The Rubber Hand Illusion and Preaching to the Unconverted

Every time I've invested an hour or two discussing some rationality topic with a newbie, they always came out (claiming to be) convinced. Of course I put in some work: I establish good rapport and compatible values, I adapt it to what they care about, I show them how they can use rationality to win - sure that helps. But rationality simply makes sense. I find it much easier to change people's minds about rationality than about, say, the NSA.

The relevant data isn't "I can convince people if I use all the social tricks in the book", it is instead "how much easier is it to convince them of their cognitive biases than of XYZ". Which makes it come down to this:

I find it much easier to change people's minds about rationality than about, say, the NSA.

I would bet on the exact opposite. Those guys make sure your family are safe, done. What's the other guy doing, still talking about goats and doors, isn't he just saying he's the smarter thinker (stupid elitist)? Well, I'm talking about knowing the people you love are better protected, having one less thing to worry about. Here are some pictures of people killed by the bad guys. Aren't you glad we deal with that stuff, for you? Thought so.

(...) the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country.

However, try not to succumb to the classic introspective meta trap, no matter how sweet its Siren call; in the end we only look inward to look outward: not as a goal in itself but as an instrumental stepping stone only. What I'm saying is, less meta more [subject] matter. Especially when paragraphs of meta obscure your post's conclusion

Thanks for this. I've had this implicit anxiety that I haven't 'reached the bottom of the meta-rabbit hole.' When I wrote the post, I definitely wasn't explicitly thinking of introspection as a stepping stone to something more important.

I'm iffy on grouping your inner homunculus with "perception" rather than "cognition"

I don't understand this. Can you elaborate? I suspect that you mean that there is no meaningful distinction between perception and cognition, since perception (I would say) is a form of cognition. I should also say that I originally used the word "reasoning," rather than cognition. Do you think that I should revert the change? Really I meant that we should demonstrate how people's brains are flawed, rather than how people are flawed. In any event, at least the principle is sound.

What I'm saying is, less meta more [subject] matter. Especially when paragraphs of meta obscure your post's conclusion

Would you be willing to point out the things that you think are obscuring my conclusion? I'm not sure to what you're referring.

About the blockquotes in this comment, for some reason I can't separate your quotes from the paper's quotes if they're right after one another, so you'll have to pay attention. To be clear, my response will always follow your quote. I've looked at Markdown syntax documentation but I can't figure out how to fix this. I'd appreciate help from anyone.

CFAR exist in the background of the realisation that's quite easy to want to be rational and read a list of mental biases but that this usually doesn't make people more rational. It thus important to develop techniques to reliably make people more rational and that includes us as well.

I know what CFAR is and what it's for, I just said that because I didn't know if they had tried rationality training with anyone else but entrepreneurs and people with a lot of experience in mathematics. If this has changed, I'd appreciate it if someone told me.

Just because someone changes their beliefs doesn't mean they do Bayesian inference. Bayesian inference is a specific heuristic and I consider it unlikely that the body uses it for this purpose.

For one, I didn't say that Bayesian inference was the conscious process by which the person changed their beliefs.

Now, I'll begin by saying that I don't know an explicit thing about Bayesian inference. Despite that, I wrote that because I've seen this researcher cited elsewhere on the site and I assumed that if he used the adjective 'Bayesian' in one his papers, you all would want to know about it. From the paper, these are the things that I'm talking about:

Wheras Botvinick & Cohen (1998) interpret their results in terms of resolving incongruities between visual versus proprioceptive location of the hand, our table experiment would lead us to argue that the illusion arises mainly from the ‘Bayesian logic’ of all perception; the brain’s remarkable ability to detect statistical correlations in sensory inputs in constructing useful perceptual representations of the world—including one’s body.

We suggest that the principle underlying this illusion is Bayesian perceptual learning—that two perceptions from different modalities are ‘bound’ when they co-occur with a high probability.

The McGurk effect is much easier to demostrate if you want to show someone how is perception is flawed.

I had never heard of this, but I just read the introduction to the Wikipedia article to get an idea of it and apparently the McGurk effect is hit or miss. To my knowledge, everyone can experience the rubber hand illusion regardless of previous experience.

As for this:

I'm not really sure that the paper demostrates that. You could also say that the person has empathy with the table.

I really don't believe that one could say that. I may be wrong, but it seems that the paper actually addresses this:

The brain’s remarkable capacity for extracting statistical correlations in sensory input is most apparent in the table condition. In the hand experiments, given the visual similarity between the fake and real hand, it is not unreasonable for the brain to tolerate some level of discrepancy between the felt position of the hand and its apparent visual location. (Indeed, Graziano (1999) has shown specific cells in the macaque to be responsive to the visual appearance of both a monkey’s real hand and a proximate fake one.) This argument, however, is difficult to apply to the case of the table; indeed, we would argue that the assimilation of the table into the body image is dictated exclusively by the Bayesian logic underlying all perception; in this case the brain’s tendency to take advantage of statistical correlations (even when they do not ‘make sense’ from the cognitive point of view and contradict a lifetime of experience with our own bodies).

Mimikry of body language leads in humans to a feeling of rapport.

I don't understand how this is relevant.

I'm also uncomfortable with the semantics of "human body" in this case. I would guess that most of the participants wouldn't say that the table is part of their body.

I agree that it's improbable that a person would explicitly consider the table a part of their body. I also think that it's probably true that most of the participants wouldn't say that they can anticipate or feel pain due to injury to something that is not part of their body.

Are you sure the qualia is all that rare? I thought it was common for people who drive to think of their cars as extensions of themselves.

Or do you mean that you can feel the process of incorporating an object into your sense of self? I can believe that would be very rare.

Tentatively, it might work to teach rational methods of improving one's life in small ways with a gradual spread into more areas rather than starting with the idea of becoming rational about everything. That might attract people who are dubious about rationality (without knowing what it is) and/or don't want sweeping self-improvement.

I didn't think of it this way. I agree. (Also, is it considered superfluous in this community to comment only for the sake of agreeing with someone? That's conceivable to me.)

I'm skeptical that experiments involving rubber hands are an effective way to gain social status.

Maybe that was a joke, but just in case it wasn't: It's not something I can prove here, but I said that because I assumed that the demonstration would impress someone in the same way that an optical illusion or a magic trick does. I'm not so impressed by magic tricks these days (unless they're absolutely nuts of course), but I can imagine that happening to a lot of people. And I think that it can be leveraged further than your average magician leverages a magic trick because the people at CFAR wouldn't just stop at 'magic tricks'; they would have other interesting exercises to show you: "Now that you've seen how your perceptions can be affected by heuristics, I'm going to show you how your thinking can be affected by them."

You have some decent arguments (though ChristianKI's critiques show where they need work), but I think the weirdness factor is just too high. Even if someone were personally convinced, what happens when they try to tell their friends?

Where do my arguments need work? If you're talking about ChristianKI suggesting that this could be empathy rather than the anticipation of pain, I don't think that that's the case here because, as I mentioned in my conversation with him below, some subjects reported mistaking the rubber hand for their 'real' hand:

Some subjects reported that the illusion was so convincing that they found themselves wondering why their hand was so white or how they had bruised their hand (there was a small ink smudge on the fake hand).

Some subjects also withdraw their 'real' hand from the experimenter as if it were at risk of injury:

[D]uring pilot work many subjects behaved as if they anticipated pain when the rubber finger was bent back: they laughed nervously, widely opened their eyes, flinched, and even pulled their real hand away from the experimenter (sufficient instruction prevented subject noise and movement during the experiments reported here).

I was really imagining this in the context of a CFAR workshop. I'm not sure how it would go for people trying to show/tell their friends about it either. I'm willing to bet that the success rate would be positively correlated with the amount and quality of the rationality training that the experimenter had received. What exactly do you mean by the 'weirdness factor?' Like: "Hey man; why are you coming towards me with that rubber hand?" I think that it would be pretty rare for people to just refuse to see the demonstration, because then they would look afraid or close-minded.

Mainly I found it very cool to read about Ramachandran and the table. It's especially interesting in the context of embodied cognition. If our mental lives are determined and made meaningful by the fact that we have physical bodies that we live in and have to make do stuff, how do we reconcile this with the notion that "There is a sense in which one’s body image is itself a ‘phantom’: one that the brain constructs for utility and convenience." ?

Slightly related to this and pretty cool in my opinion: I was thinking about this as I was falling asleep, and I looked at my body, and for a few seconds it looked like it was part of the environment instead of 'me.' It was pretty amazing.

Can you expand on what you mean? It isn't clear to me what you mean by naive realism in this context.