Which areas of rationality are underexplored? - Discussion Thread

One simple idea is to make a list of people who seem individually rational to you, and ask them what are their areas of expertise. Then, if you have a question related to the area, ask them. (An equivalent of "use google" or "ask at StackExchange", but perhaps better for questions when there is a lot of misinformation out there, or where your question would be dismissed as "too open" on SE, or where you want to find out about your unknown unknowns, etc.) If people start doing this regularly, then having an expert in the group will automatically increase the whole group's expertise. Most people don't mind talking about their hobbies; but with rationalists you may get the extra advantage of them telling you "actually, I don't know" when they happen to not know.

For instrumental rationality, find a group of people who actually want to improve at instrumental rationality (as opposed to people who merely visit LW to kill time), and create a private discussion. It's better if you can also see each other in real life, for example at meetups.

Robin Hanson would probably recommend having an internal prediction market and using it frequently. But that can create perverse incentives if you bet on stuff you can influence. (Maybe there is a way to fix this, but that needs to be considered specifically. You want a situation where people can benefit from helping a project, but not from sabotating it. Like, when you believe the project will fail, the optimal strategy would be to abstain from voting on it, not to vote against it. But the people who voted for the project would still lose their points if the project fails. It's just that no one can gain points from a failing project.) It would be probably more useful when the group gets larger, so that people can bet on things they personally don't influence.

I upvoted you because I noticed that the term "team level rationality" piquing my interest. Is "team level" or "group rationality" emphasized or taught in follow-on CFAR workshops?

This seems like a potential area of low-hanging fruit where existing "executive team coaching program" content could be adapted. Somebody hypothesized that the growing popularity of local meetups and professional growth sapping LW readership. Group effectiveness content, especially in the context of the world-class teams/names/organizations that you listed, could potentially be immediately implemented in local meetups and in professional capacities.

I don't doubt however that as difficult as it has been for a community to generate individual rationality content, group effectiveness content is even harder to generate due to a perceived smaller set of individuals capable of proven & effective group enhancement, longer timeframes to realize group results and outline group experiments, plus a will and capability to explain said technique progressions.

EDIT: Kahneman's "Thinking, Fast and Slow" has an anecdote about the "leaderless group challenge" as the inspiration for his illusion of validity cognitive bias. The group challenge is an example of the type of activity, often described as "team building exercises", that could be adapted specifically to raise small collective acuity and coordination effectiveness. As far as I'm aware, no widely available content exists specific outside of specific business, military or other domain-specific niches.

Another indirect tangent is the "Checklist Manifesto" by Atul Gawande, drawing on his experience with medical errors (especially in high-performing OR units). Although this a huge step in the right direction, it still doesn't quite get to the root of formulating and internalizing a set of practices specific to enhancing collective effectiveness (even in a small groups).

Rationality is about more than empirical studies. It's about developing sensible models of the world. It's about conveying sensible models to people in ways that they'll understand them. It's about convincing people that your model is better than theirs, sometimes without having to do an experiment.

Hmm, I'm not sure I understand what you mean. Maybe I'm missing something? Isn't this exactly what Bayesianism is about? Bayesianism is just using laws of probability theory to build an understanding of the world, given all the evidence that we encounter. Of course that's at the core just plain math. E.g., when Albert Einstein thought of relativity, that was an insight without having done any experiment, but it is perfectly in accordance with Bayesianism.

Bayesian probability theory seems to be all we need to find out truths about the universe. In this framework, we can explain stuff like "Occam's Razor" in a formal way, and we can even include Popperian reasoning as a special case (a hypothesis has to condense probability mass on some of the outcomes in order to be useful. If you then receive evidence that would have been very unlikely given the hypothesis, we shift down the hypothesis' probability a lot (=falsification). If we receive confirming evidence that could have been explained just as well by other theories, this only slightly upshifts our probability; see EY's introduction.) But maybe this is not the point that you were trying to make?

I also think that EY is not Bayesian sometimes. He often assigns something 100 per cent probability without any empirical evidence, but because simplicity and beauty of the theory. For example that MWI is correct interpretation of QM. But if you put 0 probability on something (other interpretations), it can't be updated by any evidence.

Hmm, I'm quite confident (not 100%) that he's just assigning a very high probability to it, since it seems to be the way more parsimonious and computationally "shorter" explanation, but of course not 100% :) (see Occam's razor link above for why Bayesians give shorter explanations more a priori credence.)

Regarding Kuhnianism: Maybe it's a good theory of how the social progress of science works, but how does it help me with having more accurate beliefs about the world? I don't know much about it, so would be curious about relevant information! :)

Is there a single book or resource you would recommend for learning how group theory/symmetry can be used to develop theories and models?

I work in fluid dynamics, and I've mainly seen group theory/symmetry mentioned when forming simplifying coordinate transformations. Fluid dynamicists call these "dimensionless parameters" or "similarity variables". I am certain other fields use different terminology.

. Bayesian reasoning tells you what to expect given an existing set of beliefs. It doesn't tell you how to develop those underlying beliefs in the first place

That's a very important point, and it is a pity that everyone decided to focus on the narrower point about physics.

There's a wider point, still, about ontological radicalism, doubling back, paradigm shifts and all that Kuhnian stuff that's completely missed by emphasising Bayes, and thereby implying that everything is a linear stepwise refinement of models under evidence.

group theory / symmetry

The Wikipedia page for group theory seems fairly impenetrable. Do you have a link you'd recommend as a good place to get one’s feet wet in the topic? Same with symmetry.

Thanks!

If you look at the recent posts Double Crux is not about Bayesian reasoning.

Discussions about system 1 and system 2 and how to have the two in sync are not about Bayesian reasoning either.

There are also many other topics that are not about Bayes.

I remember it was a poll in LW about how they use Bayes theorem in practical life (can't find a link). There was only a few answer about actual practical usage. There is not much practical situations where it was useful.

But it is good as a symbol of group membership and also in internet discussion.

I also think that EY is not Bayesian sometimes. He often assigns something 100 per cent probability without any empirical evidence, but because simplicity and beauty of the theory. For example that MWI is correct interpretation of QM. But if you put 0 probability on something (other interpretations), it can't be updated by any evidence. He also did it when he said that self-improving paper clip maximizer is the main risk of AI. But there are other risks of AI which are also deadly. (I counted around 100).

I vaguely remember a comment made by Vladimir_M, citing PUA as 'the elephant in the room'. I'd imagine there's some variant of Godwin's law in which someone will eventually say 'hey, why does nobody care about the elephant in the room?', so maybe the question should be 'Are we fully prepared and able to debunk PUA beliefs?'.

Not /inevitably/. And, worse case, we could censor only the mindkilled parts of a discussion.

Like others pointed out, there's a Slack channel administered by Elo, a lesswrong IRC, and a SSC IRC. (I'm sometimes present in the first, but not the other two; I don't know how active they are now.)

As an addendum, and as a way of helping newer members, maybe we could have some kind of Big/Little program? Nothing fancy, just a list of people who have volunteered to be 'Bigs,' who are willing to jump in and discuss things with newer members.

Is the idea here pairing (Alice volunteers as a Big and is matched up with Bob, they swap emails / Hangouts / etc. and have one-on-one conversations about rationality / things that Bob doesn't understand yet) or in-need matching (Alice is the Big on duty at 7pm Eastern time, and Bob shows up in the chat channel to ask questions that Alice answers), or something else?

This also made me think of the possibility of something like "Dear Prudence"; maybe emails about some question that are then responded to in depth, or maybe chat discussions that get recorded and then shared, or so on.

(Somewhat tangential, but there are other things you can overlay on top of online communities in order to mimic some features of normal geographic communities, which seem like they make them more human-friendly but require lots of engagement on the part of individuals that may or may not be forthcoming.)

This is more of a practical suggestion than a theoretical one, but what if we had an instant message feature? Some kind of chat box like google hangouts, where we could talk in a more immediate sense to people rather than through comment and reply.

There the Slack.

Join the SlateStarCodex IRC :)

I think life extension should be discussed more here.

Many rationalists disappointment me with respect to life extension. Too many of them seem to recognize that physical conditioning is important, yet very few seem to do the right things. Most rationalists who understand that physical conditioning is important think they should do something, but that something tends to be almost exclusively lifting weights with little to no cardiovascular exercise. (I consider walking to barely qualify as cardiovascular exercise, by the way.) I think both are important, but if you only could do one, I'd pick cardio because it's much easier to improve your cardiovascular capacity that way. (Cardiovascular capacity/VO2max correlates well with longevity, as discussed here.) I'm not alone in the belief that cardio is much more important; similar things have been said for a long time. I'd recommend Ken Cooper's first book for more on this perspective.

The inability for rationalists to regularly do cardiovascular exercise probably stems from similar problems that cause cryocrastination. I'd like to see more on actually implementing cardiovascular exercise routines. I have some notes on this which could help. Off the top of my head I can remember that there's evidence morning runners tend to maintain the habit better and that there's evidence that exercising in a group helps with compliance. I personally find Beeminder to help a little bit, but not much.

It's unclear to me how rationality and life extension are related. Are you thinking about the following, or something different?

1. Lots of philosophical / cultural effort has been put into accepting the inevitability of death, but this is mistakenly used to accept the nearness of death despite changing technology meaning that's in play. Rationality helps carve out the parts of that which are no longer appropriate.

2. Life extension is one of the generic instrumental goods, in that whatever specific goals you have, you can probably get more of them with a longer life than a shorter one. This makes it a candidate as a common interest of many causes.

3. Rationality habits are especially useful in life extension research, because of the deep importance of reasoning from uncertain data; 30-year olds can't quite wait for a 60-year study of intermittent fasting to complete in order to determine whether or not they should do intermittent fasting starting when they are 30.

We have posts like http://lesswrong.com/lw/jrt/lifestyle_interventions_to_increase_longevity/

Creativity is another big area that seems neglected. I've read a fair amount on the subject, but feel I have barely touched the surface.

I also feel it probably is relevant to AI, so I'm somewhat surprised to see so little discussion of it here. (By "AI" I mean a number of things here. Might be easiest to see it as application of computers to solve problems.) At the moment, AI works when the actions one can take are clear (e.g., small number of valid moves in a game). When the possible actions are not precisely specified, the specification becomes the issue. Generating these possibilities is not trivial, and frequently this is what creativity is.

Search term is "trigger action planning".

I think that it would be worthwhile seeing what we can learn from the debating community.

Consider the article Flowsheet Logic and Notecard Logic. I suspect most of the things we would learn would be antipatterns, but it's still useful to have negative examples (especially when those examples are widespread).

The debating community doesn't have the goal of arguments being in touch with reality. The only thing that matters is whether a judge will accept the argument.

When it comes to thinking about whether a scientific paper makes an argument that's likely robust, that's quite different.

The skill of not being convinced by persuasive arguments that aren't in touch with reality is valuable.

Can you clarify what you mean by the Repository repository? I'm not familiar with that term.