Nonmindkilling open questions

Medicine provides many important-feeling examples that aren't politically charged.

• Will she survive the operation?
• Does he have the flu or food poisoning? Or West Nile Virus?
• How long will this migraine last?

Is it even possible to have an open question that lots of people would understand that wouldn't serve for signaling?

How about "The stock market will rise over the next month/year/decade", or "unemployment will go up", or some similar economics question?

I tentatively suggest there's a pattern here.

By default, and in practice for the great majority, no factual question can be regarded as popular or important unless it provides an opportunity for status signaling or mind killing.

However, if there is something like a prediction market, a tiny minority will adapt to become specialists in making accurate and profitable predictions.

This applies to sports and stock trades. Most people will be happy to be a [LOCAL SPORTS TEAM] fan, and will happily remained biased for signaling purposes, maybe making penny-ante bets to show loyalty. Professional bookmakers in Vegas and professional coaches of sports teams have to look at reality, or else find another job. Similarly, people in finance may have strong political opinions on their own time, but if they don't make money, they'll be out of a job.

This doesn't necessarily help if you're trying to "explain to people how beliefs should be expressed in probabilities" to the vast majority of people who don't have skin in the game. But you could appeal to their imagination.

Or if I were to try the existence of God, I predict half the population would say it's 100% certain God exists, and the other half would say the opposite.

That sounds like a massive overestimate of the percentage of atheists.

"What is the probability there is microbial-like life (other than from earth) in our solar system?"

I'm having difficulty giving this a good estimate, myself, actually.

Will it rain next Thursday?

Questions from DAGGRE with a current estimate between 10 and 90%:

Will Ayman al-Zawahiri still be recognized as the leader of al-Qaeda as of 31 december 2012?

Will there be an official announcement of a new sovereign debt restructuring program for Greece before June 1, 2012?

Will the forces of Alassane Outtara defeat the forces of Laurent Gbagbo in the Ivory Coast before 1 December 2012?

Will Croatia’s GDP grow more than 0 percent in calendar 2012?

Will €1 Euro buy less than $1.20 Australian dollars at any point before 1 January 2013?

Will there will be a 50%-effective malaria vaccine available for general use before 2015?

Some suggestions:

• Events subject to institutionalised gambling. (I imagine LW doesn't have a massive sports fan or gambling element)
• Popular, non-crackpot conspiracy theories (admittedly, I can't think of many)
• Historical mysteries (Amelia Earhart, crew of the Marie Celeste, etc.)
• Common misconceptions
• Etymology of words

People care about their health, and there's a lot we don't know about even very popular, non-technical habits.

Does a daily aspirin help prevent cancer?

Is running better for your health than other exercise?

[Will you live longer if you switch from a typical American diet to a vegan diet?][oops. Okay, mindkillers are everywhere.]

(For specific probabilities, add parameters, e.g., 'live 3 months longer.' Or ask what parameter value the 50% probability should be at.)

[Sports team listener is known to like] will win the [upcoming sports event].

Maybe whether we'll encounter intelligent life from another planet sometime within the next century?

You could ask: Was the Trojan War an actual historical event?

It is not actually an popular question, but it is a question about a popular subject. I wouldn't say it's important, but it fits all other criteria. You could fill the listener about the details.

Or if I were to try the existence of God, I predict half the population would say it's 100% certain God exists, and the other half would say the opposite.

So this might be the result of huge selection effects, but most "average or somewhat-above-agerage" people I've met, e.g. people at my high school, were agnostic, and weren't very mind-killed on the subject; in fact, they were mostly disinterested, and wary of both theistic and atheistic evangelism. I think the God question would work just fine for such people.

ETA: Ah, Vaniver already said similarly.

Reading the comments, I'm not sure we're addressing the question you're asking.

Prediction market proponents have put a lot of thought into how to turn mind-killing open-ended questions (far-mode) into resolvable bets (near-mode), often by use of conditional wagers (chance of Y, wager valid only if X happens). This is a good mechanism for applying percentages to such questions.

However, it completely bypasses the point I think you're trying to make, which is that all useful beliefs are of this form. Basically, you want a simple-example summary of Making Beliefs Pay Rent.

I'm not sure there exists such a single example - humans are very good at separating the signaling and identity "beliefs" from testable, resolvable "predictions", and each of us has different topics with different ease of analysis. This means that it takes quite a bit of thought, study, and reflection to see how the word means different things, which shouldn't be mixed.

I think the direction to go in these discussions isn't so much to find a topc that's often expressed as an identity-signal "belief" and push someone toward a prediction-probability-"belief". Instead, you can ask "what choices are you making based on this belief, and what's the cost if you're wrong"? When you find topics on which the individual can admit that there is a concrete wager being made, then you can guide them to understanding how belief works.

And of course, if they can't tie their belief to any decisions, or understand that the decisions would be different if the belief were incorrect, then you can point out that this kind of belief doesn't help the holder of the belief.

It's a bit esoteric for many people, but nobody knows whether or not the LHC will find the Higgs boson...

How about nutrition related questions? The exact wording of the question is tricky, but something like

"Will a low fat diet help most people lose weight?" isn't the kind of thing that inspires 0% or 100% responses.

I agree that 1, 2, and 3 together eliminate all non-mindkilling topics. For a question to be well-known and unanswered, the world must not push back on it very hard (not important). Seemingly important unanswered questions are precisely the domain of religion, on one model ("why are we here?"). And it's been observed that the mindkilling aspects of debates increase inversely with their observable consequences.

I'm going to go out in the weeds, and simply point at places where probabilities are used all the time: betting.

• will there be more than one winner of the XYZ Jackpot Lottery on this drawing?
• who is going to win the superbowl?
• what are the odds of the Buffalo Sabres making it to the playoffs?
• who will win such and such boxing match?
• which horse will win this race?

Odds are well understood in these environments, and by picking a sport that a person is only peripherally interested in, most of the mindkilling effects should be reduced to a non-dangerous level.

The Space Program? There are reasonable people who say it's vital for the future good of our species, and reasonable people who say it's impractical and unnecessary, at least for the time being.

"Is the fetus growing in [pregnant woman you both know]'s uterus a boy or a girl." There is a tremendous amount of people who think that order of birth, shape of belly, pulse on pinky, etc can be used to predict the baby's sex [anecdotally these results, combined with peoples' guesses come to 50/50, go figure!] , which if enough of them agreed could arguably be used to marginally move away from the base of 51/49. This probability could be updated after an ultrasound, but still not move to 100% as there are well documented error rates associated with sexing a baby via ultrasound. Even more fun, these error rates are result specific, (i can't remember the numbers, they are buried in a baby book) a "boy" result is wrong less often than a "girl" result, and I seem to remember there is user error involved (some technicians are wrong less often than others). If a blood test is done on a fetus it could be used to further update the probability. The final test, inspection upon birth, which will update the probability again, will not quite get to 100% unless tests were done to rule out a rare abnormality (ie apparently a boy, but has an ovary)

As an afterthought, I don't actually care about the "popular and important" part of it - I usually ask someone for the population of Indonesia, and then to make me a confidence interval. So if he says 2 million, I ask him for a 98% confidence interval and then show him that he was wrong. If you're interested in trying this, make your own 98% confidence interval [two numbers X,Y such that you are 98% sure that X < population of Indonesia < Y] and then Google it.

"Will the Artist win the Best Picture Oscar?" would probably have fit your criteria in the runup to the Academy Awards. Not sure what the current analogy is - probably some similarly 'unimportant' yet highly publicised award/reality show exit.

I think when you have a question that fits the first three criteria, it always devolves into mindkilling. (Operating systems are a good example.)

The only time this doesn't happen is when the question is not popular/important. If you want to find an example, you're going to have to let go of either #2 or #5.

If we observe, most things that are factual questions are indisputable by intelligent people; for example, "Is the Earth round?" is a question that anyone who is fortunate enough to have some basic intelligence and an elementary school education is unlikely to argue. However, in order to have an opinionated question, one opens the can of worms that is mind killing and biased. For example, if you had two towns side by side, populated by young adults of equal intelligence and equal education, and they each had a sports team that competed against the other town's, those people living in each town would claim their team to be superior, without evidence other than "I live in this town." Hence, bias.

Is string theory more closely correct than any other current theory of physics?

I, at least, have essentially no way to judge this question and so don't really know what probability to assign it. Perhaps 1/n where n is the number of viable theories of physics? Plus a bit since it does seem to have more expert backing than anything else.

How/where memories are stored. It was salient for me, but even so it seems to satisfy all your conditions, except perhaps "important" since it doesn't impact most decisions that aren't whether to sign up for cryonics.

(I would like there to be no replies to this comment saying "Memory is probably stored in X via process Y" because yes, probably. That's the point.)

Questions in the area of health maintenance, weight control, diet & exercise.

an example to plug into X

Are GMO foods safe?

Suppose you were to calculate expected value (e.g. expected change in final utility) based on your probability estimates. How certain would you be in that number? If not 100%, adjust the number accordingly to take that % into account. Now, how certain are you in that number? Rinse and repeat.

People are not terribly good at transmitting and receiving, across adversary relation, what exactly they are 100% sure about. But it is clear that one has to end up with some value, that one has to trust completely; one could e.g. side with consensus, and trust that completely, or one can try to weight different people's opinions using made up numbers, but in the end, you will have a number that you'll trust, and if you don't, you'll have to propagate uncertainty and have another number for the 'expected value' that you trust; if you want to do it forever you can solve that using algebra and again have a number you'll be acting on as if it was true. That is just how probabilistic reasoning works.

Naturally, the original AGW estimates, by scientists, are just that: expected value. I find it very dubious that you can improve consensus on expected value (and standard deviation) by factoring in the contesting views yourself, with your own personal probability estimates.

Probably the question of Multiverse- versus Collapse-Interpretation in Quantum Physics could suffice. It fits your needs as a factual and, somewhat, important question, while there is no overall aggreement in the respective fields of experts (although the trend to MI seems becoming clear...). Furthermore I guess there aren't any status- or mindkilling-issues concerning this question, but, and that might rule out this question at least in some cases, a religious person might feel otherwise and reject the idea of "multiple creations" at first sight. Regarding "High uncertainty" the MI/CI-conflict might not fit your scheme, as(you already know if you read the Quantum-Physics-Sequence) there is a strong Bayesian argument to decide for Multiverse-Interpretation, but since you are going to talk to people who don't know about expressing their believes in probability, they maybe will not have read into that topic either (of course this just describes the standart-street-guy you encounter, maybe not you discussio-club-friends...). If so, at their state of special knowledge, there is little reason to value one more than the other. The worst would be for them to consider this a problem plainly boring or - within high physics- out of their reach, but if you explain multiverse beautifully enough and, maybe, ask them to imagine they are supposed to discuss the topic in a school-essay, it could become interesting enough.