritarian aspects of culture and upbringing were relevant in cases of the latter sort, it's entirely misleading to lump them together with the former. If the quoted summary is accurate, the described work is likely just bullshit tailored to support the author's preconceptions.

Comment author: pjeby 17 May 2010 09:45:55PM 40 points [-]

Other people (that I have talked to) seem to be divided on whether it was a good thing to do or not.

[Note: this is going to sound at first like PUA advice, but is actually about general differences between the socially-typical and atypical in the sending and receiving of "status play" signals, using the current situation as an example.]

I don't know about "good", but for it to be "useful" you would've needed to do it first. (E.g. Her: "Buy me a drink" You: "Sure, now bend over." Her: "What?" "I said bend over, I'm going to spank your spoiled [add playful invective to taste].")

Of course, that won't work if you are actually offended. You have to be genuinely amused, and clearly speaking so as to amuse yourself, rather than being argumentative, judgmental, condescending, critical, or any other such thing.

This is a common failure mode for those of us with low-powered or faulty social coprocessors -- we take offense to things that more-normal individuals interpret as playful status competition, and resist taking similar actions because we interpret them as things that we would only do if we were angry.

In a way, it's like cats and dogs -- the dog wags its tail to signal "I'm not really attacking you, I'm just playing", while the cat waves its tail to mean, "you are about to die if you come any closer". Normal people are dogs, geeks are cats, and if you want to play with the dogs, you have to learn to bark, wag, and play-bite. Otherwise, they think you're a touchy psycho who needs to loosen up and not take everything so seriously. (Not unlike the way dogs may end up learning to avoid the cats in a shared household, if they interpret the cats as weirdly anti-social pack members.)

Genuine creeps and assholes are a third breed altogether: they're the ones who verbally say they're just playing, while in fact they are not playing or joking at all, and are often downright scary.

And their existence kept me from understanding how things worked more quickly, because normal people learn not to play-bite you if you bare your claws or hide under the couch in response ! So, it didn't occur to me that all the normal people had just learned to leave me out of their status play, like a bunch of dogs learning to steer clear of the psycho family cat.

The jerks, on the other hand, like to bait cats, because we're easy to provoke a reaction from. (Most of the "dogs" just frown at the asshole and get on with their day, so the jerk doesn't get any fun.)

So now, if you're a "cat", you learn that only jerks do these things.

And of course, you're utterly and completely wrong, but have little opportunity to discover and correct the problem on your own. And even if you learn how to fake polite socialization, you won't be entirely comfortable running with the dogs, nor they you, since the moment they actually try to "play" with you, you act all weird (for a dog, anyway).

That's why, IMO, some PUA convversation is actually a good thing on LW; it's a nice example of a shared bias to get over. The LWers who insist that people aren't really like that, only low [self-esteem, intelligence] girls fall for that stuff, that even if it does work it's "wrong", etc., are in need of some more understanding of how their fellow humans [of either gender] actually operate. Even if their objective isn't to attract dating partners, there are a lot of things in this world that are much harder to get if you can't speak "dog".

tl;dr: Normal people engage in playful dog-like status games with their actual friends and think you're weird when you respond like a cat, figuratively hissing and spitting, or running away to hide under the bed. Yes, even your cool NT friends who tolerate your idiosyncracies -- you're not actually as close to them as you think, because they're always more careful around you than they are around other NTs.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 17 May 2010 10:36:59PM 12 points [-]

pjeby:

The jerks, on the other hand, like to bait cats, because we're easy to provoke a reaction from. (Most of the "dogs" just frown at the asshole and get on with their day, so the jerk doesn't get any fun.)

So now, if you're a "cat", you learn that only jerks do these things.

Your cat/dog analogy is very good, but this requires some extra elaboration.

As you say, in regular socializing, this "cat-baiting" behavior is characteristic of jerks and bullies; regular people will typically leave "cats" alone rather than provoke them. However, in male-female interactions in which the woman deems (consciously or not) that the man might have some potential mating value but requires additional assessment, or if she perceives that the man is actively trying to win her favors, she'll typically engage in some "cat-baiting" to test him for undesirable "catlike" traits.

There's nothing surprising there once you really understand what's going on; it's simply a regular way of assessing a potential partner's fitness. Sometimes this "cat-baiting" will be subtle and entirely unremarkable to the man, but sometimes it has the form of harsh and unpleasant shit-tests which can leave him angry and hurt, and which go far into the jerk territory by the standards of regular socializing. The latter will happen especially if the woman generally imposes high standards, or if the man looks like a poor prospect who could redeem himself only with some amazing bullet-dodging. (Hence guys who give off a "catlike" vibe often get the worst of it.)

For many guys, understanding this would, at the very least, save them a lot of pointless anger in situations like the one described above by Mallah.

Comment author: Daniel_Burfoot 17 May 2010 05:44:40PM 0 points [-]

I will formalize it. I don't know what your second statement means; to me induction and deduction are completely different. 2+2=4 is a deductive statement, provably true within the context of a certain formal system. "Mars is red" is an inductive statement, it can't be derived from some larger theory; we believe it because of empirical evidence.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 17 May 2010 08:37:55PM *  2 points [-]

"Mars is red" is an inductive statement, it can't be derived from some larger theory; we believe it because of empirical evidence.

That's not an example of a non-trivial induction, since you're talking about a set with only one element. A truly inductive statement says something about a larger set of things where we don't have the relevant empirical data about each single one of them. And once you start formalizing a procedure for non-trivial induction, the boundary between induction and deduction becomes very blurry indeed.

Comment author: Mallah 17 May 2010 02:21:04PM 4 points [-]

It was a single swat to the buttocks, done in full sight of everyone. There was other ass-spanking going on, between people who knew each other - done as a joke - so in context it was not so unusual. I would not have done it outside of that context, nor would I have done it if my inhibitions had not been lowered by alcohol; nor would I do it again even if they are.

Yes, she deserved it!

It was a mistake. Why? It exposed me to more risk than was worthwhile, and while I might have hoped that (aside from simple punishment) it would teach her the lesson that she ought to follow the Golden Rule, or at least should not pull the same tricks on guys, in retrospect it was unlikely to do so.

Other people (that I have talked to) seem to be divided on whether it was a good thing to do or not.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 17 May 2010 08:16:13PM *  9 points [-]

Other people (that I have talked to) seem to be divided on whether it was a good thing to do or not.

It sure was one hell of a low status signal. The worst possible way you can fail a shit test is to get visibly hurt and angry.

As for whether she deserved it, well, if you want to work in the kitchen, better be prepared to stand the heat. Expecting women you hit on to follow the same norms of behavior as your regular buddies and colleagues, and then getting angry when they don't, is like getting into a boxing match and then complaining you've been assaulted.

Comment author: Wei_Dai 17 May 2010 03:26:05AM 5 points [-]

Well, is it also human to stop desiring tasty food once you realize that it boils down to super-stimulation of hardware that evolved as a device for impromptu chemical analysis to sort out nutritionally adequate stuff from the rest?

Not to stop desiring it entirely, but to care less about it than if I didn't realize, yes. (I only have a sample size of one here, namely myself, so I'm curious if others have the same experience.)

As for the "larger scheme of things," that's one of those emotionally-appealing sweeping arguments that can be applied to literally anything to make it seem pointless and unworthy of effort. Selectively applying it is a common human bias. (In fact, I'd say it's a powerful general technique for producing biased argumentation.)

I don't think I'm applying it selectively... we're human and we can only talk about one thing at a time, but other than that I think I do realize that this is a general argument that can be applied to all of our values. It doesn't seem to affect all of them equally though. Some values, such as wanting to be immortal, and wanting to understand the nature of reality, consciousness, etc., seem to survive the argument much better than others. :)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 17 May 2010 05:53:05AM *  3 points [-]

I think I do realize that this is a general argument that can be applied to all of our values. It doesn't seem to affect all of them equally though. Some values, such as wanting to be immortal, and wanting to understand the nature of reality, consciousness, etc., seem to survive the argument much better than others. :)

Honestly, I don't see what you're basing that conclusion on. What, according to you, determines which human values survive that argument and which not?

Comment author: torekp 16 May 2010 04:41:35PM 1 point [-]

The extent to which you can control the peer groups your kids socialize with is quite large. Some religious sects, for example, control that socialization very tightly. The wisdom of such an approach is debatable, but it's definitely possible. A hybrid approach might be to influence (rather than strictly control) the peer-selection process and also attempt to immunize your kids to the worst aspects of their peer culture.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 16 May 2010 10:20:13PM *  8 points [-]

torekp:

The extent to which you can control the peer groups your kids socialize with is quite large.

Yes, but you have only so many possible peer groups to choose from; it's not like you can custom-design one. Ultimately, your kids will internalize the norms and taboos dictated by their peer group, and your attempts to question them will make you look stupid and obnoxious in the kids' eyes. Until of course they grow up (which happens extremely late in our society by all historical standards).

Some religious sects, for example, control that socialization very tightly. The wisdom of such an approach is debatable, but it's definitely possible.

Most people do it, not just religious sects. One of the main things (if not the main thing) that motivates people to work hard is to be able to afford to raise their families in places where their kids' peer groups will inculcate respectable middle-class values and attitudes. Religious sects are different only in that they want to eliminate some influences that pervade the mainstream culture (including the youth culture) today, and which are considered more or less OK by most other people. Typical middle-class people are instinctively horrified by the though of their kids being exposed to a peer group that espouses underclass norms, just like members of religious sects are horrified by the prospect of their kids being exposed to norms hostile to their sect. In both cases, the fears are absolutely justified if you share their respective assumptions on what the kids should turn out like.

As for the amount of attention poured into the control and oversight of kids' activities and peer groups, I'm not at all sure that modern helicopter parenting, which has become the de facto standard for middle classes, is any less intensive in this regard than the parenting practiced by members of strict religious sects.

A hybrid approach might be to influence (rather than strictly control) the peer-selection process and also attempt to immunize your kids to the worst aspects of their peer culture.

Sadly, this is often the equivalent of tilting at windmills. The kids' blind conformity and fanatical adherence to their peer group norms, and their fervor to ruthlessly punish and ostracize their peers who fail to live up to them or who end up assigned low status according to them, is rarely matched by even the most fanatical and close-minded adults. This problem is exacerbated today by the fact that in the contemporary culture, the adulthood is delayed far past the ages at which kids were expected to join the world of adult society and adult norms in the past.

Comment author: Wei_Dai 16 May 2010 02:25:04PM 14 points [-]

Once you tune your radio in, you may find such occasions more exciting.

For me, understanding "what's really going on" in typical social interactions made them even less interesting than when I didn't. At least back then it was a big mystery to be solved. Now I just think, what a big waste of brain cells.

Roko, do you personally find these status and alliance games interesting? Why? I mean, if you play them really well, you'll end up with lots of allies and high status among your friends and acquaintances, but what does that matter in the larger scheme of things? And what do you think of the idea that allies and status were much more important in our EEA (i.e., tribal societies) than today, and as a result we are biased to overestimate their importance?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 16 May 2010 08:31:52PM 6 points [-]

Wei_Dai:

Now I just think, what a big waste of brain cells.

However, that's not how human brains work. It's not like someone who on an average day spends, say, eight hours doing intellectual work and four hours socializing could do 50% more useful intellectual work by spending 12 hours working instead of socializing. For the overwhelming majority of people, it's impossible to employ their brains productively for more than a few hours a day. You get tired and lose focus to the point where you're just making a mess instead of progress.

Similarly, if you develop skills independent of your main intellectual pursuits, it's not like they will automatically steal resources and make you less productive. Human brain just doesn't work that way. On the contrary, a suitable schedule of entertaining diversions can increase your productivity in your main pursuit.

Of course, there are exceptions. Some people really can spend nearly all their waking hours intensely focused and fully productive, without the need or want for anything more in their lives. However, this is a very small minority, even among people working in math, hard science, and technical professions.

And what do you think of the idea that allies and status were much more important in our EEA (i.e., tribal societies) than today, and as a result we are biased to overestimate their importance?

That argument can be used to deny the importance of absolutely everything you do. Unless you believe that some part of you came into existence supernaturally, or you're carrying some highly consequential recent mutation, absolutely everything in your thoughts and deeds is a result of some impulse that evolved in the EEA (although of course it might be manifesting itself in a way very different from the original in today's environment).

Comment author: Wei_Dai 16 May 2010 05:22:54PM 7 points [-]

Most of what we call values seem to respond to arguments, so they're not really the kind of fixed values that a utility maximizer would have. I would be wary about calling some cognitive feature "values that came from the EEA and are not easily changed". Given the right argument or insight, they probably can be changed.

So, granted that it's human to want friendship, community, etc., I'm still curious whether it's also human to care less about these things after realizing that they boil down to status and alliance games, and that the outcomes of these games don't count for much in the larger scheme of things.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 16 May 2010 08:02:37PM *  5 points [-]

So, granted that it's human to want friendship, community, etc., I'm still curious whether it's also human to care less about these things after realizing that they boil down to status and alliance games, and that the outcomes of these games don't count for much in the larger scheme of things.

Well, is it also human to stop desiring tasty food once you realize that it boils down to super-stimulation of hardware that evolved as a device for impromptu chemical analysis to sort out nutritionally adequate stuff from the rest?

As for the "larger scheme of things," that's one of those emotionally-appealing sweeping arguments that can be applied to literally anything to make it seem pointless and unworthy of effort. Selectively applying it is a common human bias. (In fact, I'd say it's a powerful general technique for producing biased argumentation.)

Comment author: Wei_Dai 16 May 2010 04:15:06AM 2 points [-]

"Practice makes perfect" has a rather different emphasis from Roko's suggestion of "running social interactions in software", which is what I was addressing.

But to answer your point, I agree that improvements in social skills from practice can be dramatic, but probably not for everyone, just like not everyone can learn how to program computers. It would be interesting to see some empirical data on how much improvement can be expected, and what the distribution of outcomes is, so people can make more informed choices about how much effort to put into practicing social skills.

I'm also curious what the "simple heuristics" that you mention are.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 16 May 2010 05:54:04AM *  8 points [-]

Wei_Dai:

"Practice makes perfect" has a rather different emphasis from Roko's suggestion of "running social interactions in software", which is what I was addressing.

Fair enough, if you're talking only about the initial stage where you're running things purely "in software," before any skill buildup.

But to answer your point, I agree that improvements in social skills from practice can be dramatic, but probably not for everyone, just like not everyone can learn how to program computers. It would be interesting to see some empirical data on how much improvement can be expected, and what the distribution of outcomes is, so people can make more informed choices about how much effort to put into practicing social skills.

From what I've observed in practice, people with normal (and especially above average) intelligence and without extraordinary problems (like e.g. a severe speech disorder) who start at a low social skill level can see significant improvements with fairly modest efforts. In this regard, the situation is much better than with technical or math skills, where you have to acquire a fairly high level of mastery to be able to put them to any productive use at all.

I don't deny that some people with extremely bad social skills are sincerely content with their lives. However, my impression is that a very considerable percentage would be happy to change it but believe that it's impossible, or at least far more difficult than it is. Many such people, especially the more intelligent ones, would greatly benefit from exposure to explicit analyses of human social behaviors (both mating and otherwise) that unfortunately fall under the hypocritical norms against honest and explicit discussion that I mentioned in my above comment. So they remain falsely convinced that there is something deeply mysterious, inconceivable, and illogical about what they're lacking.

I'm also curious what the "simple heuristics" that you mention are.

Well, which ones are the most effective for a particular person will depend on his concrete problems. But often bad social skills are to a significant degree -- though never completely -- due to behaviors that can be recognized and avoided using fairly simple rules. An example would be, say, someone who consistently overestimates how much people are interested in what he has to say and ends up being a bore. If he starts being more conservative in estimating his collocutors' interest before starting his diatribes, it can be a tremendous first step.

This is admittedly a pretty bland and narrow example; unfortunately, pieces of advice that would be more generally applicable tend to be very un-PC to discuss due to the above mentioned hypocritical norms.

Comment author: Wei_Dai 16 May 2010 02:55:48AM 2 points [-]

I agree with you, and pjeby, who made similar points: the complexity of actual social games is higher than they appear on the surface, and much signaling is about signaling ability itself. But these insights also imply that the value of "running social interactions in software" is limited. Our general purpose cognitive machinery is unlikely to be able to reproduce the throughput and latency characteristics of a dedicated social coprocessor, and can really only handle relatively simple games, or situations where you have a lot of time to think. In other words, trying to play mating games with an NT "in software" is kind of like trying to play basketball "in software".

Comment author: Vladimir_M 16 May 2010 03:31:32AM *  6 points [-]

Your argument is fallacious because it rests on overstretching the software/hardware analogy. Human brain contains highly reconfigurable hardware, and if some particular computations are practiced enough, the brain will eventually start synthesizing specialized circuits for them, thus dramatically boosting their speed and accuracy. Or to say it the traditional way, practice makes perfect.

Whether it's throwing darts, programming computers, speaking a foreign language, or various social interactions, if you're lacking any experience, your first attempts will be very clumsy, as your general cognitive circuits struggle ineptly to do the necessary computations. After enough practice, though, specialized hardware gradually takes over and things start going much more smoothly; you just do what it takes without much conscious thinking. You may never match someone with greater natural talent or who has much more accumulated practice initially, but the improvements can certainly be dramatic. (And even before that, you might be surprised how well some simple heuristics work.)

Comment author: orthonormal 16 May 2010 01:42:40AM 2 points [-]

I agree: in some cases, one can't conclude which of two awful options is least bad (or one can conclude that the difference between them isn't likely to be worth the effort of investigating further, under the circumstances), and in that case, a random selection between such options is as good as any strategy.

However, ISTM that most trolley problems don't fall into that category, and that a policy of refusing to consider them on principle is probably a signaling phenomenon (one doesn't want to appear to endorse killing the innocent, even in such a farfetched hypothetical).

Comment author: Vladimir_M 16 May 2010 02:59:00AM *  1 point [-]

However, ISTM that most trolley problems don't fall into that category, and that a policy of refusing to consider them on principle is probably a signaling phenomenon (one doesn't want to appear to endorse killing the innocent, even in such a farfetched hypothetical).

That, however, is more likely to manifest itself in a decisive anti-utilitarian answer, not feigning indecisiveness. People who want to signal that they won't endorse killing the innocent will say that it's wrong to actively kill someone even if it saves other lives, so they wouldn't push the fat man etc. -- and usually this is an honest statement of how they would really act in practice. Expressions of moral intuitions that are loaded with signaling value are usually felt sincerely, and acted upon readily. Similarly, people who refuse to endorse any alternative -- who are, I believe, a small minority in the general public -- sincerely view the situation as akin to the bullet choice. It might be ultimately due to signaling, but note that among ordinary folks, this sends a very bad signal. It's not at all good to be perceived as morally indecisive and lacking in principles.

That said, I'd say your theory is applicable to enthusiastic consequentialists too, and actually more so. I have the impression that many people who bite moral bullets based on various consequentialist theories do it for signaling value. They want to signal their rationality, adherence to logic rather than emotion, bravery in face of hostile reactions from people whose moral intuitions get violated, etc. In fact, I'd venture to say that the signaling here is more transparent, since unlike the never-kill-the-innocent folks, they likely wouldn't be ready to follow what they say in practice [*].

--

[*] - This doesn't contradict what I wrote above (that signal-loaded moral statements are typically acted upon readily), because these people are signaling to a very different audience than ordinary folks, to whom that statement applies.

Comment author: mattnewport 16 May 2010 12:45:55AM *  4 points [-]

He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you.

Friedrich Nietzsche

I don't really agree but I think this describes the fear that underlies much of the hostility to discussing these controversial topics.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 16 May 2010 01:45:32AM *  2 points [-]

I think you're partly correct, but some other biases are in fact more relevant here. However, going deeper into this would look too much like attacking other people's motives, which would be perceived as both unproductive and hostile, so I'd rather not delve into that line of discussion.

Comment author: orthonormal 16 May 2010 12:03:24AM *  3 points [-]

That raises an obvious question: what do you actually do if you find yourself in a Sophie's choice, especially if the result of the null or default choice is more monstrous to you than the results of the other choices? Refusing to consider a class of decision theory problems is tantamount to precommitting to an unconsidered answer should one of them arise.

Of course, in most cases, people actually do seem to consider horrific choices once they're actually faced with one; I therefore conclude that the popular response of refusing to make an analysis of such problems is more about signaling than anything else.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 16 May 2010 12:47:48AM *  1 point [-]

That raises an obvious question: what do you actually do if you find yourself in a Sophie's choice, especially if the result of the null or default choice is more monstrous to you than the results of the other choices?

Well, the correct answer could be that I don't know what I would do -- and even if I knew that I would probably act in a certain way, it wouldn't be the outcome of any rational deliberation, but just a whimsical reflex from my brain overloaded with the stress of the situation.

You'll probably agree that there are situations where this would be the only realistic answer. For example, suppose you were about to be shot in a minute and the executioner showed you two bullets and told you do choose which one will end up in your head, and also threatened to kill you in a more painful and gruesome way if you refuse to make your choice clear. What does any decision theory say about this situation? It's absurd to insist on a rational rule for decision-making here.

Now of course, you can say that I chose an example where whatever the calculus, the numbers end up being equal, since the two options are identical in every relevant respect. But why should we believe that if only the options are sufficiently different, there must be a way to impose an ordering of desirability on them? Why wouldn't the "answer undefined" response be applicable in a much broader class of situations than just those where consequentialist calculations evaluate all options the same? What property of the universe or logic (or something else?) demands otherwise?

Comment author: Roko 15 May 2010 11:45:41PM 4 points [-]

This particular domain of human behavior is so ridiculously irrational

No! Not at all. Quite the contrary: in the original post I was careful to show that a shit-test is actually an application of an advanced concept from game theory -- using a credential to solve a cheap talk problem in a signaling game!

Comment author: Vladimir_M 16 May 2010 12:22:51AM *  14 points [-]

To put it more clearly, it's not that this domain of human behavior is actually particularly irrational. In reality, it has its well-defined rules, and men who have the knowledge and ability to behave according to these rules are, at least in a libertine society such as ours, awarded with high status in the eyes of others -- and lots of sex, of course, if they choose to employ their abilities in practice. In contrast, men who are particularly bad at it suffer an extreme low status penalty; they are are a target of derision and scorn both privately and in the popular culture. However, what complicates the situation is that this is one of those areas where humans practice extreme hypocrisy, in that you're expected not just to navigate the rules of the game cleverly, but also to pretend that they don't exist, and to discuss the topic openly only with mystical reverence and unrealistic idealizations. Realistic open discussions are perceived as offensive and sacrilegious. It's an enormous bias.

Comment author: kodos96 15 May 2010 11:35:04PM 2 points [-]

I understand that this is often the case, and that this is how "pick ups" often work in the real world. The thing is, I just think that human's sexual rituals are ingrained so deeply in our little monkey brains, that I don't think generalizing from what works in that domain to the broader world of "refining the art of human rationality" is a really good idea. This particular domain of human behavior is so ridiculously irrational that I don't think it serves as a good model for ordinary, everyday human irrationality. So if you're reasoning by analogy to it, you're basically patterning against a superstimulus

Comment author: Vladimir_M 15 May 2010 11:59:24PM *  2 points [-]

This particular domain of human behavior is so ridiculously irrational that I don't think it serves as a good model for ordinary, everyday human irrationality

Well, even if Geoffrey Miller's theories are overshooting it a bit, the role of sexual selection in the evolution of the human mind should not be underestimated. Rather than being some isolated dark corner or irrationality that can be safely corralled and ignored, it seems to me that various inclinations and biases related to the mating behaviors, whether directly or indirectly, are very much all-pervasive in the workings of human minds. Therefore, careful dissection of these behaviors can reveal a lot about human nature that is applicable more widely.

Comment author: kodos96 15 May 2010 10:26:40PM *  2 points [-]

I think it's the "faking it" part I and many other people find objectionable.

ETA: you edited this post after I replied, so I don't think my original reply makes sense any more....

Wouldn't it just be easier for you to ignore the posts that contain info that you don't personally need or want to know?

How is this different from "if you disagree with me, keep it to yourself"?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 15 May 2010 11:30:45PM *  15 points [-]

I think it's the "faking it" part I and many other people find objectionable.

This is where you and several other people here make a critical mistake. You view various aspects of human mating behavior exclusively in terms of signaling objective traits, and then you add a moral dimension to it by trying to judge whether these objective traits supposedly being signaled are true or fake.

In reality, however, human social behavior -- and especially mating behavior -- is about much more complex higher-order signaling strategies, which are a product of a long and complicated evolutionary interplay of strategies for signaling, counter-signaling, fake signaling, and fake signaling detection -- as well as the complex game-theoretic questions of what can ultimately be inferred from one's signaled intentions. Nobody has disentangled this whole complicated mess into a complete and coherent theory yet, though some basic principles have been established pretty conclusively, both by the academic evolutionary psychology and by people generalizing informally from practical experiences. However, the key point is that in a species practicing higher-order signaling strategies, signaling ability itself becomes an adaptive trait. You're not supposed to just signal objective traits directly; you also have to demonstrate your skill in navigating through the complex signaling games. It's a self-reinforcing feedback cycle, where at the end of the day, your signaling skills matter in their own right, just like your other abilities for navigating through the world matter -- and most things being signaled are in fact meta-signals about these traits.

Therefore, where you see "faking it" and "head games" and whatnot, in reality it's just humans practicing their regular social behaviors. You'll miss the point spectacularly if you analyze these behaviors in terms of simple announcements of objective traits and plain intentions and direct negotiations based on these announcements, where anything beyond that is deceitful faking. Learning how to play the signaling games better is no more deceitful than, say, practicing basic social norms of politeness instead of just honestly blurting out your opinions of other people to their faces.

Comment author: cupholder 14 May 2010 10:16:37PM *  2 points [-]

We're applying higher criteria for genius. But are we really?

I think this is more likely than not, but I couldn't quantify it. I think it's more likely for the simple reason that what earlier geniuses (like von Neumann etc.) did has already been done. To me, that implies the genius bar has been raised, in absolute terms, at least in the hard sciences and math.

The average has moved up, but the variance has shrunk. But this would have to be implausibly extreme shrinkage,

Agree.

The modern culture is making common folks smarter, but it drags geniuses down. I believe there might be some truth to this. The pop culture everyone's supposed to follow, however trashy, has gotten more demanding mentally, but true intellectual pursuits have lost a lot of status compared to the past. Still, such effects can't explain the severity of the effect --

Agree. It's hard for me to imagine many geniuses getting derailed just by trash TV and ostracism.

The IQ scores say a lot about people who are average or below average, but not much about smart people. This seems like the most plausible option to me, and the only one compatible with evidence.

I believe IQ still correlates positively with performance among very high-achievers, just not as well as for normal people. The biggest factor here might be touched on in your second paragraph:

Moreover, it assumes that people whose intellects stand out as strikingly brilliant are drawn -- as a necessary condition, and not too far from sufficient -- from the pool of those whose general intelligence is exceptionally high.

I would bet that the standouts you're talking about would have higher average IQ, but would not actually be 'exceptionally' high, because IQ doesn't correlate that well with success. Also, many of the geniuses we're thinking of would probably be specialists, and it's harder to track specialized performance with the (relatively) generalist metric of IQ. If the IQ threshold for genius is lower than you think, an upward shift in the mean makes less difference. (Of course it can't explain the effect away entirely; something else is happening. But it could be a part.)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 14 May 2010 10:48:57PM *  5 points [-]

cupholder:

I think it's more likely for the simple reason that what earlier geniuses (like von Neumann etc.) did has already been done. To me, that implies the genius bar has been raised, in absolute terms, at least in the hard sciences and math.

That could well be the case. However, it fails to explain the lack of apparent genius at lower educational stages. For example, if you look at a 30 year period in the second half of the 20th century, the standard primary and high school math programs probably didn't change dramatically during this time, and they certainly didn't become much harder. Moreover, one could find many older math teachers who worked with successive generations throughout this period -- in which the Flynn IQ increase was above 1SD in many countries. If the number of young potential von Neumanns increased drastically during this period, as it should have according to the simple normal distribution model, then the teachers should have been struck by how more and more kids find the standard math programs insultingly easy. This would be true even if these potential von Neumanns have subsequently found it impossible to make the same impact as him because all but the highest-hanging fruit is now gone.

I would bet that the standouts you're talking about would have higher average IQ, but would not actually be 'exceptionally' high, because IQ doesn't correlate that well with success.

Yes, that's basically what I meant when I speculated that IQ might be significantly informative about intellectually average and below-average people, but much less about above-average ones. Unfortunately, I think we'll have to wait for further major advances in brain science to make any conclusions beyond speculation there. Psychometrics suffers from too many complications to be of much further use in answering such questions (and the politicization of the field doesn't help either, of course).

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 14 May 2010 09:01:03PM 1 point [-]

It's conceivable that there are institutional barriers to genius expressing itself-- partly that there really is more knowledge to be assimilated before one can do original work, and partly that chasing grants just sucks up too much time and makes it less likely for people to work on unfashionable angles.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 14 May 2010 09:30:18PM *  2 points [-]

Still, it's not like historical geniuses all grew up as pampered aristocrats left to pursue whatever they liked. Many of them grew up as poor commoners destined for an entirely unremarkable life, but their exceptional brightness as kids caught the attention of the local teacher, priest, or some other educated and influential person who happened to be around, and who then used his influence to open an exceptional career path for them. Thus, if the distribution of kids' general intelligence is really going up all the way, we'd expect teachers and professors to report a dramatic increase in the number of such brilliant students, but that's apparently not the case.

Moreover, many historical geniuses had to overcome far greater hurdles than having to chase grants and learn a lot before reaching competence for original work. Here I mean not just the regular life hardships, like when Tesla had to dig ditches for a living or when Ramanujan couldn't afford paper and pencil, but also the intellectual hurdles like having to become professionally proficient in the predominant language of science (whether English today or German, French, or Latin in the past), which can take at least as much intellectual effort as studying a whole subfield of science thoroughly.

So, while your hypothesis makes sense, I don't think it can fully explain the puzzle.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 14 May 2010 08:51:06PM *  14 points [-]

Another thing to have in mind is that in the contemporary culture, qualities such as "open-mindedness," "questioning authority," "free-thinking," etc. are universally hailed as ideals, to the point where implying that someone lacks such qualities is considered a serious insult, and is a frequently employed tactic for character assassination. Thus, people endeavor to obtain recognition from others that they have such qualities, and get angry when someone suggests otherwise.

However, like any human culture, ours also has its strong taboos and norms that it's unwise to question, let alone flaunt; to them the respectable label of "free-thinking" doesn't apply. So, what gets labeled as "free-thinking" in our culture may be the real thing, but it may also be a cargo-cult imitation thereof, whose real purpose is signaling respectability, not revealing truth, and where tacit agreement exists not to extend skepticism and criticism to truly sacred taboos. Humans being what they are, we would expect to get much more of the latter, and this is indeed what we see. Thus, I'm extremely skeptical of anyone trying to publicly extol his own, or even someone else's "free-thinking" as a virtue.

Moreover, in any society, including ours, it would be extremely unwise -- even if it were possible -- to raise your kids to be out-and-out fearless free-thinkers who will throw themselves against every third-rail taboo and sacred cow they come across. It would ruin their life prospects. The way things seem, however, it's impossible to have that much direct influence on your kids' character anyway, except to the extent that you can control the peer groups they socialize with -- which is another thing that makes me skeptical of the above quoted work.

Comment author: cupholder 14 May 2010 01:59:34PM 1 point [-]

Another is that people who could be making major contributions are distracted by the complexity of popular culture. :-/

I'd generalise that: maybe a more complex and IQ-oriented culture means people have to run faster just to stay in the same place, intellectually.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 14 May 2010 08:14:23PM *  2 points [-]

That may be the case, but I still don't find the explanation satisfactory from the point of view of the classic general intelligence theory (not that I have a better alternative, though).

To clarify, the traditional theory of general intelligence, which is taken as a background assumption in most IQ-related research, assumes that general intelligence is normally distributed in the general population, and any reasonable measure of it will be highly correlated with IQ test scores (which are themselves artificially crafted to produce a normal distribution of scores). Moreover, it assumes that people whose intellects stand out as strikingly brilliant are drawn -- as a necessary condition, and not too far from sufficient -- from the pool of those whose general intelligence is exceptionally high. Now, if the scores on IQ tests are rising, but there is no visible increase in outstanding genius, it could mean one or more of these things (or something else I'm not aware of?):

  • We're applying higher criteria for genius. But are we really? Has the number of people at the level of von Neumann, Ramanujan, or Goedel really increased by two orders of magnitude since their time, as it should have if the distribution of general intelligence has simply moved up by 2SD since their time? (Note that for any increase in average, ceteris paribus, the increase in the rate of genius should be greater the higher the threshold we're looking at!)

  • The average has moved up, but the variance has shrunk. But this would have to be implausibly extreme shrinkage, since the average of IQ scores today is roughly at the z-score of +2 from two generations ago.

  • The modern culture is making common folks smarter, but it drags geniuses down. I believe there might be some truth to this. The pop culture everyone's supposed to follow, however trashy, has gotten more demanding mentally, but true intellectual pursuits have lost a lot of status compared to the past. Still, such effects can't explain the severity of the effect -- remember, the Flynn increase is greater than the difference between borderline retardation and being above average in the way the scores are used for diagnostics!

  • The IQ scores say a lot about people who are average or below average, but not much about smart people. This seems like the most plausible option to me, and the only one compatible with evidence. But this means that the standard model based on the normal distribution is seriously broken when it comes to the right side of the distribution, and it also makes the results of many heritability studies much more murky.

All in all, the situation is confusing, and unlikely to get clearer in the near future.

Comment author: Douglas_Knight 14 May 2010 07:12:14AM 1 point [-]

That seems a bit extreme. Why not put it on the open thread now, even if you plan on elaborating later?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 14 May 2010 06:51:19PM 0 points [-]

Don't worry, I can quickly reproduce the same argument whenever a more opportune context comes up.

Comment author: Douglas_Knight 14 May 2010 05:14:38AM 0 points [-]

Here is a provocative thought. In my opinion, scientists nowadays command the trust and confidence of the general public largely thanks to the "dark arts."

Yeah, but was this relevant? Shouldn't this go in an open thread or its own post?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 14 May 2010 06:14:47AM *  0 points [-]

Yes, you're right, it is probably too off topic. I replied to the above comment without too much thinking about the context. I'll delete it and cache the thought for a more appropriate moment.

Comment author: PhilGoetz 14 May 2010 02:40:22AM *  4 points [-]

How are popular books about popular culture an indicator of rising IQ? You mean, e.g., a book about Michael Jackson?

Science fiction blossomed in the 1930s. Educational books became big in the 1950s, I think. Self-help books became huge 40 or 50 years ago. Parenting books became huge in the 1960s. Popular sociology books date back to before Future Shock, printed 40 years ago.

I have the impression of a big increase in IQ when I listen to old radio comedy shows, pre-World War II. The humor is so simple and repetitive and uninteresting that I get the feeling the US must have consisted of adult-sized children. Maybe it's because radio was a new medium; but a lot of it was just a restaging of vaudeville humor that had been successful for decades.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 14 May 2010 03:36:40AM *  13 points [-]

PhilGoetz

I have the impression of a big increase in IQ when I listen to old radio comedy shows, pre-World War II. The humor is so simple and repetitive and uninteresting that I get the feeling the US must have consisted of adult-sized children. Maybe it's because radio was a new medium; but a lot of it was just a restaging of vaudeville humor that had been successful for decades.

I have the same impression, though it could be partly due to the growth and specialization in the pop-culture market, so that the sample you happen to see today is mainly from the output targeted at smarter audiences. But the difference seems too large to explain just by that effect; the old shows are often truly mind-numbingly dull, as you describe. There was a post about this topic a few years ago on Marginal Revolution with some striking diagrams: http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2005/04/tv_and_the_flyn.html

What makes it even more puzzling is that these apparent huge increases in average folks' sharpness were not accompanied by anything similar at the higher levels of intellectual accomplishment. In many countries, a teacher or professor who taught for, say, 30 years during the second half of the 20th century would have dealt with generations of students whose average raw IQ test scores increased by more than a whole standard deviation in that period. Yet there have been no reports of striking proliferation of super-smart students at any educational level. (Consider that if the average of a normal distribution increases by 1SD, it will, ceteris paribus, boost the percentage of scores exceeding the previous +3SD threshold by about 16 times!)

So basically, we're seeing pop culture getting more mentally demanding, along with a dramatic increase in average non-verbal IQ test scores, but no visible increase in the number of exceedingly brilliant individuals. At the same time, the tests apparently remain strong predictors of all sorts of intellectual performance. I suspect that the procedures by which IQ tests are constantly re-normed to produce neat normal distributions lead to a scoring system that is seriously misleading in at least some ways. This is also a serious objection I have to a lot of research in this area: it starts and ends assuming that we're dealing with a variable (IQ) which is normally distributed through the population, like height, even though it's in fact artificially made that way, and we still have no idea what's really underneath.

Comment author: Jack 12 May 2010 02:21:34AM *  10 points [-]

Your usual club/bar crowd in a major city is probably above average still. You can still have interesting conversations there: probably not AI, physics, serious philosophy or population genetics but pop-psychology, gender, sex, music and film, sure as long as you don't over do it and get too serious.

In comparison, my girlfriend's mother (they are from the rural midwest) thought "Al Qaeda" was the name of the man we had put in charge in Iraq (Al as in Albert or Allen).

Edit: I remember there was an AMA on reddit which was just with some guy who had a lower than average IQ and everyone acted like they were meeting an alien.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 13 May 2010 06:44:51AM *  7 points [-]

Edit: I remember there was an AMA on reddit which was just with some guy who had a lower than average IQ and everyone acted like they were meeting an alien.

Taking the IQ score for a characteristic that says something precise about an individual, like height or weight, is a fallacy. The real utility of IQ is statistical. It correlates highly with a number of relevant measures of ability and success in life, but the connection is ultimately probabilistic. Someone who scored 85 on an IQ test is highly likely to perform worse on pretty much any intellectual task than someone who scored, say, 115. However, in a large population, there will be a significant number of exceptions -- both above-average IQ types who are otherwise dumb as a box of rocks and useless for any productive work, and below-average folks who come off as clever and competent.

This is by no means to say that IQ is irrelevant. In a population large enough for the law of large numbers to kick in, the relevant measures of intellectual success and competence will correlate with the IQ distributions with merciless regularity. But whatever it is exactly that IQ tests measure, it contains enough randomness and irrelevant components to make the correlations imperfect and allow for lots of individual exceptions.

Comment author: SilasBarta 11 May 2010 06:55:55PM 1 point [-]

It looks like there is indeed quite of bit of overlap between our views. I haven't had much experience with people using the "addiction" excuse, but I recommend you approach the topic using a broader definition, as I do in this blog post (which I think you'll enjoy).

Instead of looking at it from the perspective of, "Is this person just making some excuse so they can get away with irresponsibly continuing the addictive behavior?", look at it from the perspective of, "Does this person get strong urges to do something they know is bad for them, enjoy doing it, but also wish they didn't get those urges?" And then ask if that's a very special kind of "preference" (though I think you already agree now).

Excerpt from the blog (emphasis added):

You all know about how society regards certain products as dangerous, ... because they are addictive. ... Yet I have never been able to get addicted (or near addicted -- I'm not going by the rigorous psychological definition here) to such products. ...

While I have tried cigarettes before, ... beyond the threshold that makes people yearn for a cigarette, I feel no desire whatsoever to smoke. ... Now, here's the kicker: I do get powerful, near-addiction urges to e.g. post on internet forums, eat ice cream/milkshakes (YUM!), play certain video games, and other things I can remember. But EVERY one of those things for which I do get urges ... is completely legal!

And again, I believe the addiction excuse is heavily overused; I just don't think that resolves the akrasia issue.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 13 May 2010 05:14:52AM 0 points [-]

Thanks for the link! I just posted a reply at your blog.

Comment author: SilasBarta 12 May 2010 02:37:35PM *  0 points [-]

I started reading it a while ago. It's split up into three parts:

1) Explanation of the theory
2) Evidence from historical records
3) Vestiges of the bicameral mind in the modern world

I skipped part 2 and read most of 1 and 3. I don't know whether to recommend for or against it at this point. He definitely brings up some interesting evidence I hadn't known about involving schizophrenics, hypnotism, religious rituals (incl. Greek philosophers' experience with "gods"), and the development of modern science, and D. Dennett recommends him (in a bit of a back-handed way), but at the same time I get the sense of confirmation bias permeating the book. It's a big question mark at this point, and I've since focused efforts on more reliably insightful works.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 13 May 2010 03:12:04AM *  6 points [-]

The prominent linguist and writing systems scholar Peter T. Daniels once made the following comment about Jaynes's book:

I read it many years ago, when it first came out, as did people in all sorts of humanities, and everyone's reaction was exactly the same: "Of course he doesn't know what he's talking about in my particular subfield, but all the rest of it seems plausible." What that means is that Jaynes is a very good writer.

I've read Jaynes's book, and my impressions confirm this view. Jaynes is certainly an excellent writer. The book is well worth reading even if just for entertainment value, and there is certainly much worthwhile about its creative and interesting theoretical speculations, as well as many gems of erudition that are strewn throughout it.

However, I don't think Jaynes's arguments ultimately hold water. The evidence he presents is sparse and far-fetched, and overwhelmingly limited to the ancient Mediterranean and Near East civilizations. He says very little to nothing about other human societies. There is no clear and unambiguous historical account of encountering a bicameral-minded society, even among peoples who were below the development level of the old civilizations discussed by Jaynes when first contacted by Westerners and other literate civilizations who have left extensive and clear histories. This seems to require a lot of special pleading to explain away, so I'd say it's a decisive argument against his theories.

Also, I remember several claims made by Jaynes that, to my knowledge, contradict well established findings in various fields. However, I would have to re-read the book to write down a precise critique; my memory of it isn't reliable enough to talk about the specifics right now.

Comment author: SilasBarta 11 May 2010 05:41:16PM *  0 points [-]

Thanks for your input, and I agree with your distinction along the lines of conflicting preferences.

I believe I already have implicitly formulated my views with a taboo on akrasia and preference. In my last substantive reply, I basically said that there are two kinds of phenomena going on, as seen by several significant differences, justifying a different term for each one (because they occupy such different clumps of conceptspace). And whatever those terms are, some contexts certainly do justify distinguishing between the two.

The specific differences I stated are that one would involve "retroactive consent" while the other wouldn't; a long-term period of coerced abstinence would induce psychological stress in one but not the other, and it would permanently alter the target's behavior in one case but not the other.

Preference, akrasia, whatever. Two different things are going on, warranting different actions in response.

Yes, people lie about addiction for sympathy. A lot. But that doesn't make it all a scam.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 11 May 2010 06:34:25PM *  2 points [-]

Unfortunately, I'll be too busy to write anything more than this comment until (at least) tomorrow, and the discussion is indeed getting complex and buried ever deeper into the comment thread, so I'm not sure if we'll be able to continue. But in any case, I think it's been a worthwhile exchange, and it has made me rethink my positions on these issues. As a final observation, I'll just briefly address this comment of yours:

In my last substantive reply, I basically said that there are two kinds of phenomena going on, as seen by several significant differences, justifying a different term for each one (because they occupy such different clumps of conceptspace). And whatever those terms are, some contexts certainly do justify distinguishing between the two.

I agree with this, and in retrospect, I see that due to my own hasty writing and lack of clarity, my comments could have been read as denying this distinction altogether, which was not my intention. Therefore, I think our true disagreement has been about: (1) how widely your "smoker vs. jogger" model is applicable in practice (and in particular, whether it is applicable to typical smokers who plead addiction), and (2) how widely the signaling explanation is applicable instead (i.e. the case where one falsely pleads one's supposed inability to suffer the withdrawal pains to gain the more respectable victim/sufferer status instead of being condemned for practicing vice willingly).

Maybe my impressions in this regard are biased, perhaps by my personal experiences. For all I know, I might be an atypical individual in this regard; but then, from many anecdotal observations, I have the impression that people around me have often played the above described signaling game, to the point where I see it as a general rule. So at the end, we can probably settle for an empirical disagreement whose resolution would require detailed discussions of a large, representative set of concrete situations, to see how far these alternative explanations are applicable in practice.

Comment author: Jack 11 May 2010 12:46:12AM *  7 points [-]

Your poll doesn't let responders get out of answering the second question if they haven't been diagnosed. Anyway, I scored a 27 but I'm pretty sure the fact that I have ADHD and some anxiety issues distorts my score.

(Edit: Apparently the DSM prohibits co-diagnosis of an ASD and ADHD which is really interesting. More and more I think a lot of psychological disorders are just random clusters of atypical neurological traits and not organized in any scientifically justifiable way)

Oh, and my approach to normative ethics is basically the opposite of the systematized, axiom-based approach of traditional normative ethics as exemplified by utilitarianism and strong deontology.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 11 May 2010 02:49:58AM *  0 points [-]

More and more I think a lot of psychological disorders are just random clusters of atypical neurological traits and not organized in any scientifically justifiable way

Well, that's hardly surprising when you take into account how little is still known about the actual brain structure and functionality that determines the relevant behaviors. It's even less surprising considering the amount of charlatanism and pseudoscience with which psychiatry has been plagued historically (think Freud or Rorschach -- who are in fact still taken seriously by some in the field, though such flagrant superstitions, as far as I know, don't make it into the DSMs and similarly prominent documents these days). Not to mention that many issues that psychiatry deals with have a pronounced ideological dimension, making the situation even more hopeless. (How can the question of what behaviors get to be branded as pathological ever be approached in an ideologically neutral way?)

Comment author: SilasBarta 10 May 2010 09:42:13PM *  6 points [-]

Please don't misunderstand. I'm very sympathetic toward that view, and I agree it can explain a great number of cases. Many of the specific points you made there I agree with as well, especially about Tiger Woods and "sex addiction". I've also written diatribes (that I won't dredge up) about how people go great lengths to rationalize consumption of alcoholic drinks to make them socially acceptable, when really they just want to get high. Heck, I've even tried, long ago, getting myself addicted to legal substances that are on the socially-endorsed "addictive" list, and failed.

What I dispute is that it's a full explanation applicable to all asserted cases of akrasia. For example, it runs into these problems: If you did a gun-to-the-head test on the chain smoker and the jogger over an extended period,

  • the smoker would go through a kind of negative psychological stress not present in the jogger.

  • after a long enough time, the smoker would lose the urge to smoke, and thank the gunman[1] for having used such coercion, while the jogger would stay resentful.

  • ETA: the jogger would probably return to jogging thereafter, while the smoker would not return to smoking, even in private.

Also, it would require that we make no distinction between "this person is doing X because it is painful not to" vs. "this person is doing X because it is pleasurable". Our own psychological experience tells us that there is a difference between pleasure and the absence of pain, even if that difference is not relevant in every context. (Remember, rejection of the akrasia concept requires that you believe it is never a relevant distinction, not just that it's an unnecessary distinction in some contexts.)

Furthermore, it's highly probable that people dislike the impacts of e.g. smoking/drugs on them, above and beyond the social disapproval it brings on them, especially when e.g. it takes a smoker 20 cigarettes to get a minor buzz.

The above considerations keep me from cynically dismissing the concept of akrasia as means of retaining social status while acting out one's truly fundamental preferences.

[1] ETA: I'm sorry for assuming that someone who threatens lethal force against another over a long period in order to make a philosophical point is a man rather than a woman, but I don't think it's incredibly offensive to do so.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 11 May 2010 12:09:10AM *  1 point [-]

What I dispute is that it's a full explanation applicable to all asserted cases of akrasia. For example, it runs into these problems: If you did a gun-to-the-head test on the chain smoker and the jogger over an extended period,

  • the smoker would go through a kind of negative psychological stress not present in the jogger.
  • after a long enough time, the smoker would lose the urge to smoke, and thank the gunman[1] for having used such coercion, while the jogger would stay resentful.
  • ETA: the jogger would probably return to jogging thereafter, while the smoker would not return to smoking, even in private.

First, I would note that as far as I see, the above model is applicable to a much smaller range of behaviors than commonly believed. More specifically, I think the level of "withdrawal pain" is commonly greatly exaggerated for all but the most extreme physical addictions, like heroin or very extreme alcoholism. And even for these extreme cases, when the relatively brief period of physical withdrawal is bridged, the memories of past pleasures remain a constant temptation; relapses are a notorious problem in all sorts of substance abuse cases. This, I think, shows that even for true physical dependences, a large part of the motivation is seeking pleasure, not avoiding pain.

Thus, for most forms of alleged akrasia, I do think the cynical dismissal is correct even if I grant your above objections, since the pain of quitting is not so high as to be truly relevant. Smoking is a prime example, which I conclude both from my personal experience with quitting and from the apparent ease with which smokers conform to the now ubiquitous smoking bans under which many of them spend most of their waking hours. (Apparently, far lesser threats than the gun-to-the-head test are more than enough!) It definitely seems to me that non-relapsing ex-smokers are those who came to realization that the costs exceed the benefits, not those who successfully bridged a temporary withdrawal pain period.

But otherwise, yes, I grant that your above description could be accurate for some behaviors. However, someone who believes he'd benefit from quitting, but lacks the willpower to endure the withdrawal pain, can make the arrangements to be restrained during that critical period. This indeed happens when people check into rehabs. Yet in reality, bridging the painful withdrawal period is by no means a guarantee against relapse. Now, you say:

Also, it would require that we make no distinction between "this person is doing X because it is painful not to" vs. "this person is doing X because it is pleasurable".

I accept the difference in case of a heroin addict who will pass through a few days of torment if he doesn't shoot up, or a delirium tremens-level alcoholic. But would you classify it as avoiding pain, rather than seeking pleasure, when someone who has already passed through this painful period is tempted to re-experience the past thrills? Or when someone is "addicted" to a drug that has no physical withdrawal symptoms (according to the standard terminology)? Or when someone feels that work is intolerably tedious and can't refrain from procrastinating? Where exactly do you draw that line?

Furthermore, it's highly probable that people dislike the impacts of e.g. smoking/drugs on them, above and beyond the social disapproval it brings on them, especially when e.g. it takes a smoker 20 cigarettes to get a minor buzz.

Of course -- but the question is whether the benefit is worth the cost. I don't think it's necessarily irrational to accept lower life expectancy and a certain level of damage to one's present health in exchange for something that makes life more pleasant, or at least less tedious and nerve-wracking. And regardless of one's true motivations, pleading addiction can be a successful way to reduce the social disapproval. (By the way, smoking isn't about buzz, which you stop getting very soon. But I'd rather not start elaborating on that topic...)

Comment author: SilasBarta 10 May 2010 08:01:45PM 4 points [-]

Yes, your comment establishes that there exists a reason to make the following classifications:

a) going for a jog when you say you want to go for a jog and like the health benefits and feel good while jogging -> preference for jogging

and

b) smoking despite saying you don't want to smoke and being aware of the bad consequences for your body and lifespan and wishing smoking did not give you short-term pleasure (and vice versa) -> preference for smoking

However, to get to the root of the akrasia question, that's not enough. You would need to show that there is no significant, useful difference between those "preferences" that would justify having different labels for them. Do you really believe that the same kind of "preferring" is going on in a) as in b)?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 10 May 2010 09:01:09PM *  2 points [-]

SilasBarta:

However, to get to the root of the akrasia question, that's not enough. You would need to show that there is no significant, useful difference between those "preferences" that would justify having different labels for them. Do you really believe that the same kind of "preferring" is going on in a) as in b)?

I don't have a complete theory of akrasia and related behaviors; in fact, I don't think we know enough about these issues yet to say the final word. However, from what I've observed, I do think that the preferences in (a) and (b) are essentially the same, though of course the details of the cost/benefit calculus are different. The relevant difference between them lies in their social signaling consequences, not in the nature of the preferences as such. In the contemporary culture, exercise carries positive signals, so if you exercise, it is, if anything, something to brag about. Smoking carries negative signals, so it's in your interest to present it as something you can't control.

My further (and more controversial) relevant observation is that the contemporary public and expert opinion is biased in favor of claims of helplessness and victimhood. Thus, for example, as smoking is considered more and more immoral, smokers will be judged less negatively if they claim to be helpless addicts swindled by the predatory tobacco industry than if they just say "I like it, and it's none of your business." Similarly, people who prefer the pleasures of drinking and drugs will be viewed less judgmentally if they plead "addiction" than if they just admit that they accept the costs of these pleasures, which can sometimes be very large. (Note the change in their behavior when the cost is greatly increased in the gun-to-the-head test!)

To make such a plea, however, you need to suffer from an officially approved "addiction." You can't successfully plead helplessness and victimhood if you suffer from the urge to write blog comments instead of doing work, even though many people will testify that this urge can be far greater than the lure of officially "addictive" behaviors. (Though this might change in the future as the concept of "internet addiction" gains official circulation.) In any case, the important point here is that when you're tempted to claim that someone honestly "wants" to behave differently from what he actually does, you should consider that your judgment might be skewed by these prevailing biases. (And if you doubt the existence of these biases, just remember the likes of Tiger Woods pleading "sex addiction"!)

That said, I do find the practical discussions of akrasia and similar behaviors valuable. Someone who is truly willing to eliminate some such behavior will want to minimize the costs of eliminating it. Moreover, a good anti-acrasia technique can also work by expanding the set of choices and providing and alternative that offers as much satisfaction even without the damaging behavior.

Comment author: ata 10 May 2010 07:32:57AM *  3 points [-]

I don't think this statement is logically consistent. Unless you're restrained by some outside force, if you don't do something, that means you didn't want to do it.

It's not always that simple. It would be inconsistent if our actions could be reduced to a simple utility function and we consistently used the word (and emotion) "want" to refer to actions that maximize that utility function, but neither of those are the case, because we're not intelligently-designed optimization processes. Our brains don't act under a single unified goal system, and very often the part of us that says it wants to do x, or the part that believes it wants to do x, or the part that would be happy if it could do x, or the part that feels bad if it doesn't do x — any of the parts where it feels like "wanting" rather than "doing" — isn't always the part that makes the decision. (In fact, in a direct causal sense, I'd say it's not the part that makes the decision, period. Sometimes it just seems like they're the same when they're properly synchronized.) Neither is the part that makes moral judgments on one's own actions and on other's actions, and so on.

Have you read any of the discussions of akrasia here? That's essentially shorthand for what we're talking about here (wanting to do something but not doing it), and if you are willing to discuss it on human terms — in terms of what humans actually mean when they say "want" rather than what a single-minded decision-theoretic reasoner would mean by it* — then such discussions can be quite fruitful, and not logically inconsistent or meaningless at all.

* If such an agent would say it at all, that is. It could be taken as a mistranslation, in the same sense that Eliezer says translating any of the Babyeaters' words about their own decisions as "right" would be a mistranslation. If a perfect decision-theoretic agent's utility function specifies some action, then by definition, it will automatically pursue that; there's no room for any "wanting" there, just deciding and doing. Indeed, the very fact that we have different words for "want" and "pursue" reflects the reality that we can and very frequently do one but not the other.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 10 May 2010 07:39:19PM *  2 points [-]

ata:

Have you read any of the discussions of akrasia here? That's essentially shorthand for what we're talking about here (wanting to do something but not doing it), and if you are willing to discuss it on human terms — in terms of what humans actually mean when they say "want" rather than what a single-minded decision-theoretic reasoner would mean by it* — then such discussions can be quite fruitful, and not logically inconsistent or meaningless at all.

Yes, I've read lots of stuff written about akrasia on this blog. This would be a topic for a whole separate discussion, but to put it as briefly as possible, in general I'm highly suspicious of such concepts. I view them through what Bryan Caplan calls the "Gun-to-the-Head Test" (I had actually come up with the exact same argument independently before I read about it from Caplan):

Can we change a person's behavior purely by changing their incentives? If we can, it follows that the person was able to act differently all along, but preferred not to; their condition is a matter of preference, not constraint. I will refer to this as the "Gun-to-the-Head Test." If suddenly pointing a gun at alcoholics induces them to stop drinking, then evidently sober behavior was in their choice set all along.

Note how different this is from people who have no control of their behavior even under this test. A Parkinson patient can't stop shaking his hands, and a person with normal nerves can't refrain from the knee jerk when struck into the patellar ligament, no matter what you threaten them with.

Ultimately, I believe that people engage in akrasia and "addictive" behaviors because they sincerely want it. Procrastination and substance abuse are fun and pleasant, and may well be worth a large cost for those sufficiently fond of them. And if these people can subsequently claim that their socially disapproved behaviors were somehow against their will and this way lower their cost by assuaging their reputational consequences -- well, no wonder that such excuses are popular. Saying that you would "want" to avoid procrastination is just ritual signaling behavior, just like smokers saying that they "want" to quit.

I should add that this is a complex topic, to which this brief post doesn't do justice, but this does summarize my view on the matter.

Comment author: Alicorn 10 May 2010 04:15:04PM *  3 points [-]

Autism in general affects four times as many men than women in the general population; but I've noticed that a surprisingly high proportion of the autistic "public figures" - given that ratio - are women. Temple Grandin, for instance, may be the most famous person with autism around; and a majority of the autism bloggers I've run across are female. I don't know why this is.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 10 May 2010 07:09:31PM *  7 points [-]

Autism in general affects four times as many men than women in the general population;

Does this statistic refer only to severe cases of autism that are likely to be noticed and diagnosed whenever they occur, or also to the milder, high-functioning autism spectrum disorders? Because if the latter, I would expect that mildly autistic men are much more likely to be noticed as weird and dysfunctional than women, so this might account for at least a part of the discrepancy in the rate of diagnosis.

The explanation for the greater public prominence (and presumably social acumen) of female autistics is probably similar. In most situations, it's probably harder for autistic men than women to avoid coming off as creepy or ridiculous.

Comment author: Mass_Driver 10 May 2010 03:38:06AM 9 points [-]

This might make sense, but it breaks down the models of pretty much all standard ethical theories, utilitarian and otherwise, which invariably treat humans as unified individuals.

Except for very narrow definitions of "standard," this is just incorrect. Plato, Hume, Kant, and John Stuart Mill all understood and wrote about the difference between what they thought of as the rational or refined will and the more emotional appetite. Likewise Maimonides, St. Augustine, Epictetus, and a 16th century Taoist scholar whose name I can look up for you if it's actually important. In fact, an enormous part of standard ethics deals with the divergence between what we say is right and what we actually do, and tries to identify ways to help us actually do what we say is right.

The blanket assertion that anything you do without being physically restrained is what you wanted to do under the circumstances is a creature of 20th century free-market economics. While it can be part of a self-consistent moral philosophy (e.g. Ayn Rand's Objectivism), it's hardly a litmus test for sound ethical thinking. On the contrary, we should be deeply suspicious of any moral theory that tells us that whatever we do must be what we wanted to do, because it conveniently justifies a set of actions that we (apparently) find quite easy to carry out. What is easy is not always right.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 10 May 2010 04:02:48AM *  1 point [-]

You are mostly right, except that I disagree that such simplifications are limited to 20th century economics. I had in mind formal ethical theories that I find discussed in modern analytical philosophy, and especially utilitarianism. I honestly don't see how utilitarianism can make sense unless humans are modeled as unified agents, each with a single utility function. From what I've seen, other popular formal consequentialist approaches make analogous assumptions, for which I don't see how they could be reconciled with dissolving the concept of humans as unified agents.

But yes, considering the vast philosophical tradition you mention, my above statement definitely doesn't hold in general. However, to get back to the issue that started this discussion, I don't think that Aspergery logical consistency -- that, according to Roko, apparently makes for a good consequentialist ethicist -- would be a good guide through the works of the authors you mention!

Comment author: Kaj_Sotala 10 May 2010 02:32:33AM *  9 points [-]

Interesting. This implies that there are actually two ways of interpreting such moral dilemmas: either as A) "what would you actually do in this situation", or B) "what would be the right thing to do in this situation, regardless of whether you'd actually be capable of doing it".

I've always interpreted the questions as being of type B, but the way you write suggests you're thinking of them as being type A. I wonder how much of the disagreement relating to these questions is caused by differing interpretations.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 10 May 2010 03:33:15AM *  18 points [-]

It's more complicated than that. Most people would say that there are imaginable situations where a certain course of action is right, but they'd be strongly tempted to act differently out of base motives. For example, if you ask a typical person whether it would be right to gain a large amount of money by some sort of cheating, assuming you know for sure there won't be any negative consequences, they'll immediately understand that the question is about what's normatively right, not how they'd be tempted to act. Some very sincere people would probably admit that they might yield to the temptation, even though they consider it wrong.

Now, imagine you're introduced to someone who had the opportunity to cheat a business partner for a million dollars with zero risk of repercussions, but flat-out refused to do so out of sheer moral fiber. You'll immediately perceive this person as trustworthy and desirable to deal with -- a man who acts according to high principles, not base passion and instinct. In contrast, you'd shun and despise him if you heard he'd acted otherwise.

However, let's now compare that with the extreme fat man problem (where you'd have to cut the fat man's throat to avert some greater loss of life). Imagine you're introduced to someone who was faced with it and who slit the fat man's throat without blinking. Would you feel warm and fuzzy about this person? Would any of the bullet-biting utilitarians fail to be profoundly creeped out just by the knowledge that they are standing next to someone who actually acted like that -- even though they'd all defend (nay, prescribe!) his course of action relentlessly when philosophizing? Moreover, I would again bet dollars to donuts that our genteel utilitarians would be much less creeped out by someone who couldn't bring himself to butcher the fat man.

When I think about this, I honestly can't but detect severe short-sightedness in moral bullet-biters.

Comment author: Jack 10 May 2010 02:16:36AM *  3 points [-]

You can keep all of them if you're okay saying that sometimes there are only immoral choices (or at least no moral ones) and that sometimes the action we ought to take is under-determined by our moral intuitions.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 10 May 2010 03:07:16AM 0 points [-]

Yes, why should we assume that these difficult ethical conundrums have some sort of "right answer" at all? Why would asking about the "right choice" in trolley and similar problems necessarily have to have any more sense than asking about the "correct value" of 0^0?

Comment author: Roko 10 May 2010 02:34:45AM 9 points [-]

The point here is that logical consistency in ethical armchair discussions could in fact be a consequence of myopia, not logical clear-sightedness

You're allowed to say "X is the action I would want to take, but I wouldn't be able to"

Comment author: Vladimir_M 10 May 2010 02:54:52AM *  4 points [-]

You're allowed to say "X is the action I would want to take, but I wouldn't be able to"

I don't think this statement is logically consistent. Unless you're restrained by some outside force, if you don't do something, that means you didn't want to do it. You might hypothesize that you would have wanted it within some counterfactual scenario, but given the actual circumstances, you didn't want it.

The only way out of this is if we dispense with the concept of humans as individual agents altogether, and analyze various modules, circuits, and states in each single human brain as distinct entities that might be struggling against each other. This might make sense, but it breaks down the models of pretty much all standard ethical theories, utilitarian and otherwise, which invariably treat humans as unified individuals.

But regardless of that, do you accept the possibility that at least in some cases, bullet-biting on moral questions might be the consequence of a failure of imagination, not exceptional logical insight?

Comment author: Roko 10 May 2010 01:05:08AM *  6 points [-]

Usually they end up being morally dumbfounded or end up trying to not bite enough bullets. E.g. wanting to support some deontological principle but not biting the bullets that go with it, or adopting principles that contradict each other.

Many neurotypicals I have spoken to will take really extreme positions on the fat man trolley problem, saying that they wouldn't push the fat man off the bridge even if a million people were on the trolley.

I certainly wouldn't describe my situation as "flummoxed."

Yes, but I'll be darned if you're neurotypical ;-0

Comment author: Vladimir_M 10 May 2010 02:21:42AM *  14 points [-]

On the other hand, don't forget that talk is cheap, and actions speak louder than words. I doubt that many utilitarians would be willing to follow their conclusions in practice in situations such as the fat man/trolley problem. To stress that point even further, imagine if you had to cut the fat man's throat instead of just pushing him (and feel free to increase the cost of the alternative if you think this changes the equation significantly relative to pushing). I'd bet dollars to donuts that a large majority of the contemporary genteel utilitarians couldn't bring themselves to do it, no matter how clear the calculus that -- according to them -- mandates this course of action.

This suggests to me that this "dumbfoundedness" might be in fact a consequence of more clear and far-reaching insight, not confusion. Biting moral bullets is easy in armchair discussions; what you'd actually be able to bring yourself to do is another question altogether. Therefore, when I see people who coolly affirm the logical conclusions of their favored formal ethical theories even when they run afoul of common folks' intuition, I have to ask if they are really guided by logic to an exceptional degree in their lives -- or do they simply fail to see, out of sheer mental short-sightedness, how remote their armchair theorizing is from what they'd be willing and capable to do if they, God forbid, actually found themselves in some such situation.

(This is not the reason why I don't see any validity in utilitarianism; that would be a topic for another discussion altogether. The point here is that logical consistency in ethical armchair discussions could in fact be a consequence of myopia, not logical clear-sightedness.)

Comment author: Roko 09 May 2010 10:42:29PM 3 points [-]

Just a week ago I was talking with one guy with AS about some ethics problems; he brought up an example where you're with 20 other people, including a baby who won't stop crying, hiding from an approaching army.

Yes, neurotypicals are flummoxed by these types of problems. Others include the trolley problems, and the organ donation problem.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 09 May 2010 11:03:55PM *  11 points [-]

Are you sure "flummoxed" is the right word? I don't think "neurotypicals" are confused by the mathematics involved. They just dispute that the utilitarian math represents an accurate theory of ethics. Would you use the word "flummoxed" for a physicist who understands the mathematics of a theory but disputes that it says anything relevant about the real world, even if he has no alternative theory to offer?

For full disclosure, I am not convinced by utilitarian arguments at all, both in these problems you mention and in most other widely disputed ones. I understand them with perfect clarity; I just dispute that they have any relevance beyond the entertainment value of the logical exercise, and possibly propaganda value for some parties in some situations. I certainly wouldn't describe my situation as "flummoxed."

In response to comment by Vladimir_M on What is bunk?
Comment author: Jack 08 May 2010 10:57:57PM 1 point [-]

You ignore the possibility of crackpots who are not contrarians, but instead well established or even dominant in the mainstream. You have a very rosy view of academia if you believe that this phenomenon is entirely nonexistent nowadays!

Er. I think there are plenty of people in academia who have very wrong beliefs with poor justifications. But I took our working definition of crackpot and bunk to exclude such people. We're asking about a particular kind of being wrong: being wrong and unpopular. The question is, is there something beyond that to being a crackpot. Must you also, say, engage in pseudoscience, be non-falsifiable, or engage in unsavory tactics etc. Obviously we don't want to debate definitions, but I think the claim that you picked out is true given the way we've been using the words in this thread.

Your point about emotions is a good one.

In response to comment by Jack on What is bunk?
Comment author: Vladimir_M 08 May 2010 11:24:06PM *  3 points [-]

But I took our working definition of crackpot and bunk to exclude such people. We're asking about a particular kind of being wrong: being wrong and unpopular.

Fair enough, if we define "crackpot" as necessarily unpopular. However, what primarily comes to my mind when I hear this word is the warlike emotional state that renders one incapable of changing one's mind, which I described in the above comment. If people like that manage to grab positions of power in the academia and don the cloak of respectability, I still think that they share more relevant similarity with various scorned crackpot contrarians than with people whose mainstream respectability is well earned.

I think a good test for a crackpot vs. an ordinary mistaken contrarian would be how this individual would behave if the power relations were suddenly reversed, and the mainstream and contrarian views changed places. A crackpot would not hesitate to use his power to extirpate the views he dislikes with all means available, whereas an non-crackpot contrarian would show at least some respect for his (now contrarian) opponents.

In response to What is bunk?
Comment author: Jack 08 May 2010 09:15:10PM *  2 points [-]

So a claim is bunk if and only if:

  1. Those with the right kind of difficult-to-access information or who trust the relevant "expert" class will assign it an extremely low probability.

  2. Those without that information who either don't know or don't trust the relevant expert class may assign it a more reasonable probability or even believe it.

  3. The claim is false.

  4. (?) The claim is non-trivial, if true, it would have wide-reaching implications.

So claims to have a perpetual motion machine are bunk because to understand how unlikely they are you either have to understand some physics or trust physicists. Many people do not have that information and do not trust physicists (or aren't aware that physicists even have a position on this, or aren't aware there are such people as physicists). And perpetual motion machines are impossible.

One issue I can see arising a lot is that not every claim will have an obvious class of experts. Once upon a time the expert class for the question of whether or not God exists was theologians. But perhaps the right expert class today is analytic philosophers where theists are a shrinking minority (under 15%). Or maybe cognitive scientists or anthropologists (whose beliefs I don't know).

I think we ought to distinguish somehow between crackpots (believers in bunk) and incorrect contrarians. The former are obviously part of the latter but are they the same? It seems to me that even if Eliezer Yudkowsky is really wrong about a lot that he believes (and this seems possible to me) he is nonetheless not a crackpot. But is there more to this than 'crackpots are incorrect contrarians who I don't like or have never agreed with'? Is there an objective distinction? Perhaps because he is ignored rather than rejected?

In response to comment by Jack on What is bunk?
Comment author: Vladimir_M 08 May 2010 10:43:25PM *  5 points [-]

Jack:

I think we ought to distinguish somehow between crackpots (believers in bunk) and incorrect contrarians. The former are obviously part of the latter but are they the same?

You ignore the possibility of crackpots who are not contrarians, but instead well established or even dominant in the mainstream. You have a very rosy view of academia if you believe that this phenomenon is entirely nonexistent nowadays!

That said, I'd say the main defining criterion of crackpots -- as opposed to ordinary mistaken folks -- is that their emotions have got the better of them, rendering them incapable of further rational argument. A true crackpot views the prospect of changing his mind as treachery to his cause, similar to a soldier scorning the possibility of surrender after suffering years of pain, hardship, and danger in a war. Trouble is, protracted intellectual battles in which contrarians are exposed to hostility and ridicule often push them beyond the edge of crackpottery at some point. It's a pity because smart contrarians, even when mistaken about their main point, can often reveal serious weaknesses in the mainstream view. But then this is often why they are met with such hostility in the first place, especially in fields with political/ideological implications.

In response to What is bunk?
Comment author: Vladimir_M 08 May 2010 08:29:25PM *  22 points [-]

SarahC:

A key thing to consider is the role of the "mainstream." When a claim is out of the mainstream, are you justified in moving it closer to the bunk file?

An important point here is that the intellectual standards of the academic mainstream differ greatly between various fields. Thus, depending on the area we're talking about, the fact that a view is out of the mainstream may imply that it's bunk with near-certainty, but it may also tell us nothing if the mainstream standards in the area are especially bad.

From my own observations of research literature in various fields and the way academia operates, I have concluded that healthy areas where the mainstream employs very high intellectual standards of rigor, honesty, and judicious open-mindedness are normally characterized by two conditions:

(1) There is lots of low-hanging fruit available, in the sense of research goals that are both interesting and doable, so that there are clear paths to quality work, which makes it unnecessary to invent bullshit instead.

(2) There are no incentives to invent bullshit for political or ideological reasons.

As soon as either of these conditions doesn't hold in an academic area, the mainstream will become infested with worthless bullshit work to at least some degree. For example, condition (2) is true for theoretical physics, but in many of its subfields, condition (1) no longer holds. Thus we get things like the Bogdanoff affair and the string theory wars -- regardless of who (if anyone) is right in these controversies, it's obvious that some bullshit work has infiltrated the mainstream. Nevertheless, the scenario where condition (1) doesn't hold, but (2) does is relatively benign, and such areas are typically still basically sound despite the partial infestation.

The real trouble starts when condition (2) doesn't hold. Even if (1) still holds, the field will be in a hopeless confusion where it's hardly possible to separate bullshit from quality work. For example, in the fields that involve human sociobiology and behavioral genetics, particularly those that touch on the IQ controversies, there are tons of interesting study ideas waiting to be done. Yet, because of the ideological pressures and prejudices -- both individual and institutional -- bullshit work multiplies without end. (Again, regardless of whom you support in these controversies, it's logically impossible that at least one side isn't bullshitting.) Thus, on the whole, condition (2) is even more critical than (1).

When neither (1) nor (2) holds in some academic field, it tends to become almost pure bullshit. Macroeconomics is the prime example.

In response to comment by Vladimir_M on What is bunk?
Comment author: Vladimir_M 08 May 2010 08:52:48PM *  10 points [-]

SarahC:

There are three camps I have in mind, who are outside the academic mainstream, but not obviously (to me) dismissed as bunk: global warming skeptics, Austrian economists, and singularitarians.

So, to apply my above criteria to these cases:

  • Climate science is politicized to an extreme degree and plagued by vast methodological difficulties. (Just think about the difficulty of measuring global annual average temperature with 0.1C accuracy even in the present, let alone reconstructing it far into the past.) Thus, I'd expect a very high level of bullshit infestation in its mainstream, so critics scorned by the mainstream should definitely not be dismissed out of hand.

  • Ditto for mainstream vs. Austrian macroeconomics; in fact, even more so. If you look at the blogs of prominent macroeconomists, you'll see lots of ideologically motivated mutual scorn and abuse even within the respectable mainstream. Austrians basically call bullshit on the entire mainstream, saying that the whole idea of trying to study economic aggregates by aping physics is a fundamentally unsound cargo-cult approach, so they're hated by everyone. While Austrians have their own dubious (and sometimes obviously bunk) ideas, their criticism of the mainstream should definitely be taken into account considering its extreme level of politicization and lack of any clearly sound methodology.

  • As for singularitarians, they don't really face opposition from some concrete mainstream academic group. The problem is that their claims run afoul of the human weirdness heuristic, so it's hard to get people to consider their arguments seriously. (The attempts at sensationalist punditry by some authors associated with the idea don't help either.) But my impression is that many prominent academics in the relevant fields who have taken the time to listen to the singularity arguments take them respectfully and seriously, certainly with nothing like the scorn heaped on dissenters and outsiders in heavily politicized fields.

In response to What is bunk?
Comment author: Vladimir_M 08 May 2010 08:29:25PM *  22 points [-]

SarahC:

A key thing to consider is the role of the "mainstream." When a claim is out of the mainstream, are you justified in moving it closer to the bunk file?

An important point here is that the intellectual standards of the academic mainstream differ greatly between various fields. Thus, depending on the area we're talking about, the fact that a view is out of the mainstream may imply that it's bunk with near-certainty, but it may also tell us nothing if the mainstream standards in the area are especially bad.

From my own observations of research literature in various fields and the way academia operates, I have concluded that healthy areas where the mainstream employs very high intellectual standards of rigor, honesty, and judicious open-mindedness are normally characterized by two conditions:

(1) There is lots of low-hanging fruit available, in the sense of research goals that are both interesting and doable, so that there are clear paths to quality work, which makes it unnecessary to invent bullshit instead.

(2) There are no incentives to invent bullshit for political or ideological reasons.

As soon as either of these conditions doesn't hold in an academic area, the mainstream will become infested with worthless bullshit work to at least some degree. For example, condition (2) is true for theoretical physics, but in many of its subfields, condition (1) no longer holds. Thus we get things like the Bogdanoff affair and the string theory wars -- regardless of who (if anyone) is right in these controversies, it's obvious that some bullshit work has infiltrated the mainstream. Nevertheless, the scenario where condition (1) doesn't hold, but (2) does is relatively benign, and such areas are typically still basically sound despite the partial infestation.

The real trouble starts when condition (2) doesn't hold. Even if (1) still holds, the field will be in a hopeless confusion where it's hardly possible to separate bullshit from quality work. For example, in the fields that involve human sociobiology and behavioral genetics, particularly those that touch on the IQ controversies, there are tons of interesting study ideas waiting to be done. Yet, because of the ideological pressures and prejudices -- both individual and institutional -- bullshit work multiplies without end. (Again, regardless of whom you support in these controversies, it's logically impossible that at least one side isn't bullshitting.) Thus, on the whole, condition (2) is even more critical than (1).

When neither (1) nor (2) holds in some academic field, it tends to become almost pure bullshit. Macroeconomics is the prime example.

Comment author: Roko 08 May 2010 03:15:06AM 2 points [-]

is there anything really relevant about the sleeping/waking/amnesia story here? What if instead the experimenter just went out and asked the next random passerby on the street each time?

Yes, I think that there is something very important about the memory loss/waking.

Suppose we perform the really extreme sleeping beauty problem but each interview is with a different person, chose at random from a very large pool.

I don't think many people here would take the "1/2" approach; they would reason "Since if the die came up 1, there would be 400 interviews, and I am being interviewed, it almost certainly came up 1".

Comment author: Vladimir_M 08 May 2010 07:32:35PM 0 points [-]

I'm not sure I understand your "really extreme" formulation fully. Is the amnesia supposed to make the wins in chocolate bars non-cumulative?

Comment author: ata 08 May 2010 01:52:03AM 2 points [-]

I'm curious if your 1/2 intuition still holds in this situation?

I'd still say 1/2 is the right answer, yes.

But I'm trying to avoid using intuition here; when I do, it tends to find the arguments on both sides equally persuasive (obvious, even). If there is a right answer at all, then this is truly a case where we have no choice but to shut up and do the math.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 08 May 2010 02:27:29AM *  0 points [-]

Hm.. let's try pushing it a bit further.

Suppose you're a member of a large exploratory team on an alien planet colonized by humans. As a part of the standard equipment, each team member has an intelligent reconnaissance drone that can be released to roam around and explore. You get separated from the rest of your team and find yourself alone in the wilderness. You send out your drone to explore the area, and after a few hours it comes back. When you examine its records, you find the following.

Apparently, a local super-smart creature with a weird sense of humor -- let's call it Omega -- has captured several drones and released (some of?) them back after playing with them a bit. Examining your drone's records, you find that Omega has done something similar to the above described false memory game with them. You play the drone's audio record, and you hear Omega saying: "I'll toss a coin now. Afterwards, I'll release your drone back in any case. If heads come up, I'll destroy the other ten drones I have captured. If it's tails, I'll release them all back to their respective owners, but I'll also insert this message into their audio records." Assume that you've already heard a lot about Omega, since he's already done many such strange experiments on the local folks -- and from what's known about his behavior, it's overwhelmingly likely that the message can be taken at face value.

What would you say about the expected coin toss result now? Would you take the fact that you got your drone back as evidence in favor of tails, or does your 1/2 intuition still hold? If not, what's the difference relative to the false memory case above? (Unless I'm missing something, the combined memories of yourself and the drone should be exactly equivalent to the false memory scenario.)

Comment author: ata 07 May 2010 04:17:11PM *  0 points [-]

...yeah, I think you're right.

In the few minutes before I read your comment, I was thinking about reformulating this as an Omega-style problem. (I know, I know... I do try not to be too gratuitous with my use of Omega, but what can I say — omnipotence and omniscience are surprisingly useful for clarifying and simplifying reasoning/decision problems.) So Omega tells you she's going to flip a fair coin, and if it lands on tails, she's going to make a million copies of you and put all of them in identical rooms, and if it lands on heads, she'll just put the one of you in such a room. She flips the coin, you blank out for a moment, and as expected, you're in an unfamiliar room. In this case, it doesn't appear that adding or subtracting copies of you should have anything to do with what you believe about the coin flip. You saw her flip the coin yourself, and you knew that you'd be seeing the same thing no matter what side came up. She could come back a few minutes later and say "Hey, if and only if it was tails, I just made another million copies of you and put them in rooms identical to this one, kbye" which clearly shouldn't change your belief about the coin, but seems to be a situation identical to if she had just said "two million" in the first place.

Okay, I think I'm more confidently on the 1/2 side now.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 08 May 2010 01:27:58AM *  2 points [-]

OK, I think I have a definite reductio ad absurdum of your point. Suppose you wake up in a room, and the last thing you remember is Omega telling you: "I'm going to toss a coin now. Whatever comes up, I'll put you in the room. However, if it's tails, I'll also put a million other people each in an identical room and manipulate their neural tissue so as to implant them a false memory of having been told all this before the toss. So, when you find yourself in the room, you won't know if we've actually had this conversation, or you've been implanted the memory of it after the toss."

After you find yourself in the room under this scenario, you have the memory of these exact words spoken to you by Omega a few seconds ago. Then he shows up and asks you about the expected value of the coin toss. I'm curious if your 1/2 intuition still holds in this situation? (I'm definitely unable to summon any such intuition at all -- your brain states representing this memory are obviously more likely to have originated from their mass production in case of tails, just like finding a rare widget on the floor would be evidence for tails if Omega pledged to mass-manufacture them if tails come up.)

But if you wouldn't say 1/2, then you've just reached an awful paradox. Instead of just implanting the memories, Omega can also choose to change these other million people in some other small way to make them slightly more similar to you. Or a bit more, or even more -- and in the limit, he'd just use these people as the raw material for manufacturing the copies of you, getting us back to your copying scenario. At which step does the 1/2 intuition emerge?

(Of course, as I wrote in my other comment, all of this is just philosophizing that goes past the domain of validity of human intuitions, and these questions make sense only if tackled using rigorous math with more precisely defined assumptions and questions. But I do find it an interesting exploration of where our intuitions (mis)lead us.)

Comment author: ata 07 May 2010 09:28:03PM 1 point [-]

I think that's very different... in the original scenario, heads and tails both result in you experiencing the same thing. In this case, if it comes up heads, it is a million times more likely that you will receive the prize, so getting a phone call from them is very significant Bayesian evidence.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 07 May 2010 11:00:34PM 3 points [-]

Yes, you're right (as are the other replies making similar points). I tried hard once more to come up with an accurate analogy of the above problem that would be realizable in the real world, but it seems like it's impossible to come up with anything that doesn't involve implanting false memories.

After giving this some more thought, it seems to me that the problem with the copying scenario is that once we eliminate the assumption that each agent has a unique continuous existence, all human intuitions completely break down, and we can compute only mathematically precise problems formulated within strictly defined probability spaces. Trouble is, since we've breaking one of the fundamental human common sense assumptions, the results may or may not make any intuitive sense, and as soon as we step outside formal, rigorous math, we can only latch onto subjectively preferable intuitions, which may differ between people.

Comment author: thomblake 07 May 2010 08:36:37PM 0 points [-]

Well you also have to note in the problem description that a particular person is asked, and ask what should their guess be (so far you just got as far as the announcement).

But I think that's equivalent.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 07 May 2010 08:52:02PM *  3 points [-]

Well, yes, I should also specify that you'll actually act on the announcement.

But in any case, would anyone find anything strange or counterintuitive about this less exotic formulation, which could be readily tried in the real world? As soon as the somewhat vague "expectation about the result" is stated clearly, the answer should be clear. In particular, if we ignore risk aversion and discount rate, each interviewee should be willing to pay, on the spot, up to $66.66 for an instrument sold by a (so far completely ignorant) third party that pays off $100 if the announced result is tails.

Comment author: thomblake 07 May 2010 08:06:32PM 1 point [-]

What if instead the experimenter just went out and asked the next random passerby on the street each time?

I'm confused about how that's supposed to have the same relevant features, so the answer to your question is probably "Yes".

Are you suggesting the following?: Flip a coin. Go out and ask a random passerby what the probability is that the coin came up heads.

If so, you've entirely eliminated Beauty's subjective uncertainty about whether she's been woken up once or more than once, which is putatively relevant to subjective probability.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 07 May 2010 08:32:20PM *  3 points [-]

The exact equivalent of the original problem would be as follows. You announce that:

(1) You're about to flip a coin at some secret time during the next few days, and the result will be posted publicly in (say) a week.

(2) Before the flip, you'll approach a random person in the street and ask about their expectation about the result that's about to be posted. After the flip, if and only if it lands tails, you'll do the same with one additional person before the result is announced publicly. The persons are unaware of each other, and have no way to determine if they're being asked before or after the actual toss.

So, does anyone see relevant differences between this problem and the original one?

Comment author: ata 07 May 2010 04:17:11PM *  0 points [-]

...yeah, I think you're right.

In the few minutes before I read your comment, I was thinking about reformulating this as an Omega-style problem. (I know, I know... I do try not to be too gratuitous with my use of Omega, but what can I say — omnipotence and omniscience are surprisingly useful for clarifying and simplifying reasoning/decision problems.) So Omega tells you she's going to flip a fair coin, and if it lands on tails, she's going to make a million copies of you and put all of them in identical rooms, and if it lands on heads, she'll just put the one of you in such a room. She flips the coin, you blank out for a moment, and as expected, you're in an unfamiliar room. In this case, it doesn't appear that adding or subtracting copies of you should have anything to do with what you believe about the coin flip. You saw her flip the coin yourself, and you knew that you'd be seeing the same thing no matter what side came up. She could come back a few minutes later and say "Hey, if and only if it was tails, I just made another million copies of you and put them in rooms identical to this one, kbye" which clearly shouldn't change your belief about the coin, but seems to be a situation identical to if she had just said "two million" in the first place.

Okay, I think I'm more confidently on the 1/2 side now.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 07 May 2010 08:21:09PM 0 points [-]

How about the following scenario? Say instead of Omega, it's just a company doing a weird promotional scheme. They announce that they'll secretly flip a coin in their headquarters, and if it's tails, they'll hand out prizes to a million random people from the phone directory tomorrow, whereas if it's heads, they'll award the same prize to only one lucky winner. The next day, you receive a phone call from them. Would you apply analogous reasoning in this case (and how, or why not)?

Comment author: Tenek 07 May 2010 03:34:54PM 6 points [-]

We can tweak the experiment a bit to clarify this. Suppose the coin is flipped before she goes to sleep, but the result is hidden. If she's interviewed immediately, she has no reason to answer other than 1/2 - at this point it's just "flip a fair coin and estimate P(heads)". What information does she get the next time she's asked that would cause her to update her estimate? She's woken up, yes, but she already knew that would happen before going under and still answered 1/2. With no new information she should still guess 1/2 when woken up.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 07 May 2010 08:13:07PM 4 points [-]

Let's look at the ultimate extreme version. Assume she's woken up once (or arbitrarily many non-zero times) for tails, and not at all for heads. Now the fact that she's been woken up implies tails with certainty. So if the answer remains 1/2 in the extreme versions, then there must be a discontinuous jump, rather than convergence, when the ratio of the number of awakenings for heads vs. tails tends towards zero.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 07 May 2010 08:02:52PM 2 points [-]

I have a question for those more familiar with the discussions surrounding this problem: is there anything really relevant about the sleeping/waking/amnesia story here? What if instead the experimenter just went out and asked the next random passerby on the street each time?

It seems to me that the problem could be formulated less confusingly that way. Am I missing something?