The Correct Contrarian Cluster

I don't understand how many worlds can be a slam dunk for someone who doesn't understand all the math behind quantum physics.

If a significant number of people who do understand this math believe that many-worlds is wrong, then no matter how convincing I find your non-mathematical arguments in favor of many-worlds isn't it rational for me to still assign a significant probability to the possibility that many worlds isn't correct?

Doesn't physics all come down to math, meaning that people who can't follow the math should put vastly more weight on polls of experts than on their own imperfect understanding of the field?

Another little essay on MWI. tl;dr : Eliezer is wrong on the Internet! Won't somebody please think of the mind children?...

I have spent many years studying and thinking about interpretations of quantum theory. Eliezer's peculiar form of dogmatism about many worlds is a new twist. I have certainly encountered dogmatic many-worlds supporters before. What's exceptional is Eliezer's determination to make belief in many worlds a benchmark test of rationality in general. He's not just dogmatic about it as a question of physics, but now he even calls it a rationalist "slam-dunk", a thing which should be obvious to any sufficiently informed clear thinker, and which can be used to rank a person's rationality.

My position, I suppose, is that it is Eliezer who is insufficiently informed. He has always been a wavefunction realist - a believer in the existence of the wavefunction - and simply went from a belief in collapse of the wavefunction, to a belief in no collapse. If that was the only choice, he'd have a point. But it is far from being the only choice.

One thing I wonder about (when I adopt the perspective of trying to draw lessons regarding general rationality from this affair) is whether he ought to regard himself as culpable for this error, or whether ignorance is a valid excuse. Yesterday I was promoting "quantum causal histories" as an example of an alternative class of interpretation. Those are rather obscure papers. He's certainly not at fault for not having heard of them. Yet he surely should have heard of John Cramer's transactional interpretation, and there's no trace of it in his writings on this topic.

I suspect that another factor in his thinking is a belief in the minimalism of many-worlds. All you need is the wavefunction. You even get to remove something from the theory - the collapse postulate. But the complexities reenter - and the handwaving begins - when you try to find the worlds in the wavefunction. Naive onlookers to this discussion may think of a world as a point in configuration space. But this is not the usual notion of "world" in the technical literature on many worlds. Worlds are themselves represented by lesser wavefunctions: components of the total wavefunction, or tensor factors thereof. It is a chronic question in many-worlds theory as to which such components are the worlds, or whether one even needs to specify a particular algebraic breakdown of the universal wavefunction as the decomposition corresponding to reality. I don't even know what Eliezer's position on this debate is. Is a world a point in configuration space? Is it a blob of amplitude stretching across a small contiguous region of configuration space? What about a wavefunction component which stretches across most of configuration space, and has multiple peaks - is it legitimate or not to treat that as a world? Eliezer is impressed by Robin Hanson's mangled worlds proposal; should we take Robin's definition of worlds as the one to use, if we wish to understand his thought?

I don't object to many-worlds advocates having their theoretical disputes; certainly better that they have them, than that their concepts should remain fuzzy and undeveloped! But I find it very hard to justify this harsh advocacy of many-worlds as obviously superior when the theoretical details of the interpretation remain so confused. The confusion, the unfinished work, seems comparable to that still existing with respect to the zigzag interpretations like Cramer's. And since a zigzag interpretation only requires a single, basically classical space-time, and does away with the wavefunction entirely except as the sort of probability distribution appropriate to a situation in which causality runs backwards and forwards in time, it has its own claim to elegance and minimalism.

My own position is the anodyne one that Further Research Is Required, and that theoretical pluralism should be tolerated. I respect the rigor of Bohmian mechanics; I don't believe it is the truth, but working on it might lead to the truth, and the same goes for a number of other interpretations. I tilt towards single-world interpretations because I anticipate that in most completed many-worlds theories (many-worlds theories in which the confusions have truly been resolved, by an exact theoretical framework), you will be able to find self-contained histories, akin to Bohmian trajectories but perhaps metaphorically "thicker" in cross-section. And my ultimate message for many-worlds enthusiasts is that the apparent simplicity of many worlds is an illusion because of the theoretical work necessary to finish the job. You will end up either adding lots of extra structure, or compromising on objectivity and theoretical exactness (e.g. by being blase about what is and is not a "world").

Some views are contrarian in society at large, but dominant views in particular subcultures. Libertarian views aren't dominant in economics, but they're (correct me if I'm wrong) dominant in the economics department at George Mason where Robin Hanson works. Does that make Robin a contrarian, or a conformist?

I bet that most 9/11 conspiracy theorists have a lot of friends who are also conspiracy theorists. Sometimes supporting one contrarian theory (the Jews were behind 9/11) is a way of aligning with a larger, locally-conformist narrative (the Jews are behind everything).

Next thing you know, someone will say Jews are behind the Singularity Institute... um... uh-oh.

I've read that in the 19th century, there were many people who said that iron ships couldn't possibly float. If you take a few seconds to do the math, you can quickly verify that iron ships can float. That seems like a good slam-dunk to me. Is there a modern equivalent?

Some similar, not-quite-as-obvious former popular opinions:

• Humans can never fly.
• Humans can never reach the moon.

(Interestingly, the much older "sailboats can never sail upwind" seems more plausible to me than any of these.)

Contemporary unpopular slam-dunk-yes views:

• Computers will someday attain human-level performance on any task you can name.
• Technology can enable humans to live to the age of 200.
• Evolution. (Still unpopular worldwide.)

There are culture-specific slam-dunks. I noticed, while traveling in China, particularly during an episode when the US bombed a Chinese embassy and when discussing the Tienanmen Square massacre, that most of the Chinese people who spoke openly with me (just a few) simultaneously believe their government is corrupt and untrustworthy, yet believed everything it said about those incidents. Numerous Russians I've spoken to have a blindness reconciling their views on Stalin with their views on Putin (the same attributes that made Stalin bad make Putin good). Maybe a foreigner should help us identify our slam-dunks.

There are some slam-dunks that are popular on the low end of g, and on the high end of g, but not in the middle range of g, e.g.

• Men and women have different distributions of preferences and cognitive aptitudes.

Using these in your survey could contaminate the results.

The only thing I'd predict from knowing someone believes in many worlds is that they like science fiction. This isn't because anything might be happening somewhere, it's because many worlds is a much more interesting universe.

I don't think that QM, P-Zombies and Many Worlds are good examples at all. Frankly, I tend to think that the use of nuance, the use of careful distinctions between proposed hypotheses rather than the endorsement of slogans is a very good sign. For precisely this reason, however, I thought that http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2009/12/what_do_philoso.html was a fantastically useless survey. If you summarize a philosophical debate in a slogan and ask people for a 'yes/no' answer you should expect the best thinkers to be able to explain exactly what would cause people to endorse each side and how those causes establish or fail to establish correspondence to reality.

Why would you expect someone who has a high correct contrarian factor in one area to have it in another?

Bad beliefs do seem to travel in packs (according to Penn and Teller, and Eliezer, anyhow). Lots of alien conspiracy nuts are government conspiracy nuts as well. That's not surprising, because bad beliefs are easy to pick up and they seem to be tribally maintained by the same tribe that maintains other bad beliefs.

But good beliefs? Really good ones? They're difficult. They take years. If you don't know of Less Wrong (or similar) as a source of good beliefs, you probably only have one set of good beliefs in your narrow area (like economics or quantum physics but not both). And you know what? You shouldn't be expected to have more, if that's the one set that you use to affect the world.

Barring only a few people with interdisciplinary interests, I would expect that the economists who are the best at predicting the stock market would answer “What's a many-worlds interpretation?” to Eliezer's question.

"Robin previously posted (and I commented) on the notion of trying to distinguish correct contrarians by "outside indicators" - as I would put it, trying to distinguish correct contrarians, not by analyzing the details of their arguments, but by zooming way out and seeing what sort of general excuse they give for disagreeing with the establishment. As I said in the comments, I am generally pessimistic about the chances of success for this project"

I think the method that was taught in my family is better: become an expert on one or more subjects, so that you can know, by evaluating the evidence, which views are correct. Then, judge sources by their accuracy in those areas on which you are expert.

The method was not explicitly meant for contrarianism, but it works well there. Research some promising contrarian claims (perhaps those like diet & exercise which will most affect your life) so that you have pretty high confidence in whether they are correct. Then evaluate the accuracy of contrarians based on whether their claims agree with your research in those areas, and upweight the other things that those contrarians believe. Sure, you have to be smart enough to be a good evidence evaluator, but, hey, that sounds like us.

If you only expect to find one empirically correct cluster of contrarian beliefs, then you will most likely find only one, regardless of what exists.

Treating this is as a clustering problem we can extract common clusters of beliefs from the general contrarian collection and determine degrees of empirical correctness. Presupposing a particular structure will introduce biases on the discoveries you can make.

(The first thing I'd probably try would be SVD to see if it isolates a "correctness factor", since it's simple and worked famously well on the Netflix dataset.)

I'd like to give people quizzes to identify cognitive biases, perform SVD (or factor analysis) on the results, and see if the first dimension matches up with "liberal / conservative".

PS - The technique referred to as SVD by the Netflix contestants is actually multiple linear regression. SVD uses principal component analysis, so that the first dimension is the dimension with greatest variance, etc. Simon Funk's original algorithm uses gradient search to approximate SVD, but most Netflix contestants after Funk sped it up by using a gradient-search method that adjusts all of the basis vectors in parallel, without concentrating the variance in any one of them. Therefore, it's more like multiple linear regression.

Clusters of opinion may be accidental, e.g. many lemmings follow Eliezer Yudkowsky who is correct on three topics and wrong on two. Or some other pundit. I think such accidental correlations will drown out whatever useful signal you were hoping to uncover by factor analysis. It's a fishy endeavor anyway, smells like determining truth by popular vote spiced up with nifty math. What if all smart people start using your algorithm? You could get some nasty herd effects...

There might be a certain kind of people with high-quality suggestions on what novel things to investigate. (I expect these people have more to offer than lists of beliefs.) We have effective g-factor tests that allow to reliably find smart people in general population, and to construct groups of especially smart people. This post suggests that there might be a similarly effective way to estimate people's rationality, a "cc-factor", the ability to find and adopt correct beliefs even if they go against conventional wisdom, not necessarily as a skill, but as a predisposition. This may go a long way towards building the strength of the rationality cause.

I don't think that disbelief in P-zombies belongs on this list. Or, it belongs on the list only in the sense in which Chalmers himself disbelieves in P-zombies. Chalmers doesn't think that P-zombies might actually exist in the real world. Rather, he thinks that P-zombies could have existed had the universe been governed by different laws. In other words, his "belief" in P-zombies is an artifact of how he assigns truth-values to counterfactuals.

I agree that he makes these truth-value assignments in a wrong way. But he doesn't really believe in P-zombies. He doesn't believe that they are actual. He does believe that they are possible-but-not-actual. In general, the mistake that P-zombie believers make is a mistake about how to think about counterfactuals. Not making that mistake might be a "slam dunk". If it's not, then P-zombie disbelief isn't either.

I also agree that Chalmers's beliefs about P-zombies lead him to make certain actually-incorrect metaphysical assertions. But these assertions are wrong in the same sense that your belief in a subjective thread of consciousness is wrong. [ETA: I'm not saying that you think about counterfactuals wrongly. You take exactly the right approach to them in my book.]

A better method to anchor would be to use predictions about the future. How about finding 50contrarian predictions about what will happen in 2010 and use them as control for 50 other contrarian questions for which we will never have 100% sure answers?

Though, as I also commented, there are some general structures that make me sit up and take note; probably the strongest is "These people have ignored their own carefully gathered experimental evidence for decades in favor of stuff that sounds more intuitive."  (Robyn Dawes/psychoanalysis, Robin Hanson/medical spending, Gary Taubes/dietary science, Eric Falkenstein/risk-return [...])

Eric Falkenstein wrote in 2016 that he converted to Christianity and doesn't believe in evolution via natural selection. This doesn't automatically mean that he was a crank in 1994, but to me it's moderate evidence, plus a warning that we can't trust people who have good excuses for contrarianism on some subject to have a good opinion on any other subject.

Hunch.com does this sort of data mining on their users, and they have lots of users. It seems it would be pretty easy for them to do this sort of analysis for questions raised in this post, much as they have with How Food Preferences Vary by Political Ideology and Mac vs PC People: Personality Traits & Aesthetic/Media Choices.

Can I ask for your sources or reasoning as to why "WTC explosives: no" is a slam-dunk?

What's the difference between a contrarian and a crackpot?

"I've never heard of any surveys like this actually being done, but it sounds like quite an interesting dataset to have, if it could be obtained."

This would be a really fun dataset! See how many dimensions it reduces to and what the bases are.

Yes, collect data! You might even be able to make common cause with contrarians you disagree with in the collection of this data.

Short heuristic:

If you disagree with James Randi on many things about which he is outspoken, you're probably crazy. ;)

The term "contrarian" is rather vague about who the disagreements are with.

There are many optical illusions, etc, where what most people think is wrong. The key thing is not simply disagreeing with a majority, but disagreeing with experts in the area - and not just any experts (lest we recognise priests as authorities on theology) - real experts.

A decade late to the party, I'd like to join those skeptical of EY's use of many-worlds as a slam-dunk test of contrarian correctness. Without going into the physics (for which I'm unqualified), I have to make the obvious general objection that it is sophomoric for an amateur in an intellectual field - even an extremely intelligent and knowledgeable one - to claim a better understanding than those who have spent years studying it professionally. It is of course possible for an amateur to have an insight professionals have missed, but very rare.

I had a similar feeling on reading EY's Inadequate Equilibria, where I was far from convinced by his example that an amateur can adjudicate between an economics blogger and central bankers and tell who is right. (EY's argument that the central bankers may have perverse incentives to give a dishonest answer is not that strong, since they may give an honest answer anyway, and that fact that with 20-20 hindsight it might look like they were wrong just shows that economics is an inexact science.) The economics blogger may make points that seem highly plausible and convincing to an amateur, but then, one-sided arguments often do.

Back to physics, any amateur who says "many-worlds is just obvious if you understand it, so those who say otherwise are obviously wrong" is claiming a better understanding than many professionals in the field; again backed with allegations of perverse incentives. Though the latter carry some weight, I'd put my money on the amateur just being overconfident, and having missed something.

If anything I'd judge people on the sophistication of their reasons rather than the opinion itself. E.g. I'd take more notice of someone who had a sophisticated reason for denying that 1 + 1 = 2 than someone who said 'it's just obvious, and anyone who says otherwise is an idiot'.

(I for one have doubts that 1 + 1 = 2; the most I'd be prepared to say is that 1 + 1 often equals 2. And I'm in good company here - e.g. Wittgenstein had grave doubts that simple counting and addition (and indeed any following of rules) are determinate processes with definite results, something which he discussed in seminars with Alan Turing among other students of his.)

The one kind of case in which I'd prefer the factual opinion of a sophisticated amateur to a professional is in fields which don't involve enough intellectual rigour. For example I'd rather believe an amateur with an advanced understanding of evolutionary psychology than some gender studies professors to give a correct explanation of certain social phenomena; not just because the professors may well have an ideological axe to grind, but also because they may lack the scientific rigour necessary to understand the subtleties of causation and statistics.

I am somewhat surprised that Free Will, which was assigned as first exercise in reductionism, is not up there instead of MWI or P-Z; even if conclusions in these areas are as clear, they are further up the inferential ladder (unless that in itself is part of the "test", not sure why it would be)

Can I humbly suggest that a tool along the lines of the one proposed here:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/2rw/proposal_for_a_structured_agreement_tool/

might be useful for the purpose?

So are you saying there isn't a world where Jesus is Batman?

I happen to know a few guys, religious, that have maid the Many-Worlds God Argument. Since, all possible worlds exist, therefore it means that in some world God exists. Since, God is Omnipotent so he rules our world too.

What's our obsession with finding people who are more likely to be right supporting us? Is it for validation, or so we can leach off their authority? One of the saddest psychiatric phenomenon is the association between insight into psychotic symptoms and depression as well as suicide. The earlier the insight, the higher the tendency towards suicide. Would you really want to surround yourself with people whose insight into the state of reality, into the state of your mind, and by consequence, people who will give you greater insight to yourself, perhaps beyond practical advancement?