Firewalling the Optimal from the Rational

calling a fact unlikely is an insult to your prior model, not the fact itself

Not necessarily. Your model could have been quite reasonable, and yet something weird happened in the world. Sometimes, people win the lottery twice on the same day.

One person who resisted Ronald was Ayn Rand. As one of the young libertarians (Ronald’s friend Murray Rothbard was another) who were invited to her apartment for intellectual discussions, he was cast into oblivion after a difference of opinion about . . . Rachmaninoff. Guests were asked to say who their favorite composers were, and when Rand’s turn came, she said “Rachmaninoff,” with specific reference to his second piano concerto. “Why?” Ronald asked. “Because he was the most rational,” Rand responded. At which Ronald laughed, thinking it must be a joke. He knew that the composer had dedicated that concerto to his psychiatrist — and anyway, rationality had nothing to do with its greatness. But Ronald’s laughter resulted in exile, and the loss of friends who were dear to him.

From an obituary for Ronald Hamowy.

(a) deliberately not rejecting people who disagree with a particular point of mere optimality, and (b) deliberately extending hands to people who show respect for the process and interest in the algorithms even if they're disagreeing with the general consensus.

Do you think Dmytry might be a good case study for this? I thought he had some interesting and novel ideas about processes/algorithms that at least didn't seem obviously wrong as well as some technical understanding of things like Solomonoff Induction, and also had strong disagreements with many of us regarding FAI and AI Risk. Should we have "extended our hands" to him more (at least before he became increasingly trollish), and if so how? (How would you taboo "extend hands" generally and in this specific instance?) If not, do you have someone else in mind who could serve as a concrete example?

If you're writing a post comparing the experimental evidence for four different diets, that's not "Rational Dieting", that's "Optimal Dieting".

Isn't that as wrong and misleading as using Rational Dieting? Wouldn't Optimal imply that this is the very best way to diet when the article is actually on 'Comparing evidence for for diets'? Same as how 'Rational Dieting' carries an implication that your post discusses the cognitive algorithm for dieting, as opposed to four contributing things to keep in mind and thus you should use 'Four Biases Screwing Up Your Diet' for a title, doesn't Optimal imply the wrong thing? Seems to me like you are committing different fallacies (or errors) when you are trying to fix the previous fallacies (or errors) committed due to the misuse of the word 'rational'.

Meta: I suggest creating a sequence index, and putting a link to the next post in the sequence at the bottom of each post, like you already have for all your other sequences.

Supplementing potassium (citrate) hasn't helped me much, but works dramatically for Anna, Kevin, and Vassar.

I can't find mention of this on LW and the first few things Google turns up have to do with treating kidney stones, which doesn't seem relevant. What benefits do you get when this "works dramatically"?

Good post.

What about using the word 'rational' for alliterative purposes? :)

Does anyone know any good dubstep mixes of classical music

Here's some, but they're not great. As I mentioned in an early draft of How to Fall in Love with Modern Classical Music, Nero's "Doomsday" samples from my favorite piece of contemporary classical music, John Adams' Harmonielehre. Also see Rudebrat's "Amadeus" and this Fur Elise dubstep remix. The best I could find in 5 minutes was Dubstep Beethoven.

The deeper danger is in allowing your de facto sense of rationalist community to start being defined by conformity to what people think is merely optimal, rather than the cognitive algorithms and thinking techniques that are supposed to be at the center.

Thumbs up for this; I might even suggest making it a "tl;dr". In print, I think sometimes "very short abstraction - concrete examples - moderate-length abstraction" works well.

I feel like there's a small inferential gap between the Ayn Rand anecdote and the Objectivist failure mode as you've presented it: the anecdote establishes unjustified personal antipathy on the part of a group leader, but, absent context, that doesn't lead inevitably to its target getting voted off the island.

People who've read about the history of Objectivism would probably be able to fill this gap with their own knowledge. People who've internalized Objectivism's reputation as a cult would probably fill it with an assumption (a correct one, as it turns out). But I don't think those sets cover the space of possible readers all that well.

Does anyone know any good dubstep mixes of classical music, by the way?

Can't say I do. On the other hand, there's always Vocaloid (eg. The Symphonic Pilgrimage of Luka)...

This post should really be (also) a part of the Craft and the Community sequence. The insight in conveys seems very relevant and very valuable, and I don't recall it being stated anywhere near as explicitly.

Coming from a hard-core Objectivist, the Objectivist community is unfortunately rife with all sorts of so-called "schisms". I think this is intrinsic in any community of thinkers who are focused on objectivity/optimality/rationality/etc in general, because inevitably people will feel differently on a given issue, and then everyone goes around blaming the other group that they aren't really objective or rational or optimal, etc.

This leads to me having to qualify a statement about some issue X with something like this:

As a result of pretty much universal confusion, here is a list of things I am not saying in this post:

I am not saying everyone who does not agree with X should or should not be "purged from Objectivism".
I am not saying people with varying views on different issues should or should not be called "objectivists".
I am not saying this group should or should not be limited to only "real objectivists".

Now it should be said of course that one group is actually right - but schisms are very unhealthy for any community, or any social group in general. The success of a social group per se is based very much on all-inclusiveness. That being said, identifying optimal, mainstream positions of a given philosophy is absolutely good for the philosophy per se.

So I would add something like: "firewall optimal philosophy from optimal community"

You say that paleo-inspired diets "have helped many other people in the community." What percent of people in this community have benefited from those diets how much, and how does this compare with other diets, e.g. DASH?

Moreover, if you want to prevent Less Wrong from becoming a cult like the Objectivists, it may be advisable to absolutely avoid to perform rituals explicitly modeled after religious ceremonies, like this or this.

Mmm. I think it's fairly clear that modeling ceremonies on religious rites (or doing much ritual at all outside a certain narrow scope, for that matter) is more likely than the alternative to lead to undesirable perceptions of LW. And PR is important, yes. But I'm not convinced that they're actually epistemically dangerous to any significant degree.

There's a lot of possible reasons to do ritual. The two ceremonies you link seem to mainly fall under the general heading of "affirmation of shared values", which could be used as part of a more general Dark Artsy scheme but don't seem terribly dangerous in themselves; rituals with those aims show up in dozens of secular contexts, from the Boy Scouts to martial arts dojos to the Pledge of Allegiance recited by American schoolchildren. I might have been given pause if it snuck in some seriously controversial content, like a pledge to sign up for cryonics or that believers in the collapse postulate were stupid and also evil, but as long as it limits itself to cheering for a materialistic humanism I don't think there's much to object to. That's way too general to be epistemically risky, and attempts to cast it as such would probably be more funny than menacing.

Now, why pull from a theological source when there's all these other sources available? Well, religions have been doing it the longest, for one thing. In the absence of a deep understanding of the mechanics of something, a good heuristic for getting it done is to find someone that does it well and plagiarize.

"It's rational to vote for Party X" deflates to "It's optimal to vote for Party X" or just "I think you should vote for Party X".

I'm starting to get very confused about what Eliezer means by "deflates to". I thought he meant "has the same meaning as" or "conveys the same meaning as", but now I think maybe he means "most of the time when you want to use the former, you should use the latter instead". Sorry if I'm still stuck on the by-now-not-quite-central topic of semantics, but I don't see how "rational" has the same meaning as "should", either according to my own understanding, or according to definitions given by Eliezer in the past. (My understanding is that "should" conveys some hard-to-define sense of normativity, whereas "rationality" is a subset of normativity that seems more objective than the other parts, which we usually call "morality".)

In comments on this thread, the issue of diet and "consensus" came up. Why I consider this topic important here, quite in line with what EY asserted in his post, is shown in this New York Times column by John Tierney.

The issue is not this or that alleged fact. ("Saturated Fat is Harmful," or "Saturated Fat is Good" or even "We don't know") The issue is how we know what we know, and what we don't know, and how individual and social fallacies lead to possible error.

Tierney writes about cascades, social phenomena that can afflict scientists, whom we might imagine would know better, creating the appearance of a "scientific consensus" that is not rooted in science and the scientific method.

Usually, most scientists get it right most of the time, but I've seen several such cascades create a false "scientific consensus" that is almost invulnerable, and it can take generations for that false consensus to unravel, so strong are the social mechanisms that maintain it. A few who are willing to risk their careers in pursuit of real science eventually prevail -- the scientific method is ultimately powerful --, but the cost can be enormous to all of us in terms of poor decisions and delayed benefits.

We might consider creating some case studies. Unless we reach back to old controversies, these will be, by nature, controversial-in-the-present. The goal would not be an answer about "the truth." The value would be in examining the reasoning, the sources and processes of what people (including experts) believe or trust.

Many people readily fix on conclusions, and politics ("importance") easily leads to belief that anyone with a contrary conclusion -- or even who only presents contrary evidence -- is a positive danger, a menace to health or science, to be condemned and sanctioned.

Not dubstep: 9th (The Man Who Swam Through A Speaker)

My own thoughts about these and related words are here.

Typo report: there appears to be an underscore rather than a space in the sentence "personal_identity follows individual particles."

Is it the intention here to exclude people from the community who have doubts as to the universal applicability of Rationalism, in the general sense? Or someone who argues (even from a non-Rational standpoint) that a non-Rational method is optimal in a specific case? Or even someone who believes that from a Rational standpoint, a non-Rational method is optimal in general?

Obviously someone who uses non-Rational methods to conclude that non-Rational methods are in general superior has nothing to contribute on that subject. How closely do decisions about Rationality have to conform to the local norm for someone to be a real community member?

Many readers may already have appreciated this point, but one of the Go stones placed to block that failure mode is being careful what we bless with the great community-normative-keyword 'rational'. [...] Nonetheless, the second Go stone placed to block the Objectivist Failure Mode is trying to define ourselves as a community around the cognitive algorithms;

I don't think that Go constitutes good metaphor. Go isn't much a game about preventing certain outcomes, It's a game where you trade territory for influence. It's a game about leaving aji open.

One possible strategy for making this easier is explicitly having sub-communities for each optimal thing, that all explicitly include some non-rationalists and exclude some rationalists. Just based on the naive model that people want to identify their behaviour with a community or it will feel odd, and that there is some pressure not to have overlapping signals of membership in different tribes since it be confusing.

"It should be another matter if someone seems interested in the process, better yet the math, and has some non-zero grasp of it, and are just coming to different conclusions than the local consensus."

I anticipate that helping such people gain a better grasp of the process may well be the best possible demonstration that you care about the process itself. At minimum, providing rationalist adjustments to people's conclusions helps ME feel as though I have regard for the process, even if I'm currently still struggling to implement the process rigorously when deriving conclusions of my own.

[R]ationalist opinion leaders are better able to . . . give up faster when things don't work.

Why is this a good thing? It seems to me that people give up too easily just as much as—if not more than—the opposite, especially when they're trying something that they don't expect to work. You have to stick with it long enough to collect a reasonable amount of data.

The deeper danger is in allowing your de facto sense of rationalist community to start being defined by conformity to what people think is merely optimal, rather than the cognitive algorithms and thinking techniques that are supposed to be at the center.

This is true. Wouldn't it be beneficial, though, for any particular community to focus on upholding rationalist principles? If the LW community is specifically committed to rationality, other communities should be committed to rationality as a side effect—as an optimization heuristic.

The effective altruism community, for example, already does a pretty good job of this. Effective altruists tend to be aware of the sorts of biases that get in the way of effective giving. On the other hand, most charities and charity-based communities don't have this focus on rationality. The breast cancer movement, for instance, does not give the same attention to rationality as the effective altruism movement.

Of course, if the breast cancer movement did give attention to rationality, it probably wouldn't be the breast cancer movement anymore—if would be the effective altruism movement. If you're looking for the optimal method for preventing breast cancer, why not generalize that and just look for the optimal method for helping people (which is almost certainly not breast cancer research)?

May I ask how many people any of you have seen walking around entirely barefoot, as opposed to wearing minimalist footwear of any kind?

I heard an amazing classical performance of Amon Tobin by the cover group for the proper Amon Tobin recently.

Seth Roberts's "Shangri-La diet", which was propagating through econblogs, led me to lose twenty pounds that I've mostly kept off, and then it mysteriously stopped working...

What does stopped working mean? Your weight got stable? You regained the pounds you lost? You regained more than you lost?

[ Reposting censored comment without the offending material ]

When I saw that Patri Friedman was wearing Vibrams (five-toed shoes) and that William Eden (then Will Ryan) was also wearing Vibrams, I got a pair myself to see if they'd work.

Is Patri Friedman supposed to be a good example of a rational person? From the Wikipedia article on him he appears to be quite a crank.

And yet nonetheless, I think it worth naming and resisting that dark temptation to think that somebody can't be a real community member if they aren't eating beef livers and supplementing potassium, or if they believe in a collapse interpretation of QM, etcetera.

Then you may consider avoiding to patronize and insult people who don't share your beliefs, like this:

I'm just back from an event where the normal parents signed their normal kids up for cryonics, and that is the way things are supposed to be and should be, and whatever excuses you're using or thinking of right now, I don't believe in them any more, you're just a lousy parent.

Or this:

WHAT DOES THE GOD-DAMNED COLLAPSE POSTULATE HAVE TO DO FOR PHYSICISTS TO REJECT IT? KILL A GOD-DAMNED PUPPY?

Or this:

OMISSIS Warning: Dangerous Fobbiden Knowledge that will eat your soul give you nightmares. BOOOOO!!!!11!!ONE1!!

Moreover, if you want to prevent Less Wrong from becoming a cult like the Objectivists, it may be advisable to absolutely avoid to perform rituals explicitly modeled after religious ceremonies, like this or this.

I think preventing "poseurs" requires going to a level deeper in the following ways:

Even though we might think that rationalists should agree if they all have the same information, we need to go deeper by acknowledging that we have no proven method which accomplishes this, and have no clue whether we ever will. It creates pressure to agree. We need to release that pressure and just start where we are, living with the fact that all we can do is keep learning and sharing and improving our methods for these and hope everyone gets on the same page eventually. It needs to be labeled as the far-off ideal that it is.

I agree with the problem you point out in undiscriminating skeptics, however I disagree with your solution there. Which was (paraphrasing) "The real rationalists are the ones who are able to disagree with the other skeptics and show that they've thought it out."

This encourages people to look for reasons to disagree in order to show off. It might, on the one hand, be a good thing, since it encourages people to think critically and they may find more mistakes that way, but going in the opposite direction of "Believe people are rationalists because they believe X, Y, and Z." is an over-correction. This is relevant because it is likely to promote schisms. A group of thinkers of any stripe are going to have an overwhelming number of disagreements as it is because groups of thinkers grow in their own directions and tend to refuse to conform to promote social cohesion.

When it comes down to it, promoting disagreement is no better aimed at the target of promoting truth-seeking than promoting agreement. If what you want is truth-seekers, promote truth-seekers.

There are nasty pitfalls to using labels at all but "rationalist" might be able to be a healthy and constructive label. Here's what I mean by pitfall and how I think a rationalist label might be made healthy and constructive:

When earning a label (whether that be a job title or a social status title), we're looking at it as a system to game (give the right answers on tests, do posturing) and it is those system-gaming efforts that result in the superficial and empty appearance of belonging (like undiscriminating skeptics who mock what you expect).

People desire to earn status, and that can be a really positive force, but only if it's directed at a goal and the right type of goal. "Disagree sometimes and support your point" will result in disagreements (not necessarily high quality ideas), whereas a goal like "make something that actually works" (a theory that's proven true, a social program that gets results, etc.) would be a wonderful "fire under the ass" to get us moving and figuring out how to do what works.

If status is going to be important to people, the way of determining whether they deserve it should not be quick and it should require that they game reality rather than gaming your model of what a rationalist is.

If you want to use quick mental models as shortcuts to save time while you're navigating the jungle of irrational people out there, this is understandable, everyone does it - but if you publish that here, it's going to become part of the culture, and applying these shortcuts when it comes to which people deserve respect is going to motivate people to value activity over results.

But of course this whole post is really about playing Go... ;-)

It would be very sad to get lynched by the Greens while discussing the likelihoods of Many Words vs Many Worlds :)

Not all Authority is bad - probability theory is also a kind of Authority

Authority seems like a bad word to use here. I don't understand what you're trying to say. This is partially because:

1. Authority is almost always used to describe argumentation based on sources other than logic or evidence. You're using it to describe probability theory which is a kind of logic and evidence.
2. Authority is practically meaningless as a concept if it includes both accurate and inaccurate foundations of argumentation. Probability theory works, appeals to authority don't.

.

[ Reposting censored comment without the offending material ]

When I saw that Patri Friedman was wearing Vibrams (five-toed shoes) and that William Eden (then Will Ryan) was also wearing Vibrams, I got a pair myself to see if they'd work.

Is Patri Friedman supposed to be a good example of a rational person? From the Wikipedia article on him he appears to be quite a crank.

And yet nonetheless, I think it worth naming and resisting that dark temptation to think that somebody can't be a real community member if they aren't eating beef livers and supplementing potassium, or if they believe in a collapse interpretation of QM, etcetera.

Then you may consider avoiding to patronize and insult people who don't share your beliefs, like this:

I'm just back from an event where the normal parents signed their normal kids up for cryonics, and that is the way things are supposed to be and should be, and whatever excuses you're using or thinking of right now, I don't believe in them any more, you're just a lousy parent.

Or this:

WHAT DOES THE GOD-DAMNED COLLAPSE POSTULATE HAVE TO DO FOR PHYSICISTS TO REJECT IT? KILL A GOD-DAMNED PUPPY?

[ OMISSIS Warning: Dangerous Forbbiden Knowledge that will eat your soul give you nightmares. BOOOOO!!!!11!!ONE1!! ]

Moreover, if you want to prevent Less Wrong from becoming a cult like the Objectivists, it may be advisable to absolutely avoid to perform rituals explicitly modeled after religious ceremonies, like this or this.