Rationality Quotes August 2013

Pencil and paper is far more reliable than your native memory, and also gives you a way to work on more than seven or so objects at once. Either one would expand your capabilities significantly. Taken together they're huge, at least when you're working with things that natural selection hasn't optimized you for (i.e. yes for abstract math; not so much for facial recognition).

Is there something more to it than "you can do harder sums with a pencil and paper than you can in your head"?

Yes.

The paper is about the importance of environmental scaffolding on behavior. One of the topics it touches on is akrasia in college students, and it hypothesizes that this is because they lost their usual scaffolding - the routine of their homes, their parents, etc.

The main point is that models of the human mind need to take into account the extent to which humans rely on external objects for computation. Paper and pencil are an extreme example of this.

The quote itself has further implications. In my opinion, this is the single most important technological development. As far as I'm concerned, the "Singularity" began when humans began using things other than their brains to store and process information. That was the beginning of the intelligence explosion, that was the first time we started doing something qualitatively different.

Everyone realizes that writing stuff down is useful, but since we do it all the time not everyone realizes what a big deal it is.. The important insight is that to write is to make the piece of paper a component of your memory and processing power.

When you were what?

Your chance of averaging 3.5 to two significant figures seems quite high indeed, though.

The more precise statement of "math says rolling more dice makes things less random" is that if you roll ten six-sided dice and add up the answer, the result will be less random (on its scale) than if you merely roll one six-sided die.

Even more precisely: the outcome of 10d6 is 68.7% likely to lie in the range [30,40], while the outcome of 1d6 is only 33.3% likely to lie in the corresponding range [3,4].

I think the quoted portion of the article addresses exactly this point: people were scared of rolling many dice because this meant lots of randomness, but the math says that the opposite effect occurs.

As to your other points (starting with "kind of a slap in the face"), that is addressed in the article, but not the quoted part. In summary: both rolling dice and drawing cards is random, but there's a bunch of reasons why the randomness of drawing cards isn't as frustrating. (It can be frustrating too, though.)

Why is this quote upvoted?

Maybe because of this part:

Players [...] equated lots of dice rolling with the game being "more random" even though that contradicts the actual math.

It's a cautionary tale about Norwegian food.

Betcha it'd work. I'm going to set a piece of candy in front of me, work for half an hour, and then put it back, at least once a day for a week.

In the context of LW, I took it as an amusing critique of the whole idea of rewarding yourself for behaviours you want to do more .

It's either a cautionary tale about the dangers of deceiving yourself, or a humorous look at the impossibility of actually doing so.

I took it to be about the hidden complexity of wishes: people often say they want to have more money left at the end of the month when what they actually mean is that they want to have more money left at the end of the month without making themselves miserable in the process, and the easiest solution to the former needn't be at all a solution to the latter.

I don't understand this rationality quote. Is it about fighting akrasia? Self-hacking to effectively saving money? It clearly describes a method that wouldn't actually work, and it could work as humour, but what does it mean as a rationality tale?

It could be used as an effective "How to create an Ugh Field and undermine all future self-discipline attempts" instruction manual. It isn't a rationality tale. It is confusing that 40 people evidently consider it to be one. (But only a little bit confusing. I usually expect non-rationalist quotes that would be accepted as jokes or inspirational quotes elsewhere to get around 10 upvotes in this thread regardless of merit. That means I'm surprised about the degree of positive reception.)

It's interesting to view this story from source-code-swap Prisoner's Dilemma / Timeless Decision Theory perspective. This can be a perfect epigraph in an article dedicated to it.

I thought the way he deceived his conscious mind, and never learned, was interesting.

Such a threat can also be effective for asymmetrical violence -- no matter which way the asymmetry goes.

It wasn't very interesting - some issue of how to make one piece of software talk to the code you'd just written and then store the output somewhere else. Not physics, just infrastructure. But the recognition of the levels was interesting, I thought. Although I do believe "literally five seconds" is likely an exaggeration.

If I understand why I did something, I want to believe ...

I think it may depend a lot on how well the action fits into your schema for reasonable behavior.

I have mild OCD. Its manifestations are usually unnoticeable to other people, and generally don't interfere with the ordinary function of my life, but occasionally lead to my engaging in behaviors that no ordinary person would consider worthwhile. The single most extreme manifestation, which still stands out in my memory, was a time when I was playing a video game, and saved my game file, then, doubting my own memory that I had saved it, did it again... and again... and again... until I had saved at least seven times, each time convinced that I couldn't yet be sure I had saved it "enough."

Afterwards, I was horrified at my own actions, because what I had just done was too obviously crazy to just handwave away.

It depends on the context, in particular, whether the situation is one where you "must" have a good reason for your actions. Your reaction is appropriate for most ordinary situations; his is appropriate for the context he's talking about (doing a different movement than than the one you intended in a chess game) and other high stakes situations (blurting an answer you know is wrong in an examination, saying/doing something awkward on a date, making a risky movement driving your car…)

It is the second book in the series Harry Potter and the Natural 20, which can be found here.

If you put the quote into quotation marks and search Google, it's the fifth hit.

A demonstration of the gray fallacy. The opinions of Ariel Castro are not equidistant from the truth with those of the rest of society, and we don't find the truth by finding a middle ground between his claims and those of everybody else.

I assume the original intent of the quote was about romantic partners, where it means, "Instead of searching so hard, make sure to prioritize being awesome for its own sake."

I was trying to repurpose it to express that action is better than preparing for something to fall into place more generally, and I think it's appealed to people.

You still have to be the right person to be the right person in a team....?

Far too many people...

Completely putting teamwork aside, most major contributions to humanity were achieved by standing on the shoulders of those who came before.

Difficult. The "distance" is metaphorical, and this probably doesn't apply when there's an easy, unambiguous, generally accepted metric. Without that, how do we do the study?

Still, if you have a way, it could be interesting.

I can't parse your post, but that may be partly because I don't understand how subsidizing status markers would produce character traits to begin with.

It's not an especially rational piece of work as such, although it has its moments, but it is one of the more detailed examinations of heroic responsibility and the associated cultural expectations in fiction (if you can get past the sometimes shaky translation). Your mileage might vary, but I see echoes of it whenever Eliezer writes about saving the world.

It has some elements that stand out in terms of rationalist virtue, and many others which don't.

I found it to be very much a mixed bag, but the things it did well, I thought it did exceptionally well.

It's not so much rationalist as... Eliezer-ish. See my review in the media thread: http://lesswrong.com/lw/i8c/august_2013_media_thread/9ilm

A creature that can build a spaceship is probably closer to oe that can build a plane than it is to a rock at least, you have to start somewhere.

To be fair there are quite a few people who nowadays listen to electronic music, take drugs that are pills and who spend a lot of time in dark rooms.

So Tetris is really an anti-procrastination learning tool? Hmmm, wonder why that doesn't sound right….

But the challenge rate is not fixed. It increases at higher levels. So the lesson seems rather hollow: At some point, if you are successful at solving challenges, the rate at which new ones appear becomes too high for you.

And todays challenges can be used to remedy yesterdays failures.

I'm afraid I don't know what that stands for.

What?

From the same website, another LessWrongian wisdom:

The bad news is robots can do your job now. The good news is we're now hiring robot repair technicians. The worse news is we're working on robot-fixing robots- and we do not anticipate any further good news.

And, while you were writing, someone would provide the wanted answer ;)

I'm pretty sure I had this very exercise in a creative-writing class somewhere in school.

That's an interesting prediction. Have you tried it? Can you predict what you'd do after filling the notebook?

In my imagination, I'd probably wind up in one of two states:

• Feeling tricked and asking myself "What was the point of that?"
• Feeling accomplished and waiting for the next instruction.

That, and I'm getting the distinct impression their world is a non-euclidean mess.

It is. That doesn't mean the results are good.

Google nGram suggests that "Finding yourself" wasn't a phrase that was really in use before the 1960 albeit there a short uptick in 1940. Given that you need some time for criticism and Shaw died in 1950, I think it's quite clear that this quote is to modern for him. Although maybe post-modern is a more fitting word?

The timeframe seems to correspond with the rise of post-modern thought. If you suddenly start deconstructing everything you need to find yourself again ;)

I think you are right that it is difficult to find the exact source. I came upon this quotation in the book Up where the author quoted Bernard Shaw. Google gave me http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/5217.George_Bernard_Shaw, but no article or play was indicated as a source of this quote.

As opposed to what? I would guess maybe a better concept is what you're able to get done...

If best is defined as easiest, then the "usually" within the quote is entirely superfluous. "If" statements are logically exception-less, and the Law of Conserved Conversation (That i've just made up) means that "usually" implies exceptions. Otherwise it would be excluded from the quote. So I say, pedantically, "duh. but you're missing the point a bit, aren't you mate?"

I like to think of the principle as a kind of Occam's for action. Don't take elaborate actions to produce some solution that is otherwise trivially easy to produce.

I see it as more of a "rather than sorting projects by revenue, make sure to sort them by profit," combined with "in cases where revenue is concave and cost linear, which happen frequently, the lowest cost project is probably going to be the highest profit."

Alternatively, if you define solution such that any two given solutions are equally acceptable with respect to the original problem.

There are surprisingly few MRI machines or DNA sequencers in cotton fields and sweatshops. Paraphrasing the original quote from Stephen Jay Gould: The problem is not how good we are at detecting talent; it's where we even bother to look for it.

I suspect, actually, that Gould would not view "find the geniuses and get them out of the fields" as a reasonable solution to the problem he poses. What he wants is for there to be no stoop labour in the first place, whether for geniuses or the terminally mediocre. The geniuses are just a way to illustrate the problem.

That's a hard problem, with no reasonable way to measure it in in a large population in sight, or even direction of the relationship taken into account. Ideally you'd take a bunch of kids and look at their brains and then see how they grew up and see whether you could find anything that altered the distribution in similar cases - but ....

Well, you see the problem? It's a sort of twiddling your thumbs style studying, rather than addressing more immediate problems that might do something at a reasonable price/timeline.

they are not well known to me

There was only one Ramanujan

In what reference class?

You presume too much, the only thing I remember about Gould's views is that they are controversial.

Fund raising for new ventures does this a lot, raising money for many sorts of investment at the retail level is largely an effort of telling good stories not particularly supported by statistical fact.

At least in investing the people listening to the stories eventually find out whether their investment went sour.

Yes, it's wrong. In the QM formalism position is a fundamental property. However, the way physical properties work is very different from classical mechanics (CM). In CM, a property is basically a function that maps physical states to real numbers. So the x-component of momentum, for instance, is a function that takes a state as input and spits out a number as output, and that number is the value of the property for that state. Same state, same number, always. This is what it means for a property to have a well-defined value for every state.

In QM, physical properties are more complicated -- they're linear operators, if you want a mathematically exact treatment. But here's an attempt at an intuitive explanation: There are some special quantum states (called eigenstates) for which physical properties behave pretty much like they do in CM. If the particle is in one of those states, then the property takes the state as input and basically just spits out a number. Whenever the particle is in that state, you get the same number. For those states, the property does have a well-defined value.

But the problem in QM is that those are not the only states there are. There are other states as well. These states are linear combinations of the eigenstates, i.e. they correspond to sums of eigenstates (states in QM are basically just vectors, so you can sum them together). These linear combinations are not themselves eigenstates. When you input them into the property, it spits out multiple numbers, not just one. In fact it spits out all the numbers corresponding to each of the eigenstates that are summed together to form our linear combination state. So if A and B are eigenstates for which the property in question spits out numbers a and b respectively, then for the combined state A + B, the property will spit out both a and b -- two numbers, not just one.

So the property isn't just a simple function from states to numbers; for some states you end up with more than one number. And which of those numbers do you see when you make a measurement? Well, that depends on your interpretation. In collapse theories, for instance, you see one of the numbers chosen at random. In MWI, the world branches and each one of those numbers is seen on a separate branch. So there's the sense in which properties aren't well-defined in QM -- properties don't associate a unique number with every physical state. This is all pretty hand-wavey, I realize, but Griffiths is right. If you really want an understanding of what's going on, then you need to study QM in some depth.

Also, I should say that in MWI there is something to your claim that the position of a particle is emergent and not fundamental, but this is not so much because of the nature of the property. It's because particles themselves are emergent and non-fundamental in MWI. The universal wavefunction is fundamental.

But when it's being used, you don't see it!

"Because the dollar is dirty" is one of those pained, stretched explanations people come up with to explain why they do what they do, not the actual reason (even in some small part) the bookmark was invented and became popular.

I get all kinds of entertainment out of reading a $20 bill.

You may as well ask, "Why spend $20 on a book ? Why not just save the $20 ?"

Arr.

I tear out a blank page from the nearest notebook of sufficient size, and fold it as necessary.

Or just fold the corner of the page over.

I find it hard to come up with a deeper meaning for the original statement, so yeah.

Besides, it's not hard to come up with a deeper meaning behind what the responders are saying; in pointing out that an object specifically designed as a bookmark makes a better bookmark than a dollar bill, they're making a statement about more than just dollar bills and bookmarks, but about specialization in general.

While I agree that people often make decisions without thinking them out, I think you are underestimating aesthetics. Aesthetics have phychological effects, and often people find better design structure estetically pleasing.

It would seem that most of the responders are hopelessly literal....

Your quote is both literally and connotatively poor. If Spielberg had asked "Why spend two dollars on a bookmark? ... Why not use a dollar as a bookmark?" then there would at least have been some moral along the lines of efficient practicality. Even then it would be borderline.

I think it's good to be well-calibrated.

It is usually best to be socially confident while making well-calibrated predictions of success. The two are only slightly related and Downey is definitely talking about the social kind of confidence.

I think it's best to be well-calibrated, use that to choose your team as one that's going to succeed, and then to be confident.

Well, I think the thrust of the quote had more to do with being confident in your own projects. But I'll try to do an answer to your point because I think it's important to recognise the limitations of domain specialists - some of whom just aren't very good at their jobs.

If you're not on your team of expert surgeons, you're gonna be screwed if they're not actually as expert as you might think they were. There's a bit in What Do You Care What Other People Think? Where Feynman is talking about his first wife's hospitalisation - and how he had done some reading around the area and come up with the idea that it might be TB - and didn't push for the idea because he thought that the doctors knew what they were doing.

Then, sometime later, the bump began to change. It got bigger—or maybe it was smaller—and she got a fever. The fever got worse, so the family doctor decided Arlene should go to the hospital. She was told she had typhoid fever. Right away, as I still do today, I looked up the disease in medical books and read all about it. When I went to see Arlene in the hospital, she was in quarantine—we had to put on special gowns when we entered her room, and so on. The doctor was there, so I asked him how the Wydell test came out—it was an absolute test for typhoid fever that involved checking for bacteria in the feces. He said, "It was negative." "What? How can that be!" I said. "Why all these gowns, when you can't even find the bacteria in an experiment? Maybe she doesn't have typhoid fever!" The result of that was that the doctor talked to Arlene's parents, who told me not to interfere. "After all, he's the doctor. You're only her fiancé." I've found out since that such people don't know what they're doing, and get insulted when you make some suggestion or criticism. I realize that now, but I wish I had been much stronger then and told her parents that the doctor was an idiot—which he was—and didn't know what he was doing. But as it was, her parents were in charge of it.

Anyway, after a little while, Arlene got better, apparently: the swelling went down and the fever went away. But after some weeks the swelling started again, and this time she went to another doctor. This guy feels under her armpits and in her groin, and so on, and notices there's swelling in those places, too. He says the problem is in her lymphatic glands, but he doesn't yet know what the specific disease is. He will consult with other doctors. As soon as I hear about it I go down to the library at Princeton and look up lymphatic diseases, and find "Swelling of the Lymphatic Glands. (1) Tuberculosis of the lymphatic glands. This is very easy to diagnose . . ."—so I figure this isn't what Arlene has, because the doctors are having trouble trying to figure it out.

[Feynman moves onto less likely possibilities]

One of the diseases I told Arlene about was Hodgkin's disease. When she next saw her doctor, she asked him about it: "Could it be Hodgkin's disease?" He said, "Well, yes, that's a possibility." When she went to the county hospital, the doctor wrote the following diagnosis: "Hodgkin's disease—?" So I realized that the doctor didn't know any more than I did about this problem. The county hospital gave Arlene all sorts of tests and X-ray treatments for this "Hodgkin's disease—?" and there were special meetings to discuss this peculiar case. I remember waiting for her outside, in the hall. When the meeting was over, the nurse wheeled her out in a wheelchair. All of a sudden a little guy comes running out of the meeting room and catches up with us. "Tell me," he says, out of breath, "do you spit up blood? Have you ever coughed up blood?" The nurse says, "Go away! Go away! What kind of thing is that to ask of a patient!"—and brushes him away. Then she turned to us and said, "That man is a doctor from the neighborhood who comes to the meetings and is always making trouble. That's not the kind of thing to ask of a patient!" I didn't catch on. The doctor was checking a certain possibility, and if I had been smart, I would have asked him what it was. Finally, after a lot of discussion, a doctor at the hospital tells me they figure the most likely possibility is Hodgkin's disease. He says, "There will be some periods of improvement, and some periods in the hospital. It will be on and off, getting gradually worse. There's no way to reverse it entirely. It's fatal after a few years."

[Gets convinced to lie to her that it's Hodgkins - lie falls through]

For some months now Arlene's doctors had wanted to take a biopsy of the swelling on her neck, but her parents didn't want it done—they didn't want to "bother the poor sick girl." But with new resolve, I kept working on them, explaining that it's important to get as much information as possible. With Arlene's help, I finally convinced her parents. A few days later, Arlene telephones me and says, "They got a report from the biopsy." "Yeah? Is it good or bad?" "I don't know. Come over and let's talk about it." When I got to her house, she showed me the report. It said, "Biopsy shows tuberculosis of the lymphatic gland." That really got me. I mean, that was the first goddamn thing on the list! I passed it by, because the book said it was easy to diagnose, and because the doctors were having so much trouble trying to figure out what it was. I assumed they had checked the obvious case. And it was the obvious case: the man who had come running out of the meeting room asking "Do you spit up blood?" had the right idea. He knew what it probably was!

I felt like a jerk, because I had passed over the obvious possibility by using circumstantial evidence—which isn't any good—and by assuming the doctors were more intelligent than they were. Otherwise, I would have suggested it right off, and perhaps the doctor would have diagnosed Arlene's disease way back then as "tuberculosis of the lymphatic gland—?" I was a dope. I've learned, since then.

=====================

Point being, disinvolving yourself from decisions is not a no-risk choice, and specialists aren't necessarily wise just because they've sat through the classes and crammed some sort of knowledge into their heads to get a degree. Assigning trust is a difficult subject.

There's a book called The Speed of Trust - and that's pretty much what you give up in being involved in complex decisions where you're not a specialist and where the specialists are actually really good at their jobs - a bit of speed.

Expert surgeons tend to think that more problems should be solved via surgery than doctors who aren't surgeons. Before getting surgery you should always talk with a doctor who knows something about the kind of illness you are having who isn't a surgeon.

After the operation is done doctors will ask you if everything is alright with you. If you try to understand what the operation involved you will give your doctor answers that are likely to be more informative than if you just try to place all responsibility onto another person.

Especially if you feel something that's not normal for the type of operation that you get, it important to be confident that you perceive something that's worth bringing to the attention of your doctor.

Having had big operations (one with 8 weeks of hospitalisation and one with 3 weeks) myself I think not taking enough for myself in those context was one of the worst decisions I made in my life. But then I was young and stupid about how the world works at the time.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding the quote, but this seems to wither if you have something to protect.

Only if you're not the one with the responsibility to do something to protect it. I don't know the context of the quote, other than apparently being from an interview (with the actor, not any character he has played), but I read it as being about your own efforts to accomplish something. In such matters, you are the first person on your team, and you won't get any others on board by telling them you're not sure this is a good idea. Once you've made the decision that you are going to go for it, you have to then go for it, not sit around wondering if it's the right decision. If you're not acting on a decision, you didn't make it.

That may be a better wording of what I was trying to say here.

This works as a rationalization growing from the conclusion that others should be "on your team". If on well-calibrated assessment you yourself are not "on your team", others probably shouldn't be either, in which case projecting confidence amounts to deceit.

(Unless I don't understand what you are saying) I reject whatever definition 'deceit' is given such that the above claim is true. Behaving in a socially confident manner is different in nature to lying.

Why shouldn't they be? The idea that if you don't rate yourself highly no one should is just an excuse for shitty instincts.

Obviously it's a useful piece of nonsense to tell yourself. People are more likely to come to your side if you are confident. But the explicit reasoning is reprehensible. (not that any explicit reasoning probably went in, it's such a common idea that it is repeated without thought. It's almost a universal applause light.)

This is more of an irrationality quote. A bit of of paper thin justification for a shitty but common sentiment which it's useful to adopt rather than notice.

How about "If you know nothing and are willing to learn, you're closer to the truth than someone who's attached to falsehoods"? Even then, I suppose you'd need to throw in something about the speed of learning.

To me "filled with falsehoods and errors" translates into more falsehoods than "some". Though I agree its not a very good quote within the context of LW.

He who knows nothing is further from the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors, but has the courage to acknowledge them as so.

-LessWrong Community

Maybe it's just where my mind was when I read it but I interpreted the quote as meaning something more like:

"It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence."

In what units does one measure distance from the truth, and in what manner?

(Reference.)

That's the joke.

I always thought it was interesting that Tupac got all the conspiracy theories while Biggie got none, despite the fact that Biggie released an album called Ready to Die, died, then two weeks later released an album called Life After Death. It's probably because Tupac's music appeals more to hippie types who are into this kind of stuff.

Then, to continue the metaphor, we should study it by telescope from afar, not as a present and influential entity in our own sphere of existence, but rather a distant body, informative but impotent, the object of curiosity rather than devotion.

Much of science, including social science, tries to explain things we all know, but science can also make a contribution by establishing that some of the things we all think we know simply are not so. In that case, social science may also try to explain why we think we know things that are not so, adding as it were a piece of knowledge to replace the one that has been taken away.

— Jon Elster, Explaining Social Behavior: More Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences, p. 16

Only if they won't let you throw it away.

Counter-quote.

Only loosely. The insightful part of the grandparent quote is the third sentence, which complements the moral-greyness issue quite well.

Empirically, heaping scorn on everyone and seeing who sticks around leads to lots of time wasted on flame wars.

Straw man. The grandparent explicitly made the scorn conditional, not 'on everyone'.

Empirically, heaping scorn on everyone and seeing who sticks around

Eric Raymond isn't suggesting that. Why are you?

A relevant example:

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/07/linus-torvalds-defends-his-right-to-shame-linux-kernel-developers/

Linux kernel seems to me a quite well-managed operation (of herding cats, too!) that doesn't waste lots of time on flame wars.

While the more socially enlightened attitudes lead to very effective and high signal-to-noise conflict handling, as can be observed on Tumblr and MetaFilter?

(Anyway, if an adult woman complains because you called her a girl, the course of action that leaves you the most time to get stuff done is apologizing, not doing that again, and getting back to work, not endlessly whining about how ridiculous the PC crowd are.)

Not necessarily, it might just encourage further frivolous complaints.

We use the karma system for that.

So I asked a friend about courteous programming environments, and he mentioned a couple that he's worked at:

Webmethods, renamed as Novell Business Service Management Managed Objects at Software AG

Anyone know where Google fits on the courtesy to flame spectrum? How about Steam?

"If it July, I desire to believe it is July. If it is August, I desire to believe it is August..."