Open & Welcome Thread - October 2019

There are a bunch of really great introductions to category theory, and this is definitely one of them. There's also Youtube videos of his lectures going over the same material.

My plan is to go very slowly, and to assume everything needs to be explained in as much detail as possible. This will make for a tediously long but hopefully very readable series.

For what it’s worth, I tried reading that (I’d seen it recommended elsewhere, and this latest mention reminded me to give it a try).

I haven’t quite given up yet, but it’s not looking good. I found the preface to be thoroughly unconvincing as an argument for why I (a “working programmer”, as Milewski puts it) would want to learn category theory; and the next chapter (the Introduction) seems to be packed with some of the most absurd analogies I have ever seen, anywhere. (One of which is outright insulting—what, so the reason we need static type systems is that programmers are nothing more than monkeys, hitting keys at random, and with static typing, that randomly generated code will not compile if it’s wrong? But I am not a monkey; how does this logic apply to a human being who is capable of thought, and who writes code with a purpose and according to a design? Answer: it doesn’t.)

I will report back when I’ve read more (or finally given up), I suppose…

Given that ideologies are useful as rallying flags for people to coordinate / build alliances around but can also become increasingly harmful as they become more embedded (into e.g. education and policy) and unquestionable, what should someone trying to build a social movement do?

One idea is to have some sort of timed auto-destruct mechanism for the ideology. For example, have the founders and other high-status members of the movement record a video asking people to question the ideology, and giving a bunch of reasons for why the ideology might be false or people shouldn't be so certain about it, to be released after the movement succeeds in gaining power. People concerned about ideologies could try to privately talk the leaders into doing this. But with deepfakes being possible, this might not work so well in the future (and also the timing mechanism seems tricky to get right) so I wonder what else can be done.

My guess is that there are fragments of things addressing at least part of this, just not oriented around ideology as a keyword (belief as attire [? · GW], professing and cheering [LW · GW], fable of science and politics [LW · GW]). I guess one thing is that much of the sequence are focused on "here is a way for beliefs to be wrong" rather than examining more closely why having this way-of-treating-beliefs might be useful. (Although Robin Hanson's work I think often explores that more directly)

What to do if you spot a harmful ideology is a political question, and in some cases the answer might be pretty orthogonal to rationality. (although you might mean the more specific subquestion of "how to stop harmful ideologies while maintaining/raising the sanity waterline." i.e. many people fight harmful ideologies with counter ideologies).

some random additional thoughts (this might also be part of what you were already thinking of, it's just what my brain had easily available)

I think I see the word ideology as a bit more neutral than you're phrasing here. Or at least, your examples are 'generally accepted around here as false/bad'. But, LessWrong has an overall ideology of beliefs-that-we-coordinate around, complete with "those beliefs being object-level useful" and "some people using those beliefs as attire, sometimes for reasons that are plausibly virtuous and sometimes for reasons that seem like exactly the sort of thing Eliezer wrote the sequences to complain about.

Science also has an ideology (similar but different from Yudkowskianism). The sequences also cover "how to address wrongness in the science ideology", I think. For example in Science or Bayes [LW · GW]:

In physics, you can get absolutely clear-cut issues.  Not in the sense that the issues are trivial to explain.  But if you try to apply Bayes to healthcare, or economics, you may not be able to formally lay out what is the simplest hypothesis, or what the evidence supports.  But when I say "macroscopic decoherence is simpler than collapse" it is actually strict simplicity; you could write the two hypotheses out as computer programs and count the lines of code. Nor is the evidence itself in dispute.

I wanted a very clear example—Bayes says "zig", this is a zag—when it came time to break your allegiance to Science. [emphasis mine]

"Oh, sure," you say, "the physicists messed up the many-worlds thing, but give them a break, Eliezer!  No one ever claimed that the social process of science was perfect.  People are human; they make mistakes."

But the physicists who refuse to adopt many-worlds aren't disobeying the rules of Science.  They're obeying the rules of Science.

The tradition handed down through the generations says that a new physics theory comes up with new experimental predictions that distinguish it from the old theory.  You perform the test, and the new theory is confirmed or falsified.  If it's confirmed, you hold a huge celebration, call the newspapers, and hand out Nobel Prizes for everyone; any doddering old emeritus professors who refuse to convert are quietly humored.  If the theory is disconfirmed, the lead proponent publicly recants, and gains a reputation for honesty.

(Paul Graham's "What you can't say" is also relevant)

So, one way to fight bad/wrong/incomplete ideology is... well, to argue against it, if you're in an environment where that sort of thing works. If you're not in an environment conducive to clear argument, the obvious choices are "first try to make the environment conducive to argument" or, well, various dark-artsy rhetorical flourishes that work symmetrically whether your ideas are good or not.

It seems like you have more specific questions in mind (would be curious what your motivating examples are).

The way I'd have carved up your question space is less like "how to stop/fight ideologies" and more like "what to do about the general fact of some sets of beliefs becoming sticky over time?"

The sequences also touch upon, in response to the claim "Death is good because it kills old scientists that are stuck in their ways, which allows science to march forward", to which Eliezer replies "Jesus Christ sure, but you can just make scientists retire without killing them." But, you do still need to implement the part where you actually make them retire as public figures.

...if less than two of them are rationalists?