Sunny's Shortform

It's happened again: I've realized that one of my old beliefs (pre-LW) is just plain dumb.

I used to look around at all the various diet (Paleo, Keto, low carb, low fat, etc.) and feel angry at people for having such low epistemic standards. Like, there's a new theory of nutrition every two years, and people still put faith in them every time? Everybody swears by a different diet and this is common knowledge, but people still swear by diets? And the reasoning is that "fat" (the nutrient) has the same name as "fat" (the body part people are trying to get rid of)?

Then I encountered the "calories in = calories out" theory, which says that the only thing you need to do to lose weight is to make sure that you burn more calories than you eat.

And I thought to myself, "yeah, obviously.".

Because, you see, if the orthodox asserts X and the heterodox asserts Y, and the orthodox is dumb, then Y must be true [LW · GW]!

Anyway, I hadn't thought about this belief in a while, but I randomly remembered it a few minutes ago, and as soon as I remembered its origins, I chucked it out the window.

Oops!

(PS: I wouldn't be flabbergasted if the belief turned out true anyway. But I've reverted my map from the "I know how the world is" state to the "I'm awaiting additional evidence" state.)

The ball-on-a-hill model of reputation

This is a model I came up with in middle school to explain why it felt like I was treated differently from others even when I acted the same. I invented it long before I fully understood what models were (which only occurred sometime in the last year) and as such it's something of a "baby's first model" (ha ha) for me. As you'd expect for something authored by a middle schooler regarding their problems, it places minimal blame on myself. However, even nowadays I think there's some truth to it.

Here's the model. Your reputation is a ball on a hill. The valley on one side of the hill corresponds to being revered, and the valley on the other side corresponds to being despised. The ball begins on top of the hill. If you do something that others see as "good" then the ball gets nudged to the good side, and if you do something that others see as "bad" then it gets nudged to the other side.

Here's where the hill comes in. Once your reputation has been nudged one way or the other, it begins to affect how others interpret your actions. If you apologize for something you did wrong and your reputation is positive, you're "being the bigger person and owning up to your mistakes"; if you do the same when your reputation is negative, you're "trying to cover your ass". Once your action has been interpreted according to your current reputation, it is then fed back into the calculation as an update: the rep/+ person who apologized gets a boost, and the rep/- person who apologized gets shoved down even further.

Hence, "once the ball is sufficiently far down the hill, it begins to roll on its own". You can take nothing but neutral actions and your reputation will become a more extreme version of what it already is (assuming it was far-from-center to begin with). This applies to positive reputation as well as negative! I have had the experience of my reputation rolling down the positive side of the hill -- it was great.

There are also other factors that can affect the starting position of the ball, e.g. if you're attractive or if somebody gives you a positively-phrased introduction then you start on the positive side, but if you're ugly or if your current audience has heard bad rumors about you then you start on the negative side.

I'd be curious if anyone else has had this experience and feels this is an accurate model, and I'd be very curious if anyone thinks there is a significant hole in it.

When you estimate how much mental energy a task will take, you are just as vulnerable to the planning fallacy as when you estimate how much time it will take.

I'm told that there was a period of history where only the priests were literate and therefore only they could read the Bible. Or maybe it was written in Latin and only they knew how to read it, or something. Anyway, as a result, they were free to interpret it any way they liked, and they used that power to control the masses.

Goodness me, it's a good thing we Have Science Now and can use it to free ourselves from the overbearing grip of Religion!

Oh, totally unrelatedly, the average modern person is scientifically illiterate and absorbs their knowledge of what is "scientific" through a handful of big news sources and through cultural osmosis.

Hmm.

Moral: Be wary of packages labeled "science" and be especially wary of social pressure to believe implausible-sounding claims just because they're "scientific". There are many ways for that beautiful name to get glued onto random memes.

I just saw a funny example of Extremal Goodhart [LW · GW] in the wild: a child was having their picture taken, and kept being told they weren't smiling enough. As a result, they kept screaming "CHEEEESE!!!" louder and louder.

A koan:

If the laundry needs to be done, put in a load of laundry.
If the world needs to be saved, save the world.
If you want pizza for dinner, go preheat the oven.

When you ask a question to a crowd, the answers you get back have a statistical bias towards overconfidence, because people with higher confidence in their answers are more likely to respond.

From my personal wiki. Seems appropriate for LessWrong.

The End-product Substitution is a hypothesis proposed by me about my behavior when choosing projects to work on. The hypothesis is that when I am evaluating how much I would like to work on a project, I substitude judgment of how much I will enjoy the end product for judgment of how much I will enjoy the process of creating it. For example, I recently [Sep 2019] considered creating a series of videos mirroring the content of the LessWrong sequences, and found myself fawning over how nice it would be to have created such a series of videos, and not thinking at all about how I would go about creating them, let alone how much I would enjoy doing that.

I just learned a (rationalist) lesson. I'm taking a course that has some homework that's hosted on a third party site. There was one assignment at the beginning of the semester, a few weeks ago. Then, about a week ago, I was wondering to myself whether there would be any more assignments any time soon. In fact, I even wondered if I had somehow missed a few assignments, since I'd thought they'd be assigned more frequently.

Well, I checked my course's website (different from the site where the homework was hosted) and didn't see any mention of assignments. Then I went to the professor's website, and saw that they said they didn't assign any "formal homework". Finally, I thought back to the in-class discussions, where the third-party homework was never mentioned.

"Ah, good," I thought. "I guess I haven't missed any assignments, and none are coming up any time soon either."

Then, today, the third-party homework was actually mentioned in class, so just now I went to look at the third-party website. I have missed three assignments, and there is another one due on Sunday.

I am not judged by the quality of my reasoning. I am judged by what actually happens, as are we all.

In retrospect (read: "beware that hindsight bias might be responsible for this paragraph") I kind of feel like I wasn't putting my all into figuring out if I was missing any assignments, and was instead just nervously trying to convince myself that I wasn't. Obviously, I would rather have had that unpleasant experience earlier and missed fewer assignments -- aka, if I was missing assignments, then I should have wanted to believe that I was missing assignments.

Oops.

I've been thinking of signing up for cryonics recently. The main hurdle is that it seems like it'll be kind of complicated, since at the moment I'm still on my parent's insurance, and I don't really know how all this stuff works. I've been worrying that the ugh field [LW · GW] surrounding the task might end up being my cause of death by causing me to look on cryonics less favorably just because I subconsciously want to avoid even thinking about what a hassle it will be.

But then I realized that I can get around the problem by pre-committing to sign up for cryonics no matter what, then just cancelling it if I decide I don't want it.

It will be MUCH easier to make an unbiased decision if choosing cryonics means doing nothing rather than meaning that I have to go do a bunch of complicated paperwork now. It will be well worth a few months (or even years) of dues.

I just caught myself substituting judgment of representativeness for judgment of probability [LW · GW].

I'm a conlang enthusiast, and specifically I study loglangs, which are a branch of conlangs that are based around predicate logic. My motivation for learning these languages was that I was always bothered by all the strange irregularities in my natural language (like the simple past tense being the same as the past participle, and the word inflammable meaning two opposite things).

Learning languages like these has only drawn my attention to even more natural-language nonsense. Occasionally I explain this to conlang lay-people, and maybe 50% of them are surprised to find that English is irregular. Some of them even deny that it is, and state that it all follows a perfectly normal pattern. This is a perpetual annoyance to me, simply because I spend so much time immersed in this stuff that I've forgotten how hard it is to spot from scratch.

Well, a while ago I wanted to start learning Mandarin from a friend of mine who speaks it as their first language. While introducing the language, they said that things like tenses were expressed as separate words ("did eat") rather than sometimes-irregular modifications of existing words ("ate"). This reminded me of loglangs, so I gave them the spiel that I gave in the two previous paragraphs -- natlangs, irregularities, annoyances, etc.

"Huh," said the friend. They then turned to another native Chinese speaker and asked "Does Chinese have anything like that?"

I said, "I guarantee it does."

This was months ago. Just now I was reflecting on it, and I realized that I have almost no evidence whatsoever that Chinese isn't perfectly regular (or close enough that the thrust of my claim would be wrong).

It's clear to me now that my thought process was something like "Well, just yet another conlang outsider who's stunned and amazed to find that natural languages have problems." That brought to mind all the other times when I'd encountered people surprised to find that their mother tongue (almost always English) had irregularities, and the erroneous conclusion precipitated right out.

I was 100%, completely, unreservedly fooled by this year's April Fools' joke. Hilarious XDD

I would appreciate an option to hide the number of votes that posts have. Maybe not hide entirely, but set them to only display at the bottom of a post, and not at the top nor on the front page. With the way votes are currently displayed, I think I'm getting biased for/against certain posts before I even read them, just based on the number of votes they have.

The other day, my roommate mentioned that the bias towards wanting good things for people in your in-group and bad things for those in your out-group can be addressed by including ever more people in your in-group.

Here's a way to do that: take a person you want to move into your in-group, and try to imagine them as the protagonist of a story. What are their desires? What obstacles are they facing right now? How are they trying to overcome them?

I sometimes feel annoyed at a person just by looking at them. I invented this technique just now, but I used it one time on a person pictured in an advertisement, and it worked. I had previously been having a "what's your problem?" feeling, and it was instantly replaced with a loving "I'm rooting for you" feeling.

Why is it my responsibility to heal the wounds that somebody else dealt to me??

Because if you don't heal your wounds, you will bleed on people who didn't cut you.

Idea: "Ugh-field trades", where people trade away their obligations that they've developed ugh-fields for in exchange for other people's obligations. Both people get fresh non-ugh-fielded tasks. Works only in cases where the task can be done by somebody else, which won't be every time but might be often enough for this to work.

I just caught myself committing a bucket error.

I'm currently working on a text document full of equations that use variables with extremely long names. I'm in the process of simplifying it by renaming the variables. For complicated reasons, I have to do this by hand.

Just now, I noticed that there's a series of variables O1-O16, and another series of variables F17-F25. For technical reasons relating to the work I'm doing, I'm very confident that the name switch is arbitrary and that I can safely rename the F's to O's without changing the meaning of the equations.

But I'm doing this by hand. If I'm wrong, I will potentially was a lot of work by (1) making this change (2) making a bunch of other changes (3) realizing I was wrong (4) undoing all the other changes (5) undoing this change (6) re-doing all the changes that came after it.

And for a moment, this spurred me to become less confident about the arbitrariness of the naming convention!

The correct thought would have been "I'm quite confident about this, but seeing as the stakes are high if I'm wrong and I can always do this later, it's still not worth it to make the changes now."

The problem here was that I was conflating "X is very likely true" with "I must do the thing I would do if X was certain". I knew instinctively that making the changes now was a bad idea, and then I incorrectly reasoned that it was because it was likely to go wrong. It's actually unlikely to go wrong, it's just that if it does go wrong, it's a huge inconvenience.

Whoops.

Epistemic status: really shaky, but I think there's something here.

I naturally feel a lot of resistance to the way culture/norm differences are characterized in posts like Ask and Guess [LW · GW] and Wait vs Interrupt Culture [LW · GW]. I naturally want to give them little pet names, like:

• Guess culture = "read my fucking mind, you badwrong idiot" culture.
• Ask culture = nothing, because this is just how normal, non-insane people act.

I think this feeling is generated by various negative experiences I've had with people around me, who, no matter where I am, always seem to share between them one culture or another that I don't really understand the rules of. This leads to a lot of interactions where I'm being told by everyone around me that I'm being a jerk, even when I can "clearly see" that their is nothing I could have done that would have been correct in their eyes, or that what they wanted me to do was impossible or unreasonable.

But I'm starting to wonder if I need to let go of this. When I feel someone is treating me unfairly, it could just be because (1) they are speaking in Culture 1, then (2) I am listening in Culture 2 and hearing something they don't mean to transmit. If I was more tuned in to what people meant to say, my perception of people who use other norms might change.

I feel there's at least one more important pair of cultures, and although I haven't mentioned it yet, it's the one I had in mind most while writing this post. Something like:

• Culture 1: Everyone speaks for themselves only, unless explicitly stated otherwise. Putting words in someone's mouth or saying that they are "implying" something they didn't literally say is completely unacceptable. False accusations are taken seriously and reflect poorly on the accuser.
• Culture 2: The things you say reflect not only on you but also on people "associated" with you. If X is what you believe, you might have to say Y instead if saying X could be taken the wrong way. If someone is being a jerk, you don't have to extend the courtesy of articulating their mistake to them correctly; you can just shun them off in whatever way is easiest.

I don't really know how real this dichotomy is, and if it is real, I don't know for sure how I feel about one being "right" and the other being "wrong". I tried semi-hard to give a neutral take on the distinction, but I don't think I succeeded. Can people reading this tell which culture I naturally feel opposed to? Do you think I've correctly put my finger on another real dichotomy? Which set of norms, if either, do you feel more in tune with?

When somebody is advocating taking an action, I think it can be productive to ask "Is there a good reason to do that?" rather than "Why should we do that?" because the former phrasing explicitly allows for the possibility that there is no good reason, which I think makes it both intellectually easier to realize that and socially easier to say it.

I just noticed that I've got two similarity clusters in my mind that keep getting called to my attention by wording dichotomies like high-priority and low-priority, but that would themselves be better labeled as big and small. This was causing me to interpret phrases like "doing a string of low-priority tasks" as having a positive affect (!) because what it called to mind was my own activity of doing a string of small, on-average medium-priority tasks.

My thought process might improve overall if I toss out the "big" and "small" similarity clusters and replace them with clusters that really are centered around "high-priority" and "low-priority".