Make an Extraordinary Effort

Eliezer, this is probably the most useful blog on the internet. Don't stop writing...

Except the universe doesn't care how much backbreaking effort you make, only if you get the cause and effect right. Which is why cultures that emphasize hard work are not overtaking cultures that emphasize reason (Enlightenment cultures). Of course even these cultures must still do some work, that of enacting their cleverly thought out causes.

This doesn't seem to mesh with the Friendly AI goal of getting it perfectly right on the first try.

Do we accept some uncertainty and risk to do something extraordinary now, or do we take the slow, calm, deliberative course that stands a chance of achieving perfection?

Is there any chance of becoming a master of the blade without beginning to cut?

Ian C: Rome emphasized hard work and discipline, Greece reason. Arguably this applies to China and Denmark too. The dominant enlightenment cultures, such as Britain in 1750 or 1900, weren't merely better at reason. They were ABSOLUTELY CRUSHINGLY better at reason AND hard work than were other world cultures at the time. Modern developed cultures are clearly in the middle ground between the enlightenment pre-WWI and the the ancient third world.

How long would it take for an AGI engineer from the (seemingly inevitable) future to explain it to you so you could build one? Is it humanly possible - is a single person capable of understanding and remembering all of it? It's been said there's not one person who understands a modern microcomputer in its totality - perhaps the last of the low hanging fruit was picked by people in the age of Steve Wozniak.

But, on the other hand, this sort of thing probably isn't a good idea. Or at least there should be a more compelling reason for it.

Extraordinary results require extraordinary effort? Not necessarily. You may achieve extraordinary results, effortlessly like water flowing around rocks. Don't consider the problem domain as outside of yourself. Become a part of the problem system, so that it effortlessly self-optimizes and develops as if by itself and you merely find yourself in the midst of it every day, feeling more like an observer than a participator. When it feels like an effort, you're not maximally tuned to the problem.

By being maximally tuned to the problem, I mean that you have maximized your knowledge about the domain (you know the dead-ends) and your techniques and methods are sufficient in number and capability (your know all the tricks and have created some of your own); you lack nothing and can simply flow.

> "You should go to college and get a Master's degree and get a doctorate and publish a lot of papers on ordinary things -

scientists and investors won't listen to you otherwise." Even assuming that I tested out of the bachelor's degree... You can "test out of" every step to the ladder, and go straight to post-doc/professor equivalent by publishing multiple well-respected papers (and not necessarily on ordinary things) in top journals.

Most Japanese culture seems like a reinvention of Chinese culture demanded by national pride. My impression is that their versions are like cheap knock-offs of the originals. Their martial arts are worse. They even managed to mess up the game of go. Japan faces limitations due to their small numbers. That's a problem China doesn't have.

Small Typo Alert: The second quote should be attributed to "Mastering Eishin-Ryu Swordsmanship"

"Ryu", not "Ruy".

I'm all for putting effort into the little extraordinary, we just have different definitions of extraordinary.

A little extraordinary is building a human type brain stuff. By type I mean limited in its self-understanding due to complex hacked together constantly changing code. Then spreading it to enough people so that any one persons respective mental problems get evened out so the society thus created is not dominated by any one group. Convincing the society that we might need to relax privacy might before we get super plagues, is also a little extraordinary.

Very extraordinary is building something that understands itself and the laws of physics enough to be able to expand itself exponentially taking over nearby space uploading all of humanity into a simulation where death was not allowed. And getting it right first time.

It is not sadness in the future that means I do not want to be there, it is perpetual responsibility. I only want temporary responsibility, because it is mentally draining, however I do want responsibility while I am alive.

Most American culture seems like a reinvention of British culture demanded by national pride. My impression is that their versions are like cheap knock-offs of the originals. Their beers are worse. They even managed to mess up the game of football. America faces limitations due to their vast tracts of underpopulated flyover country. That's a problem Britain doesn't have.

In my experience, 'isshokenmei' is a rote expression drilled in Japanese schoolkids from nursery school on. As such, it is long since drained of any "deep" meaning to your average Japanese. I'm not sure a parent exhorting a Japanese kid to do well on a test with "isshokenmei" is saying much more than "Try your best."

You are absolutely right about Japanese science not being pre-eminent in the world and why. For related reasons I am leaving the East altogether - the action is in the US (and the West in general), and looks to stay there for a long time.

And Tim Tyler, viewing Japanese culture as a shabby simulacrum of Chinese culture makes you sound like an executive at GM or Ford from the 70s talking about Toyota or Honda. Who's laughing now? Sure Japanese culture was heavily, heavily influenced in various waves by China - that is, pre 19th-century China, going back to the 6th and 7th centuries. I would say today foreign influence on Japan emanates almost exclusively from the West, particularly the US (maybe a little pop culture from Korea). If anything, these days China is copying Japan.

Cyan, you put it much better than me.

...expand itself exponentially taking over nearby space uploading all of humanity into a simulation

Ah yes, there's nothing wrong with murdering people as long as you name video game characters after them.

One aspect of present in most of the Japanese arts is repetition and training. In order to achieve excellence at something, you do it over and over again hundreds and thousands of times until you get it right.

In activities where constant repetition is possible and productive, reliable progress can be achieved. Training in this way dominates even intelligence. An average IQ chess player, karateka, language student, or tennis player who has trained for thousands of hours will be far more effective at the activity than a genius level beginner.

One problem with rationality is it is hard to practice. If you want to train for a marathon, you get up at 6am every morning and run ten miles. Is there an analogous training method for rationality? If so, it is not obvious to me. This lack of an effective training method is probably why intelligence appears to be the dominant factor in rationality contests.

Sometimes I do wonder if I ought to be peddling rationality in Japan instead of the United States - but Japan is not preeminent over the United States scientifically, despite their more studious students. The Japanese don't rule the world today, though in the 1980s it was widely suspected that they would (hence the Japanese asset bubble). Why not? In the West, there is a saying: "The squeaky wheel gets the grease." In Japan, the corresponding saying runs: "The nail that sticks up gets hammered down." This is hardly an original observation on my part: but entrepreneurship, risk-taking, leaving the herd, are still advantages the West has over the East. And since Japanese scientists are not yet preeminent over American ones, this would seem to count for at least as much as desperate efforts.

The Japanese don't rule the world today, though in the 1980s it was widely suspected that they would True, however, they didn't blow up their entire financial system and in turn that, seemingly, of the entire planet.

And since Japanese scientists are not yet preeminent over American ones, this would seem to count for at least as much as desperate efforts. http://www.crunchgear.com/2008/08/01/the-us-beats-japan-in-patent-application-filing-for-the-first-time-since-1963-becomes-world-no-1/ http://www.seinan-gu.ac.jp/~djohnson/natural/population.html

Maybe you and I do math differently, but based on population, Japan is cleaning America's clock, assuming patents are a reasonable indicator of innovation.

Any reasonable person, even watching the mainstream media news, could hardly come to any other conclusion than America has backed itself into a corner. It's pretty simple math.

Make no mistake, I understand your point, that America is more dynamic and all that, but as it is, they have set things up almost perfectly to destroy themselves (financially), and the entire world if they get away with it. Perhaps if America had adopted a little more of the "The nail that sticks up gets hammered down" philosophy, we wouldn't be in this predicament.

I think most people's feedback threshold requires some return on their efforts in a relatively short time period. It takes monk-like patience to work on something indefinitely without any intermediary returns. So then, I don't think the point in contention is whether people are willing to make extraordinary effort, it is whether they are willing to make extraordinary effort without extraordinary returns in a time span relative to their feedback threshold. Even in eastern cultures where many people believe that enlightenment in the strong sense is possible by meditating your whole life, there is a reason why there are only a few practicing monks.

Most American culture seems like a reinvention of British culture demanded by national pride. My impression is that their versions are like cheap knock-offs of the originals. Their beers are worse. They even managed to mess up the game of football.

Though that is apparently meant sardonically, as a UK citizen, it doesn't seem too far off to me - though I would have gone for the language and the arts with my comparison.

Of course the analogy goes horribly wrong when you get down to the "numbers" point I mentioned. Japan is tiny, China is huge. England is tiny, America is huge. The very same factor that worked for America over England also works for China over Japan. Almost everyone realises this.

True, however, they didn't blow up their entire financial system and in turn that, seemingly, of the entire planet.

I'm not sure if this should be taken literally, but see wiki:Japanese asset price bubble and wiki:Carry trade#Currency.

In activities where constant repetition is possible and productive, reliable progress can be achieved. Training in this way dominates even intelligence. An average IQ chess player, karateka, language student, or tennis player who has trained for thousands of hours will be far more effective at the activity than a genius level beginner. One problem with rationality is it is hard to practice. If you want to train for a marathon, you get up at 6am every morning and run ten miles. Is there an analogous training method for rationality? If so, it is not obvious to me. This lack of an effective training method is probably why intelligence appears to be the dominant factor in rationality contests.

I also complained about the lack of a practice method in "The Martial Art of Rationality", my very first post here on Overcoming Bias.

But your suggestion that this is why rationality-contests are dominated by intelligence is very, very deep. I'm not sure how true it is (a little true or a whole lot true) but it's definitely truly deep, in the good sense of the term.

(What else could we generalize this to?)

Along the lines of a rationality competition and why rationalists don't seem to do all that much better, is there a criteria for rationality? In the fields where lots of work results in maximizing gain, there are quantitative criteria for what counts as good and bad. I don't know of any such criteria for rationality.

Right on schedule: "Two Americans and a U.S.-based Japanese scientist won the Nobel Prize in chemistry on Wednesday" ... Here.

Also, as per Daniel Burfoot's comment, the Japanese have a saying that you don't truly know how to do something until you've done it 10,000 times. The goal of that as I understand it, in martial arts or language training or any other repetitive art, is to go beyond thought, hence, beyond intelligence, to the place where you are engaging in pure action.

Is it possible to practice rationality in such a reflexive manner? Probably not. Thus the "fallback" on intelligence in rationality contests.

Hmm, it would be interesting to try to develop a video game aimed at teaching rationality; I'm sure it would be possible to make a game world with the kind of baffling chaotic problem Eliezer talks about. It could be presented as a world with weird physical laws, in which you perform experiements ... but it could also be something completely different, as long as the baffling element is there.

There are some aspects that are hard to reproduce in a game, such as the fact that you don't even know whether a solution exists and/or how much effort is required, or the social pressure to do things a particular way ... but then there are plenty of ways game have of teaching you things that are subtly wrong...

Anyway, even if it's not possible to make a game that makes you really challenge a baffling chaotic problem, it's probably still possible to make one that can teach you quite a bit about rationality.

(by the way, I'm a game programmer / game designer, so I'll start taking notes on what could be possible, what's already been done etc.) (I already know of a game that gave you "incorrect" feedback on the rules - "don't do this or you'll die" where in fact, you don't always die if you don't)

Eliezer: I also complained about the lack of a practice method in "The Martial Art of Rationality", my very first post here on Overcoming Bias.

But your suggestion that this is why rationality-contests are dominated by intelligence is very, very deep.

Surely it is a tautology. "Intelligence" is what we say people have, when they do well at rationality contests. Compare "talent", which is what we say people have, when they exhibit prowess at a practisable activity beyond what would be expected from the practise they have put in.

Re: why rationality can't be learned by rote -

If you introspect on a process of reason, you see that you actually choose at each step which path of inquiry to follow next and which to ignore. Each choice takes the argument to the next step, ultimately driving it to completion. Reason is "powered by choice(TM)" which is why it is incoherent to argue rationally for determinism and also why it can't be learned by rote.

Software developers (such as myself) in our more abstract moments can think of reason as simply encoding ones premises as a string of symbols standing for definitions and mechanically applying the rules of deduction (Prolog style). But introspection belies this - it's actually highly creative and messy. Reason is an art not a science.

...the language and the arts with my comparison...

I thought about going this way, but I decided to stick with what I know.

Since sarcasm seems to have failed, let me just state flatly that all of the cultures we've mentioned have enough members and enough diversity that blanket assertions such as, "Japanese martial arts are worse than Chinese ones," or "American football is a cheap knockoff of rugby" are reductive and parochial to the point of not-even-wrongness.

One last wrinkle:

I think that it's important to understand the value of selectivity. One simply doesn't have the energy and time to make an extraordinary effort at all aspects of one's life.

Pick a few areas in which to make an extraordinary effort, and focus on getting by everywhere else.

My Japanese is rudimentary at best, but isn't issho related to issho ni meaning "together"? And what about the practice of saying gambatte kudasai before exams -- "please do your best"? Maybe the Japanese have as many ways of describing effort as they do to describe the circumstances of death.

If you introspect on a process of reason,

Hey Ian C.: try spending less time introspecting and more time reading histories of psychology. Your errors have already been anticipated, made, and corrected.

Make no mistake, I understand your point, that America is more dynamic and all that, but as it is, they have set things up almost perfectly to destroy themselves (financially), and the entire world if they get away with it. Perhaps if America had adopted a little more of the "The nail that sticks up gets hammered down" philosophy, we wouldn't be in this predicament.

Maybe making poor economic decisions has nothing to do with ideology or cultural assumptions...

Aaaand the takeaway metaphor is that 'creative' ideas are the probably explosive ones, but we sometimes still really need to move trucks.

Solidly great, this.

"It is essential for a man to strive with all his heart, and to understand that it is difficult even to reach the average if he >does not have the intention of surpassing others in whatever he does." —Budo Shoshinshu

seems to contradict the 'give up already' sequence

Every now and then, someone asks why the people who call themselves "rationalists" don't always seem to do all that much better in life

I think this is because, while we have lots of useful theory and advice here about epistemic rationalism, we have virtually nothing about instrumental rationalism.

1. Success requires taking action, and taking action requires generating options, and I'm not very good at generating options. Little in the way of advice for doing it is given in Rationality A-Z (at least up to this point) beyond "spend a few minutes thinking about it, if it's important." It's good advice, but seems insufficient. (I would kind of expect a leading expert in AGIs to have more ideas about this problem—or are the techniques used by AIs inapplicable to humans?)

2. Motivation is perhaps a larger problem for me. I don't know how motivation works and how to create it in myself; in theory there is a thing I want to create more than anything else in the world; in practice I just haven't felt like doing it for several weeks (perhaps this is because I anticipate no one will see its utility and almost everyone will ignore it as they have in the past, but actually the rationale lies in my emotional system, it cannot be introspected, and sometimes my feelings change so I can work on it again.) "Shut up and do the impossible!", says the next post, but this requires quite some motivation.

3. A lot of success in life depends on our relationships with others, and I've never been good at developing relationships, nor has there been much advice about that here. I don't know any aspiring rationalists in person, and I find the poor reasoning of most people to be grating. I can't use terms like "expected value" with others and expect to be understood. Succeeding at standard non-rationalist office politics is one of those things that I'd love to do in theory, but in practice it's unpredictable and mysterious and scary and I lack the will to take the necessary risks (especially having lost my last two jobs, I really want something stable at the moment). I might worry that I'll never be more than a low-level employee, if it would do any good to worry. I often lament that I play the role of a "leaf node" in the game of life—a person no one pays much attention to—but I simply don't know how to fix the problem.

Bayesians with the same priors cannot agree to disagree, is a believing Orthodox Jew.

The facile explanation is that people compartmentalize and have biases, but this reminds me, where do priors come from? So far I have not seen any proposals for how to evaluate evidence in a new area of study, let alone how to evaluate evidence "from scratch".

Or the ones who say to me:  "You should go to college and get a Master's degree and get a doctorate and publish a lot of papers on ordinary things—scientists and investors won't listen to you otherwise."  Even assuming that I tested out of the bachelor's degree, we're talking about at least a ten-year detour in order to do everything the ordinary, normal, default way.  And I stand there thinking:  Are they really under the impression that humanity can survive if every single person does everything the ordinary, normal, default way?

I guess it's not exactly a coincidence, but I had to make the near same judgment not two weeks ago.