Rationality Quotes November 2014

My native language is Russian (and was also the only language I could speak before my teens). I can also speak English, and it is my primary language for thinking now (it is MUCH easier to think in English, than in Russian - Russian is horrible). The two languages do not feel like different maps. I do have some problems in conversing with Russian-speaking individuals, mostly with expressing myself (English offers so many useful features not present in Russian that I feel like an amputee when I can't use them), but I do not think that knowing the distinction helped me with rationality much. They are not different ways of seeing the world, but different ways of describing what you see. Not different maps, different map colorings, maybe.

This is also the same reason I like Alan Perlis's quote on programming languages. Paraphrased it reads "There's no point in learning a new language that doesn't teach you a new way of thinking." I equate "the new way of thinking" with maps here.

map is not the territory when you have two different maps

Every map is also a part of the whole territory - don't forget this complication!

That's often true, but there are counter-examples, like my all time favorite : the Foundation cycle. In it, especially the beginning of it (the Foundation novel and the prequels), it's truly the heroes who are doing something awesome - the Foundation and all what's associated to it - and the villains who try to prevent them (and even that is more complicated/interesting as simple "vilain").

It's also often the case in Jules Verne fiction, or in the rest of "hard scifi", be it about trans-humanism (permutation city for example) or about planetary exploration.

A counterexample to the initial claim, which is probably more true of epic fantasy than of fiction generally: In Ayn Rand's fiction, it is indeed the heroes who have great and awesome schemes; the villains just want to wet their beaks, or to stop people from doing great and awesome things, depending on how villainous they are.

The outline of the Hero's journey calls for the story to begin with the hero in a mundane situation of normality.

has anyone been keeping a reading list selecting exclusively for heroes with awesome schemes?

I want to get the most amount of candy with the least amount of walking.

My 9-year-old son on Halloween.

The Valley of Bad Rationality at work again. Improved optimisation skills and strategic awareness applied to increase the amount of candy consumed while reducing physical exercise!

Can't optimize for two quantities at once. If he could get the maximum amount of candy but not the absolute minimum of walking, what does he choose?

max( Candy / e^Walking ) 

You are a good parent.

[Vizzini has just cut the rope The Dread Pirate Roberts is climbing up]
Vizzini: HE DIDN'T FALL? INCONCEIVABLE.
Inigo Montoya: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

That seems like a failure of noticing confusion; some clear things are actually false.

Huh. My default reaction during an emergency is to freeze out like a deer in the headlights.

I don't entirely agree with them. Dr. Bowmen knows that the they won't do anything, which is why he started messing with Florence in the first place. If they made a habit of doing something during an emergency, Dr. Bowmen would stop causing them.

... wait, what? You can equate predicates of predicates but not predicates?!

(Two hours later)

Well, I'll be damned...

(This is basically just restating what Ilya stated but with more details filled in.)

I'd like to see if I can make the seemingly impossible at least plausibly possible. Let's consider a specific startling-looking case, the theorem on slide 17. It's about functions from infinite bit-strings to nonnegative integers, and it says:

• If you have a function such that
  • for any a, there's a limited number of bits the function looks at to decide f(a)
• then actually
  • there's a fixed number of bits (independent of a) the function can ever look at to decide f(a) for any a

and at first that seems ridiculous, because obviously you can make what bits it looks at depend on a, and make the number able to be arbitrarily large for suitably chosen a, right?

Let's consider a specific "counterexample" that turns out not to be one. You might think: OK, let's make f count the number of consecutive 1s at the start of our bit-string. Then the antecedent is true -- if a begins with exactly m 1s then the function doesn't care about anything past the (m+1)th bit -- but the consequent isn't -- for any m, you can find two things that agree in their first m places.

"Of course" this is wrong, and the reason why it's wrong is that I failed to actually define a function, because what if a consists entirely of 1s?

Stepping back a little: Suppose we consider values of a that require f to look at more and more bits. Then in a certain sense, they "converge" to a value that requires f to look at every bit -- in other words, one for which the function doesn't halt. (If you tried to implement f from the description I gave above, then you'd make a function that never terminates when passed a bit-string that's all 1s.)

Can we turn this into a proof of the theorem on slide 17? Yes. Suppose you have a function that can look at unboundedly many bits in order to decide its output. Now:

• Can it look at unboundedly many bits when the first bit is 0? If so, set a0 = 0.
  • If not, then it can look at unboundedly many bits when the first bit is 1. Set a1 = 1.
• Can it look at unboundedly many bits when the first bit is a0 and the next is 0? If so, set a1 = 0.
  • If not, then it can look at unboundedly many bits when the first bit is a0 and the next is 1. Set a1 = 1.

And so on. And now consider feeding it the bit-string a = [a0,a1,a2,...]. If the function looks only at finitely many bits, we get a contradiction -- because we know that it can look at unboundedly many bits even when those finitely many bits take the values they take in a, which means it doesn't stop after looking at those finitely many bits, after all.

This is in general what's going on with this "topological" stuff. We're looking at cases where the input to the function consists of infinitely many finite choices -- e.g., an infinite string of bits -- and then if we're given a function that can look at unboundedly many bits, we can repeatedly make one choice in a way that still leaves the function potentially looking at unboundedly many bits; in the limit we get an input that makes the function not terminate.

(I have been a little sloppy in talking about what bits the function "looks at". If you think of the function as implemented by a program running on an actual computer, this language matches reality. But if you think more generally of any mathematical function, you need to translate "given bits X, the function looks only at bits Y" as "among bit-strings with bits X, the value of the function is uniquely determined by bits Y" and then "given bits X, the function looks at unboundedly many bits" as "there is no finite Y such that given bits X the function looks only at bits Y".)

I think adding the author name in addition to "mathoverflow" would make sense.

Of course, if bad proofs lead to heads being cut off, then there would probably be fewer bad proofs. (I take it the point here is not that Castelnuovo had any doubts about whether Enriques was being honest about believing the result or had come to his belief on flimsy grounds (which is usually not something one can take for granted...), but that he understood this and was interested in finding an explicit formal proof of the result.)

Someone should write a post called "Open Problems in Self-Improvement".

I wonder whether the classification of PTSD takes account of the apparently miraculous effects of MDMA shown in some studies.

This is an excellent concept and I am interested in reviewing the evidence further but Seligman's conclusions in positive psychology are notoriously...ah....unfounded by evidence so I am skeptical of this scale.

Be careful about interpreting these estimates.

Addiction is a good example: Although beset by selection problems, it looks like many (possibly most) substance-dependent people will eventually recover, despite poor evidence for any specific intervention (relative to just encouraging someone to quit), and the low odds of recovery for a single attempt. But you wouldn't say that these recoveries were somehow accidental or not self-directed! Slatestarcodex had an interesting review of this for alcoholism here.

Also note that several of the other areas will tend to change regardless of a specific intervention:

• Many (major) depressive episodes will resolve themselves over time. So a positive effect due to treatment could mean several different things: Faster recovery; increased odds of recovery; greater magnitude of recovery; less chance of relapse; or even something like less functional impairment despite no subjective relief. I've read less about other conditions.
• Weight tends to flatten out and later decrease in mid-life.
• Absolute personality trait measures drift with aggregate predictability over time. (Relatives measures are more stable, but it's not shocking to see large a large percentile change in an individual.)

Finally: When people talk about weight-loss, they're usually talking about dieting. But bariatric surgery has good evidence for large, long-term weight loss, and is not a rare procedure, (~100,000 a year: link)

As a Nietzsche-lover, why is this one here?

Hate seems a mite strong, but strongly disagree with? Certainly.

Source/context?

"soon" can vary quite a bit, depending on what is false. Following the link, I'm skeptical of "From the study of that single pebble you could see the laws of physics and all they imply." Specifically, I'm skeptical that one can deduce the parts of the laws of physics that matter under extreme conditions (general relativity, physics at Plank-scale energies) by examining the behavior of matter under benchtop conditions, at achievable levels of accuracy. The motivation for building instruments like the LHC in the first place is that they allow probing parts of physical laws which would otherwise produce exceeding small effects or exceedingly rare phenomena.

While this is on My Side, I still have to protest trying to sneak any side (or particular (group of) utility function(s)) into the idea of "rationality".

From the same source:

Girl 1: Oh I would want to be a trillion years old.

Boy 2: That’s not even a number.

:|

hate to break it to you, kid...

Marriage to Kim Kardashian is not contagious. The danger of Ebola is not to be measured by how many it has killed, but how many it may kill.

Also more than have died from UFAI. Clearly that's not worth worrying over either.

I'm not terrified of Ebola because it's been demonstrated to be controllable in fairly developed counties, but as a general rule this quote seems incredibly out of place on less wrong. People here discuss the dangers of things which have literally never happened before almost every day.

Given that no revolution ever produced the system that the people who threw the revolution planned to introduce I don't think that it's an easy case to argue that you need to have a specific plan.

Waterfall is no good design paradigma.

This strikes me as a common failing of rationality. Personally I've never really noticed it in politics though. People arguing politics from all corners of the spectrum usually know exactly what they want to happen instead, and will advocate for it in great detail.

However, in science it is extremely common for known broken theories to be espoused and taught because there's nothing (yet) better. There are many examples from the late 19th/early 20th centuries before quantum mechanics was figured out. For example, the prevailing theory of how the sun worked used a model of gravitational contraction that simply could not have powered the sun for anything like the known age of the earth. That model wasn't really discarded until the 1920s and 30s when Gamow and Teller figured out the nuclear reactions that really did power the sun.

There are many examples today, in many fields, where the existing model simply cannot be accurate. Yet until a better model comes along scientists are loath to discard it.

This irrationality, this unwillingness to listen to someone who says "This idea is wrong" unless they can also say "and this alternative idea is right" is a major theme of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

I don't particularly agree with this quote, but the link it comes out of is excellent.

I don't buy it. We have many existing laws and spending programs that make us worse off than not having them (or, equivalently, leaving it up to the market rather than the taxpayers to provide them). The free market is known to work well enough, and broadly enough, that demanding "What would you replace it with?" when someone proposes ending one of those laws or programs is un-called-for. (If anyone really does doubt that the market will do better, the thing to do is to try it and see, not to demand proof that can't exist because the change in question hasn't been tried recently.) After a few repetitions, I simply lump the asker in with the kind of troll whose reply to every comment is "Cite?" and add him to my spam filter.

One of the major symptoms of my stroke was seriously truncated working memory, and I spent months both training it back and learning to work around the limitations of it.

So i agree that there are strategies that can overcome the limits of working memory,though I wouldn't describe them as "thinking more"... it was more like saving state externally on a regular basis, and developing useful habits of interacting with that saved state. More generally, it's not a question of doing the same thing for longer, it's a question of doing different things that end up taking longer. It's "thinking differently, for longer."

That being said, though, I cannot begin to describe how much smarter I felt (and seemed) when the damage began to heal and I could start doing stuff in my head again.

I find it entertaining that no matter how weird the deep scientific explanation is, that explanation can only be developed by scientists who have a naive sensory relationship with their instruments. They have to handle the instruments (or the computer controls) as though their hands and tools are made of solid stuff moving at easy-to-perceive speeds.

Scepticism is directed not at things, but at claims. And claims about things difficult to measure should face increased scepticism.

That strikes me as really ... odd.

To whom is the advice addressed? If something is actually untrue, and one has determined it to be untrue, then the task of being skeptical about it is finished.

I could probably find a loophole in the preceding statement, but it couldn't possibly be what Bill James was referring to.

As for directing skepticism at [claims depending upon] things that are difficult to measure, well that seems like one step away from directing skepticism at claims depending on little evidence. Which is surely what we want to do. Again, there's a loophole, but clearly not something Bill James was trying to point out.

Stories always outlasted their usefulness.

That is an interesting thought. When I try to ground it in contemporary reality my thoughts turn to politics. Modern democratic politics is partly about telling stories to motivate voters, but which stories have outlasted their usefulness? Any answer is likely to be contentious.

Turning to the past, I wrote a little essay suggesting that stories of going back to nature to live in a recent golden age when life was simpler may serve as examples of stories that have outlasted their usefulness by a century.

But but fictional evidence!

If I may attempt to summarize:

The virtue of the philosopher lies in having the courage to keep questioning assumptions, despite the nagging fears that not only will nothing good come of it, but that it would be a happier life to remain in ignorance.

Is there anything like a general theory of satisficing that tells you when it's a good idea? It's reasonably easy to decide in individual cases provided you've got a lot of specific quantitative information, but suppose you don't have a lot of specific information and you only know qualitative facts about how something works within a system.

If not, should people just default to satisficing unless there are obvious reasons it will fall short of optimality, or should they do the opposite? I'm inclined to favor the former, but am interested to hear other people's perspectives.

Dupe (twice).

Funny, I upvoted your other quote and downvoted this one.

Anyhow, if the object of your affections surprises you with a cuddle and your well being is unimpacted, I wouldn't call that sane.

A good one, but a duplicate.

Technically true, although Mao managed to get remarkably close.

This looks closer to a cheer for local memes (transhumanism) than a rationality quote. Can you give me a reason I'm wrong in thinking this?

A bit of context would have helped... Another quote from he linked post:

The idea, obviously, is to combat sexy and exciting misinformation with even sexier and more exciting accurate information.

or, in more nerdy terms, "Both System 1 and System 2... Engage!".

On a more controversial note, I wonder if it can be quantified how much it helps (or hurts?) the CFAR cause that its president and public face Julia Galef is not just smart and articulate, but also conventionally good looking.

I'm not really getting anything from this other than "Mainstream philosophy, boo! Empiricism, yeah!"

Is there anything more to this post?

I don't think I understand this quote. What is a "temporally contingent worldview"? It can't simply mean any worldview that wasn't widely held in the past, because that would mean distancing oneself from pretty much all science. What, then?

Also, while I agree that the truth of a statement (that doesn't include spatio-temporal indexicals, either implicit or explicit) is not a function of time or place, widespread knowledge of a true statement usually varies with time and place. Not saying this justifies adoption of a temporally contingent worldview (since I'm not sure what is), but there does seem to be a bit of a non-sequitur in that quote.

The truth of a preposition may not be a function of time or place, but which preposition a natural-language sentence states is.

I first met this quote in a talk about quantum physics. Funny that it seems to come from an esoteric book.

If you can't get people to take something seriously, sometimes it's because it's plainly wrong. The concept of "addicted to their beliefs" relieves you of having to listen to them. "Addiction" is no more an explanation of anything than "emergence".

This is in a context of wondering why "Western science" (an absurd concept) "has devoted several centuries to not believing in the paranormal." I shall resist the tu quoque against the author and just say that I think that book is made of wrong.

The YouTube link is to a German-language presentation. I have only a fragment of German, but with Google Translate I gather that the speaker was (d.2011) a management trainer and motivational speaker. Not good qualifications for talking about quantum physics. "'Alles ist mit allem verbunden' ...ja ja und die Erde ist eine Scheibe," as the first comment says.

How is this a rationality quote? As reasoning it is trivial, because all of its significance is smuggled into the premise (that we are killing beings that are intelligent in a relevant sense).

I don't empathize with the suffering of all sentient beings, and don't think that I should either. There are even some human beings who I don't empathize with; serial killers, for instance.

I empathize with animals on an essentially arbitrary basis, according to what's been taught to me by my culture. It helps if an animal does something "nice" for me, and if an animal does something "mean" like biting me then I'll dislike it. I don't think that this is incorrect for me to do because I don't think there are any moral justifications that run deeper than an individual's values, arbitrary though they might be.

I do think that most human beings directly involved in slaughterhouses and similar things are damaged by their experiences, as this is what many former workers have reported. There's something wired into our nature to react badly to the smells of blood and death, and we're fairly imaginative beings so empathizing with the animals is probably somewhat inevitable if we work with them daily. Many other jobs damage their workers, though, so this is not a strong reason to be anti-meat.

I also agree with vegetarianism in the abstract as it's clear that feeding plants to animals then eating animals is a less efficient process than eating plants directly. If more people were vegetarian in this way, we would either have cheaper food prices or less agriculture that damages ecosystems, and I think both of those are probably good things. (I am somewhat uncertain about cheap food prices, as developmental economics is apparently quite complicated - does anyone know more about this?)

On a somewhat related note, I'm of the opinion that animal rights activists and perhaps even some types of vegetarians should ally with hunters and promote hunting. Hunted animals live their entire lives in the wild and are presumably much happier than animals in cages. The more meat that is eaten from free animals, the less meat that is eaten from captive animals.

I don't empathize with the suffering of all sentient beings, and don't think that I should either. There are even some human beings who I don't empathize with; serial killers, for instance.

I empathize with animals on an essentially arbitrary basis, according to what's been taught to me by my culture. It also helps if the animals do something "nice" for me, and if the animal does something "mean" like biting me then I'll dislike it. I don't think that this is incorrect for me to do because I don't think there are any moral justifications that run deeper than an individual's values, arbitrary though they might be.

I do think that most human beings directly involved in slaughterhouses and similar things are damaged by their experiences, as this is what many former workers have reported. There's something wired into our nature to react badly to the smells of blood and death, and we're fairly imaginative beings so empathizing with the animals is probably somewhat inevitable if we work with them daily. Many other jobs damage their workers, though, so this is not a strong reason to be anti-meat.

I also agree with vegetarianism in the abstract as it's clear that feeding plants to animals then eating animals is a less efficient process than eating plants directly. If more people were vegetarian in this way, we would either have cheaper food prices or less agriculture that damages ecosystems, and I think both of those are probably good things. (I am somewhat uncertain about cheap food prices, as developmental economics is apparently quite complicated - does anyone know more about this?)

On a somewhat related note, I'm of the opinion that animal rights activists and perhaps even some types of vegetarians should ally with hunters and promote hunting. Hunted animals live their entire lives in the wild and are presumably much happier than animals in cages. The more meat that is eaten from free animals, the less meat that is eaten from captive animals.

I don't empathize with the suffering of all sentient beings, and don't think that I should either. There are some human beings even who I don't empathize with (much), like serial murderers or active sociopaths.

I empathize with animals on an essentially arbitrary basis, according to what's been taught to me by my culture; it also helps if the animals do something "nice" for me. I don't think there are any moral justifications that run deeper than an individual's values, so I don't think that this is incorrect for me to do.

However, I do think that most human beings directly involved in slaughterhouses and similar things are damaged by their experiences, as this is what many former workers have reported. There's something wired into our nature to react badly to the smells of blood and death, and we're fairly imaginative beings so empathizing with the animals is probably somewhat inevitable if we work with them daily. Many other jobs damage their workers, though, so this is not a reason to outlaw meat.

Additionally, I think that vegetarianism is reasonably well justified by the idea that feeding plants to animals then eating animals is a less efficient process than eating plants directly. If more people were vegetarian in this way, we would either have cheaper food prices or less agriculture that damages ecosystems, and I think both of those are good things. (I am somewhat uncertain about cheap food prices, as developmental economics is apparently quite complicated.)

On a somewhat related note, I'm of the opinion that animal rights activists and perhaps even some types of vegetarians should ally with hunters and promote hunting. Hunted animals live their entire lives in the wild and are presumably much happier than animals in cages. The more meat that is eaten from free animals, the less meat that is eaten from captive animals.

I don't empathize with the suffering of all sentient beings, and don't think that I should either. There are even some human beings who I don't empathize with (much), like serial murderers or active sociopaths.

I empathize with animals on an essentially arbitrary basis, according to what's been taught to me by my culture. It also helps if the animals do something "nice" for me, and if the animal does something "mean" like biting me then I'll dislike it. I don't think that this is incorrect for me to do because I don't think there are any moral justifications that run deeper than an individual's values, arbitrary though they might be.

I do think that most human beings directly involved in slaughterhouses and similar things are damaged by their experiences, as this is what many former workers have reported. There's something wired into our nature to react badly to the smells of blood and death, and we're fairly imaginative beings so empathizing with the animals is probably somewhat inevitable if we work with them daily. Many other jobs damage their workers, though, so this is not a strong reason to be anti-meat.

Additionally, I think that vegetarianism is reasonably well justified by the idea that feeding plants to animals then eating animals is a less efficient process than eating plants directly. If more people were vegetarian in this way, we would either have cheaper food prices or less agriculture that damages ecosystems, and I think both of those are good things. (I am somewhat uncertain about cheap food prices, as developmental economics is apparently quite complicated.)

On a somewhat related note, I'm of the opinion that animal rights activists and perhaps even some types of vegetarians should ally with hunters and promote hunting. Hunted animals live their entire lives in the wild and are presumably much happier than animals in cages. The more meat that is eaten from free animals, the less meat that is eaten from captive animals.

That doesn't sound terribly rational. One's performance when tired is a well-known case where the lens sees itself very darkly. If you're going to mess with your sleep pattern it is imperative to quantize; measure the thing you care about, experiment, and see whether it is making you worse or better.

Why the link? The quote is not to be found there.