Your Strength as a Rationalist

It's strange that it sounds like a rationalist is saying that he should have listened to his instincts. A true rationalist should be able to examine all the evidence without having to rely on feelings to make a judgment, or would be able to truly understand the source of his feelings, in which case it's more than just a feeling. The unfortunate thing is that people are more likely to remember the cases when they didn't listen to their feelings which ended up being correct in the end, than all the times when they were wrong.

The "quiet strain in the back of your mind" is what drives some people to always expect the worst to happen, and every so often they are right which reinforces their confidence in their intuitions more than their confidence diminishes each time they are wrong.

In some cases, it might be possible for someone to have a rational response to a stimulus only to think that it is intuition because they don't quite understand or aren't able to fully rationalize the source of the feeling. From my own experiences, it seems that some people don't make a hard enough effort to search for the source... they either don't seem to think that there is a rational source, or don't care to take the effort.... as long as they are able to ascertain what their feelings suggest they do, they really don't seem to care whether or not the source is rational or irrational.

A true rationalist would be able to determine the source and rationality of the feeling. The interesting question is if he fails to rationally explain the feeling, should he ignore the feeling, chalking it up to his weakness as a perfect rationalist.

Since we are all human and cannot be perfectly rational, shouldn't a rationalist decide that a seemingly irrational feeling is just that, irrational. Is it not more rational to believe that a seemingly irrational feeling is the result of our own imperfection as a human?

Anon, see Why Truth?:

When people think of "emotion" and "rationality" as opposed, I suspect that they are really thinking of System 1 and System 2 - fast perceptual judgments versus slow deliberative judgments. Deliberative judgments aren't always true, and perceptual judgments aren't always false; so it is very important to distinguish that dichotomy from "rationality". Both systems can serve the goal of truth, or defeat it, according to how they are used.

"I should have paid more attention to that sensation of still feels a little forced."

The force that you would have had to counter was the impetus to be polite. In order to boldly follow your models, you would have had to tell the person on the other end of the chat that you didn't believe his friend. You could have less boldly held your tongue, but that wouldn't have satisfied your drive to understand what was going on. Perhaps a compromise action would have been to point out the unlikelihood, (which you did: "they'd have hauled him off if there was the tiniest chance of serious trouble"), and ask for a report on the eventual outcome.

Given the constraints of politeness, I don't know how you can do better. If you were talking to people who knew you better, and understood your viewpoint on rationality, you might expect to be forgiven for giving your bald assessment of the unlikeliness of the report.

In it's strongest form, not believing system 1 amounts to not believing perceptions, hence not believing in empiricism. This is possibly the oldest of philosophical mistakes, made by Plato, possibly Siddhartha, and probably others even earlier.

Sounds like good old cognitive dissonance. Your mental model was not matching the information being presented.

That feeling of cognitive dissonance is a piece of information to be considered in arriving at your decision. If something doesn't feel right, usually either te model or the facts are wrong or incomplete.

T

"And this is where I fell down as a rationalist. I remembered several occasions where my doctor would completely fail to panic at the report of symptoms that seemed, to me, very alarming. And the Medical Establishment was always right. Every single time. I had chest pains myself, at one point, and the doctor patiently explained to me that I was describing chest muscle pain, not a heart attack. So I said into the IRC channel, "Well, if the paramedics told your friend it was nothing, it must really be nothing - they'd have hauled him off if there was the tiniest chance of serious trouble.""

My own "hold on a second" detector is pinging mildly at that particular bit. Specifically, isn't there a touch of an observer selection effect there? If the docs had been wrong and you ended up dying as a result, you wouldn't have been around to make that deduction, so you're (Well, anyone is) effectively biased to retroactively observe outcomes in which if the doctor did say you're not in a life threatening situation, you're genuinely not?

Or am I way off here?

A valid point, Psy-Kosh, but I've seen this happen to a friend too. She was walking along the streets one night when a strange blur appeared across her vision, with bright floating objects. Then she was struck by a massive headache. I had her write down what the blur looked like, and she put down strange half-circles missing their left sides.

That point was when I really started to get worried, because it looked like lateral neglect - something that I'd heard a lot about, in my studies of neurology, as a symptom of lateralized brain damage from strokes.

The funny thing was, nobody in the medical profession seemed to think this was a problem. The medical advice line from her health insurance said it was a "yellow light" for which she should see a doctor in the next day or two. Yellow light?! With a stroke, you have to get the right medication within the first three hours to prevent permanent brain damage! So we went to the emergency room - reluctantly, because California has enormously overloaded emergency rooms - and the nurse who signed us in certainly didn't seem to think those symptoms were very alarming.

The thing is, of course, that non-doctors are legally prohibited from making diagnoses. So neither the nurse on the advice line, or the nurse who signed us into the emergency room, were allowed to say: "It's a migraine headache, you idiots."

You see, I'd heard the phrase "migraine headache", but I'd had no idea of what the symptoms of a "migraine headache" were. My studies in neurology told me about strokes and lateral brain damage, because those are very important to the study of functional neuroanatomy. So I knew about these super dangerous and rare killer events that seemed sort of like the symptoms we were encountering, but I didn't know about the common events that a doctor sees every day.

When you see symptoms, you think of lethal zebras, because those are what you read about in the newspapers. The doctor thinks of much less exciting horses. This is why the Medical Establishment has always been right, in my experience, every single time I'm alarmed and they're not.

But in answer to your question about selection effects, Psy-Kosh, I think I'd have noticed if my friend had actually had a stroke. In fact, it would have been much more likely to have been reported and repeated than the reverse case.

Okie, and yeah, I imagine you would have noticed.

Also, of course, docs that habitually misdiagnose would presumably be sued or worse to oblivion by friends and family of the deceased. I was just unsure about the actual strength of that one thing I mentioned.

I think one would be the closest to truth by replying: "I don't quite believe that your story is true, but if it is, you should... etc" because there is no way for you to surely know whether he was bluffing or not. You have to admit both cases are possible even if one of them is highly improbable.

Doesn't any model contain the possibility, however slight, of seeing the unexpected? Sure this didn't fit with your model perfectly — and as I read the story and placed myself in your supposed mental state while trying to understand the situation, I felt a great deal of similar surprise — but jumping to the conclusion that someone was just totally fabricating is something that deserves to be weighed against other explanations for this deviation from your model.

Your model states that pretty much under all circumstances an ambulance is going to pick up a patient. This is true to my knowledge as well, but what happens if the friend didn't report to you that once the ambulance he called it off and refused to be transported. Or perhaps at the same time his chest pains were being judged as not-so-severe the ambulance got another call in that a massive car pileup required their immediate presence.

Your strength as a rationalist must not be the rejection of things unlikely in your model but instead the act of providing appropriate levels of concern. Perhaps the best response is something along the lines of "Sounds like a pretty strange occurrence. Are you sure your friend told you everything?" Now we're starting to judge our level of confidence in the new information being valid.

Which is honestly a pretty difficult model to shake as well. So much of every bit of information you build your world with comes from other people that I think it pretty decent to trust with some amount of abandon.

I don't see that you did anything at all irrational. You're talking to a complete stranger on the internet. He doesn't know you, and cannot have any possible interest in deceiving you. He tells you a fairly detailed story and asks for you advice. For him to make the whole thing up just for kicks is an example of highly irrational and fairly unlikely behavior.

Conversely, a person's panicking over chest pains and calling the ambulance is a comparatively frequent occurrence. Your having read somewhere something about ambulance policies does not amount to having concrete, irrefutable knowledge that an ambulance crew cannot make an on-site determination that there's no need to take a person to the hospital. To a person without extensive medical knowledge there is nothing particularly unlikely about the story you were told.

Therefore, the situation is this -- you are told by a complete stranger that has no reason to lie to you a perfectly believable story. You have no concrete reason ("read something somewhere" does not qualify) to doubt either the story or the man's sanity. Thus there is nothing illogical about taking the story at face value. You did the perfectly rational thing.

Since there was no irrationality in your initial behavior, the conclusions that you arrive at further in your post are unfounded.

DP

> The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

An alternative explanation? You put your energy into solving a practical problem with a large downside (minimizing the loss function in nerdese). Yes, to be perfectly rational you should have said: "the guy is probably lying, but if he is not then...".

It is a design flaw in human cognition that this sensation manifests as a quiet strain in the back of your mind, instead of a wailing alarm siren and a glowing neon sign reading "EITHER YOUR MODEL IS FALSE OR THIS STORY IS WRONG."

I wouldn't call it a flaw; blaring alarms can be a nuisance. Ideally you could adjust the sensitivity settings . . . hence the popularity of alcohol.

Thank you, Eliezer. Now I know how to dissolve Newcomb type problems. (http://lesswrong.com/lw/nc/newcombs_problem_and_regret_of_rationality/)

I simply recite, "I just do not believe what you have told me about this intergalactic superintelligence Omega".

And of course, since I do not believe, the hypothetical questions asked by Newcomb problem enthusiasts become beneath my notice; my forming a belief about how to act rationally in this contrary-to-fact hypothetical situation cannot pay the rent.

This sort of brings to my mind Pirsig's discussions about problem solving in ZATAOMM. You get that feeling of confusion when you are looking at a new problem, but that feeling is actually a really natural, important part of the process. I think the strangest thing to me is that this feeling tends to occur in a kind of painful way -- there is some stress associated with the confusion. But as you say, and as Pirsig says, that stress is really a positive indication of the maturation of an understanding.

I'm not sure that listening to ones intuitions is enough to cause accurate model changes. Perhaps it is not rational to hold a single model in your head, as your information is incomplete. Instead one can consciously examine the situation from multiple perspectives, in this way the nicer (simpler, more consistent, whatever your metric is) model response can be applied. Alternatively you could legitimately assume that all the models you hold have merit and produce a response that balances their outcomes e.g. if your model of the medical profession is wrong and they die from your advice it is much worse than the unnecessary calling of the ambulance (letting the medical profession address the balance of resources). This would lead a rational person to simultaneously believe many contradictory perspectives and act as if they were all potentially true. Does anyone know of any theory in this area? the modelling of models (and efficiently resolving multiple models) would be very useful in AI.

Considering that medical errors apparently kill more people than car accidents each year in the United States, I suspect the establishment is not in fact infallible.

From TvTropes:

"According to legend, one night the students of Baron Cuvier (one of the founders of modern paleontology and comparative anatomy) decided to play a trick on their instructor. They fashioned a medley of skins, skulls and other animal parts (including the head and legs of a deer) into a credibly monstrous costume. One brave fellow then donned the chimeric assemblage, crept into the Baron's bedroom when he was asleep and growled "Cuvier, wake up! I am going to eat you!" Cuvier woke up, took one look at the deer parts that formed part of the costume and sniffed "Impossible! You have horns and hooves!" (one would think "what sort of animals have horns and hooves" is common knowledge).

More likely he was saying "Impossible! You have horns and hooves (and are therefore not not a predator.)" The prank is more commonly reported as: "Cuvier, wake up! I am the Devil! I am going to eat you!" His response was "Divided hoof; graminivorous! It cannot be done." Apparently Satan is vegan. Don't comment that some deer have been seen eating meat or entrails, I occasionally grab the last slice of my bud's pizza but that doesn't classify me as a scavenger."

How do you face this situation as a rationalist?

I feel really uncomfortable with this idea: "EITHER YOUR MODEL IS FALSE OR THIS STORY IS WRONG."

I think this statement suffers from the same limitations of propositional logic; consequently, it is not applicable to many real life situations.

Most of the times, our model contains rules of this type (at least if we are rationalists): Event A occurs in situation B with probability C, where C is not 0 or 1. Also, life experiences teach us that we should update the probabilities in our model over time. So beside the uncertainty caused by the probability C, there is also uncertainty resulted from our degree of belief in the correctness of the rule itself. The situation becomes more complicated when the problem is cost sensitive.

I got your point (I hope so) and I'm definitely not trying to say "IT IS WORNG" but I think it is true to some degree.

This post frustrated me for a while, because it seems right but not helpful. Saying to myself, "I should be confused by fiction" doesn't influence my present decision.

First concertize. Let's say I have a high level world model. A few of them perhaps, to reduce the chance that one bad example results in a bad principle.

"My shower produces hot water in the morning." "I have fresh milk to last the next two days." "The roads are no longer slippery."

What do these models exclude? "The water will be cold", "the milk will be spoiled", "I'll see someone sliding at an intersection" are easy ones. Then there are weirder ones like "I don't even own a shower", "Someone drank all my milk in the middle of the night", and "the roads are closed off due to an earthquake".

I could say, "My model as stated technically disallows all these things, so if I see any, I should have a huge update", but that's unrealistic. The use of "easy" and "weird" implicitly show that I'm already thinking about hypotheses not as strictly allowing and disallowing, but as resulting in greater and lesser probabilistic gains/hits to my confidence.

Even if I do give up entirely on "I have fresh milk", I usually replace it with something that is consistent with the old reasoning (not just the old observations). Perhaps I reason "The milk should have been fresh but spoiled because of a temporary power outage last night". That's actually a bad example because it's not something I'd jump to if I didn't have other observation indicating a power outage. Let's try again. "The milk should have been fresh, but oh dang, it wasn't." Yes, that looks like something I'd think. What about the others? My first explanations would probably be "The roads are a little slippery some places" and "The water heater is acting up".

So what did we just see in this totally fictional but mildly plausible-sounding anecdote? Sometimes a failed hypothesis --becomes-> failed hypothesis + some noise. Other times it's like the water heater explanation which look pretty different. Let's think about the first type. Is this small model-distance update heuristic justified? The new model clearly gives more probability mass to our actual observations, but that's the representative heuristic, totally insufficient to judge whether the theory is acceptable. For that we look to Bayes:

P(H|E) = P(H) * P(E|H) / P(E)

P(E) will be the same for all hypotheses we consider, so just ignore that. P(E|H) is pretty high, since we added noise to make sure the hypothesis would predict evidence. What about P(H)? How do I practically compare the prior for different hypotheses? How do I know when adding noise to my model is good enough vs. when I need to search for new hypotheses?

Let's think of six different methods to guess whether our new hypothesis will be good enough.

1. Outside view. Think of five times you've been confused in the past four months when dealing with spoiled foods you purchased. If you can't, you're well calibrated enough in the spoiled food domain and the hypothesis is fine.
2. Solomonoff induction says that complexity penalizes the prior probability of hypotheses. Let's try some dirty things that look like that. Count the words in the hypothesis. Counts the nouns and verbs. Count the number of conjunctions and subtract the number of disjunctions. Count syllables or time how long it takes you to say it. Do this a lot in your daily life so you know how big your theories generally are. Guess what your average has been. Compare to milk explanation.
3. Consequential salience. Think of four things your theory predicts and four things that your theory disallows. If any of those eight things makes you squick, count a point. Two squicks or more means your theory is weird and you need to look for a better hypothesis. If you spend long enough trying to think of a consequence that you notice the time, your hypothesis isn't paying rent in expectation and you need to look for a better hypotheses.
4. Remember your day looking for two pieces of confirming evidence. Remember your day looking for three pieces of disconfirming evidence. Arbitrarily decide whether the hypothesis continues to jive with new evidence. If not, new hypothesis formation.
5. Imagine a wizard told you your new hypothesis before you tasted the spoiled milk. Imagine his clothes. Is the hypothesis sensible enough that you can trust him? Would you let him borrow a cup of sugar?
6. You're wrong. Your hypothesis is simply wrong. Say it to yourself. Say that the milk is still fine. Imagine whether you could go about your day believing this. Can you drink the milk? If not, your hypothesis changed by a large amount and it's sensible to look for alternatives rather than sticking with your old reasoning by mental inertia.

Now the critical stage!

1. You don't have time to remember the last four months. Don't even think about hypothesis priors unless you've already spent more than a minute trying to decide something. Milk is not a big deal, save your cognitive energy for the higher order bits of your life. Also, four months is kind of food-spoiling specific. Time frames would have to be adapted for different problems.

2. That is not Solomonoff induction in any way. We don't even have a language for formally expressing high level concepts like "spoiled milk" unless you look at brain architecture to figure out how they classify reality. Also "compare" is not concrete enough.

3. Emotional salience fails us badly in abstract situations. Thinking of disconfirming evidence is painful; our brains won't easily present squicky things.

4. Arbitrarily decide is not an actionable procedure.

5. This one actually seems kind of okay, unless you're just as likely to give sugar to senseless wizards.

6. I'm not sure small updates have small changes in consequence value, but doing more thinking when costs are high generally doesn't seem horrible. Maybe we should add in something to keep us from thinking longer just to procrastinate though.

Conclusions! Priors over explanations are -hard-. Sometimes we naturally make new hypotheses, sometimes we just add some noise. Maybe take the outside view of yourself if you have time! Maybe take the outside view of the hypothesis by having a wizard tell it to you if not. Your strength as a rationalist? Not drinking spoiled milk, not wasting time thinking about spoiled milk, noticing squicks, successfully doubting yourself when you feel a squick, believing some things because they work really well even if they sound crazy when a wizard says them.

Your strength as a rationalist is your ability to be more confused by fiction than by reality.

Yet, when a person of even moderate cleverness wishes to deceive you, this "strength" can be turned against you. Context is everything.

As Donald DeMarco asks in "Are Your Lights On?", WHO is it that is bringing me this problem?

Alas, belief is easier than disbelief; we believe instinctively, but disbelief requires a conscious effort.

Looking through Google Scholar for citations of Gilbert 1990 and Gilbert 1993, I see 2 replications which question the original effect:

• Hasson, U., Simmons, J. P. and Todorov, A. 2005: Believe it or not: on the possibility of suspending belief. Psychological Science, 16, 566–71 http://mba.yale.edu/faculty/pdf/Simmonsj_Believe.pdf
• Richter, T., Schroeder, S. and Wohrmann, B. 2009: You don’t have to believe everything you read: background knowledge permits fast and efficient validation of information. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 96, 538–58 http://cms.uni-kassel.de/unicms/fileadmin/groups/w_270518/pub_richter/Richter_Schroeder_Woehrmann_JPSP.pdf

(While looking for those, I found some good citations for my fiction-biases section, though.)

Eliezer's model:

The Medical Establishment is always right.

Information given:

• Person is feeling chest pain.
• Paramedics say hospitalization is unnecessary.

Possible scenarios mentioned in the story:

1. Person is feeling chest pain and is having a heart attack.
2. Person is feeling chest pain but does not need to be hospitalized.
3. Person is lying.

Between the model and the information given, only Scenario 1 can be ruled false; Scenarios 2 and 3 are both possible. If Eliezer is going to beat himself up for not knowing better, it should be because Scenario 3 did not occur to him -- not that Scenario 3 is the logical reality.

I see two senses (or perhaps not-actually-qualiatively-different-but-still-useful-to-distinguish cases?) of 'I notice I'm confused':

(1) Noticing factual confusion, as in the example in this post. (2) Noticing confusion when trying to understand a concept or phenomenon, or to apply a concept.

Example of (2): (A) "Hrm, I thought I understood what, "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" means when I first heard it; the words seemed to form a meaningful whole based on the way they fell together. But when I actually try to concretise what that could possibly mean, I find myself unable to, and notice that characteristic pang of confusion."

Example of (2): (B) "Hrm, I thought I understood how flight works because I could form words into intelligent-sounding sentences about things like 'lift' and 'Newton's third law'. But then when I tried to explain why a plane goes up instead of down, my word soup explained both equally well, and I noticed I was confused." (Compare, from the post: "I knew that the usefulness of a model is not what it can explain, but what it can't. A hypothesis that forbids nothing, permits everything, and thereby fails to constrain anticipation.")

Was a mistake really made in this instance? Is it not correct to conclude 'there was no problem'? Yes, the author did not realise the story was fictional; but what of what he concluded implied the story was not fictional?

Furthermore, is it good to berate oneself because one does not immediately realise something? In this case, the author did not immediately realise the story was fictional. But evidently the author was already working toward that conclusion by throwing doubt on parts of the story. And the evidence the author had was obviously inconclusive; the story could have been fictional (and the lie could have been invented at several stages), or the complainant could perhaps have simply misinterpreted chest pains as something else, or perhaps the doctors could have in fact made a mistake etc. Given all that, it seems rather after-the-fact to conclude the "Rational" conclusion one should have reached was that the story was a fiction. Surely the "Rational" conclusion would be to suspend judgement pending further investigation; or perhaps judge, but judge lightly. In any case, the self-flagellation at the end of the article seemed unnecessary. Humans are not capable of permanently being "Rational" thinkers; to get to the "Rational" conclusions, it is often best to proceed in baby-steps we can take rather than "Rational" leaps prescribed by whatever vision of "Rationality" is imagined by the author.

This looks like an instance of the Dunning-Kruger effect to me. Despite your own previous failures in diagnosis, you still felt competent to give medical advice to a stranger in a potentially life-threatening situation.

In this case, the "right answer" is not an analysis of the reliability of your friend's account, it is "get a second opinion, stat". This is especially true seeing as how you believed the description you gave above.

If a paramedic tells me "it's nothing", I complain to his or her superiors, because that is not a diagnosis. Furthermore, I don't see in your description a claim that the paramedics said there's no need to worry even if the pain becomes worse later on, so it seems sensible for you to presume they didn't. So, even if the first assessment is presumed correct, it is not admissible to think that it extends to different evidence.

And if that doesn't convince you, compute the expectation value of probably being right in a chat vs. the small chance of being sued for wrongful death times everything you own and will ever earn.

Of course, it's also possible to overdo it. If you hear something odd or confusing, and it conflicts with belief that you are emotionally attached to, the natural reaction is to ignore the evidence that doesn't fit your worldview, thus missing an opportunity to correct a mistaken belief.

On the other hand, if you hear something odd or confusing, and it conflicts with belief or assumption that you aren't emotionally attached to, then you shouldn't forget about the prior evidence in light of new evidence. The state of confusion should act as a trigger mechanism telling you to tally up all the evidence, and decide which piece doesn't fit.

It is a design flaw in human cognition...

Since I think evolution makes us quite fit to our current environment I don't think cognitive biases are design flaws, in the above example you imply that even if you had the information available to guess the truth, your guess was another one and it was false, therefore you experienced a flaw in your cognition.

My hypotheses is that reaching the truth or communicating it in the IRC may have not been the end objective of your cognitive process, in this case just to dismiss the issue as something that was not important anyway "so move on and stop wasting resources in this discussion" was maybe the "biological" objective and as such it should be correct, not a flaw.

If the above is true then all cognitive bias, simplistic heuristics, fallacies, and dark arts are good since we have conducted our lives for 200,000 years according to these and we are alive and kicking.

Rationality and our search to be LessWrong, which I support, may be tools we are developing to evolve in our competitive ability within our species, but not a "correction" of something that is wrong in our design.

Is EY saying that if something doesn't feel right, it isn't? I've been working on this rationalist koan for weeks and can't figure out something more believable! I feel like a doofus!

" we believe instinctively, but disbelief requires a conscious effort" link not working

This article actually made me question „Wait, is this even true?“ when I read an article with weird claims; then I research whether the source is trustworthy and sometimes, it turns out that it isn‘t

Trying to understand this.

I *knew* that the usefulness of a model is not what it can explain, but what it can’t. A hypothesis that forbids nothing, permits everything, and thereby fails to constrain anticipation.

I think what Yud means there is that a good model will break quickly. It only explains a very small set of things because the universe is very specific. So it's good that it doesn't explain many many things.

It's a bit like David Deutsch arguing that models should be sensitive to small changes.  All of their elements should be important.