Elevator pitches/responses for rationality / AI

What most people don't realize is that there is a mathematically optimal way to update your beliefs in response to evidence, and a mathematically optimal way to figure out which decision is most likely to bring you the most of what you want

You've said something similar in a recent video interview posted on LW, and it cringed me then, as it does now. We don't know of such optimal ways in the generality the context of your statement suggests, and any such optimal methods would be impractical even if known, which again is in conflict with the context. Similarly, turning to the interview, SingInst's standard positions on many issues don't follow from formal considerations such as logic and decision theory, there is no formal theory that represents them to any significant extent. If there is strength to the main arguments that support these positions, it doesn't currently take that form.

First, a general comment on your versions, sorry: you tend to use big words, scientific jargon, and too few examples.

Compare your pitch with the following (intentionally oversimplified) version:

"So, I hear you care about rationality. What's that about?"

It's about figuring out what you really want and getting it. If you are at a game, and it's really boring, should you walk out and waste what you paid for the tickets? If you apply for a position and don't get it, does it help to decide that you didn't really want it, anyway? If you are looking to buy a new car, what information should you take seriously? There are many pitfalls on the road to making a good decision; rationality is a systematic study of the ways to make better choices in life. Including figuring out what "better" really means for you.

First, thanks to lukeprog for posting this discussion post. The Ohio Less Wrong group has been discussing elevator pitches, and the comments here are sure to help us!

I often end up pitching LW stuff to people who are atheists, but not rationalists. I think this type of person is a great potential "recruit", because they WANT a community, but often find the atheistic community a little too "patting ourselves on the back"-ish (as do I). My general pitch is that Less Wrong is like the next step: "Yeah, we're all (mainly) atheists, but now what??"

Here's an example from a recent facebook comment thread:

Other person- What exactly do atheist groups do? I went to a couple meetings of [ Freethought Group ] here at [ Local big university], but it turned out to be exactly like Sunday school but except for reading Bible verses, everyone talked about why religion was terrible. It's not exactly what I'm all about.

Me- Yeah, I hate "Rah rah, Atheism!" stuff too. I know [Person A ] and [Person B ] from lesswrong.com . I like the site because it's like..."Yeah, we've all got the atheism stuff figured out. Let's move on and see where we can go from there."

Then I point them to Methods of Rationality, and hopefully now to our meetups.

Possible absolute shite ahead (I went the folksy route):

"So, I hear you care about rationality. What's that about?"

It's about being like Brad Pitt in Moneyball. (Oh, you didn't see it? Here's a brief spoiler free synopsis). It's the art seeing how others, and even yourself, are failing and then doing better.

"Science doesn't know everything."

Oh, yeah, I completely agree. But, it does know a helluva lot. It put us on the moon, gave us amazing technology like this [pull out your cellphone], and there's every reason to think it's going to blow our minds in the future.

"But you can't expect people to act rationally. We are emotional creatures."

Yeah, no that's true. We've recently seen all kinds of bad decisions--housing crisis and so on. But that's all the more reason to try and get people to act more rationally.

"But sometimes you can't wait until you have all the information you need. Sometimes you need to act right away."

Yeah, true... true. Still, we can prepare in advance for those situations. For example, you might have reason to believe that you're going to start a new project at your job. That's going to involve a lot of decisions and any poor decision at such an early stage can magnify as times goes by. That's why you prepare the best you can for those quick decisions that you know you'll be making.

"But we have to use intuition sometimes. And sometimes, my intuitions are pretty good!"

Yeah, intuitions are just decisions based on experience. I remember reading that chess masters, y'know like Billy Fisher or Kasparov, don't even deliberate on their decisions, they just know; whereas, chess experts, a level below master, do deliberate. But to get to that level of mastery, you need tens of thousands of hours of practice, man. Only a few of us are lucky enough to have that kind of experience in even a very narrow area. If you're a something like an intermediate chess player in an area with a bunch of skilled chess players, your intuition is going to suck.

"But I'm not sure an AI can ever be conscious."

Maybe not, but that's not really important. Did you hear about Watson? That machine that beat those Jeopardy players? They're saying Watson could act as a medical diagnostician like House and do a better job at it. Not only that, but it'd be easier than playing jeopardy... isn't that crazy?

The elevator pitch that got me most excited about rationality is from Raising the Sanity Waterline. It only deals with epistemic rationality, which is an issue, and it, admittedly, is best fit towards people who belong to a sanity-focused minority, like atheism or something political. It was phrased with regard to religion originally, so I'll keep it this way here, but it can easily be tailored.

"What is rationality?"

Imagine you're teaching a class to deluded religious people, and you want to get them to change their mind and become atheists, but you absolutely cannot talk about religion in any way. What would you do? You'd have to go deeper than talking about religion itself. You'd have to teach your students how to think clearly and actually reevaluate their beliefs. That's (epistemic) rationality.

"Why is rationality important? Shouldn't we focus on religion first?"

By focusing on rationality itself you not only can approach religion in a non-threatening way, but you can also align yourself with other sane people who may care about economics or politics or medicine. By working together you can get their support, even though they may not care about atheism per se.

"But you can't expect people to act rationally. We are emotional creatures."

Yes, we are emotional creatures. But being emotional is not incompatible with being rational! In fact, being emotional sometimes makes us more rational. For example, anger can inhibit some cognitive biases, and people who sustain damage to "emotional" areas of their brains do not become more rational, even when they retain memory, logical reasoning ability, and facility with language. What we want to do is make the best possible use of our available tools -- including our emotional tools -- in order to get the things that we really want.

One of the most difficult arguments I've had making is convincing people that they can be more rational. Sometimes people have said that they're simply incapable of assigning numbers and probabilities to beliefs, even though they acknowledge that it's superior for decision making.

"So, I hear you care about rationality. What's that about?"

Rationality is about improving your thinking so that you make better decisions. You know, sometimes you make decisions that turn out bad because there is some piece of knowledge or information that you really needed to know but didn't. But sometimes it turns out even with the same information you can make a better choice if you think about things differently. In the narrow sense rationality is getting your brain to make the best use of the information you have to make the best choice. In the wider sense rationality is about filling your brain up with the best information in the first place.

That might just sound like common sense - that people should think carefully about things - but it turns out that there are a whole lot of really common mistakes that people don't realize that they are making, and it really is possible to learn better patterns of thinking that let you make better decisions.

I'm not sure if this deserves its own article, so I'm posting it here: What would be an interesting cognitive bias / debiasing technique to cover in a [Pecha kucha] (http://www.pecha-kucha.org/what) style presentation for a college writing class?

Given the format, it should be fairly easy to explain(I have less time than advertised, only 15 slides instead of 20!) So far, I've thought about doing the planning fallacy, representativeness heuristic or the disjunction fallacy. All three are ones I can already speak casually about and don't leap out at me as empowering motivated cognition (...a topic which would empower it, huh)

I would personally like to do Bayes Theorem, but I can't 1) Think of a way to compress it down to five minutes 2) Can't think of ways for other people to help compress it down to five minutes without also omitting the math.

Downvote if this is off topic. If not, please tell me why because I'll just assume it's an offtopic downvote!

It's about figuring out the mistakes that people tend to make, so you can avoid making them. ("Like what?") Like people aren't good at changing their minds. They only want to think about information that supports what they already believe. But really, I should look at all the information that comes my way and decide - is my old belief really true? Or should I change my mind based on the new information I got?

"But you can't expect people to act rationally. We are emotional creatures."

This may be difficult to answer appropriately without knowing what the hypothetical speaker means with “emotions” (or "expect", for that matter). But the phrase seems to me like a potential cached one, so ve may not know it either.

A possible elevator response below:

Rationality is not Vulcan-like behavior; you don't have to renounce to your emotions in order to act rationally. Indeed, for most people, many emotions (like affection, wonder, or love) are very valuable, and applied rationality is knowing how to obtain and protect what is truly precious for you.
What is important is to rationally understand how your emotions affect your judgment, so you can try to consciously avoid or damper unwanted emotional reactions that would otherwise have undesirable consequences for you.

Does Sark's recent tweet, "Intuitions are machines, not interior decoration," work as an elevator pitch, or is it too opaque to a non-LWer? Or is it too short? Maybe it's a fireman's pole pitch.

I find the conscious AI response to be the most compelling. Now that I think about it, that's more evidence for the usefulness of concrete examples.

"Science doesn't know everything."

Yes, but science is all about using whatever methods work to produce more new knowledge all the time. All the new knowledge we can produce with mechanisms that we know are actually trustworthy will eventually become part of science, and the only stuff that's ultimately going to get left out is information we can only generate through means we know aren't reliable at producing truth.

Biases from Wikipedia's list of cognitive biases. Cue: example of the bias; Response: name of the bias, pattern of reasoning of the bias, normative model violated by the bias.

Edit: put this on the wrong page accidentally.