Rationality Quotes November 2013

It looked like nonsense to me. I stopped reading after a few sentences.

I thought it was a puzzle or riddle, so I went back and looked at it again. My first guess was that it was something to do with running, then paper airplanes (which can be made from newspaper, but not a magazine). The rock as anchor made me realize there needed to be something attached, which made me realize it was a kite.

On the other hand, I don't have any trouble seeing alternative interpretations; perhaps it's because I already tried several and came to the conclusion myself. (Or maybe it's just that I'm more used to looking at things with multiple interpretations; it's a pretty core skill to changing one's self.)

Then again, I also don't see the paragraph as infused with irreversible knowing. I read the words literally every time, and have to add words like, "for flying a kite" to the sentences in order to make the link. I could just as easily add "in bed", though, at which point the paragraph actually becomes pretty hilarious -- much like a strung-together collage of fortune cookie quotes... in bed. ;-)

The reason I posted the link to epiphany addiction was that this quote is an example of how confusion doesn't feel good (it prompted you to stop reading...), and that "sense of knowing" feels pleasant. The danger being that we have very little control over when we feel either, so the feeling of knowing is no substitute for rationality.

True, the availability heuristic, which the quote condemns, often does give results that correspond to reality - otherwise it wouldn't be a very useful heuristic, now would it! But there's a big difference between a heuristic and a rational evaluation.

Optimally, the latter should screen out the former, and you'd think things along the lines of "this happened in the past and therefore things like it might happen in the future," or "this easily-imaginable failure mode actually seems quite possible."

"This is an easily-imaginable failure mode therefore this idea is bad," and its converse, are not as useful, unless you're dealing with an intelligent opponent under time constraints.

Why would she claim she hadn't seen it coming, when it would be have been much more to her benefit if she had claimed that she had seen the crisis coming?

Nitpicking, but the quote stated that people who are on neither offensive nor defensive are people you can learn from - it didn't say that people who are on the offensive or defensive are necessarily wrong to do so.

One reading: "offense" as "trying to lower another's status" and "defense" as "trying to preserve one's own status". The people you can learn from are the ones whose brains focus on facts rather than status.

Some people are naturally on the defensive even when debating true propositions.

I'm not sure if this is relevant.

In a technical sense, of course you can learn from people on offense/defense, since they are giving you information.

The set of people who hold and argue for accurate beliefs about a given issue, and the set of people from whom it is possible to learn about a given issue, may often overlap but are not at all the same.

I agree, besides which, if there is a popular rule, sign, or proxy for determining who is on the better side of a debate, you can bet that the intellectually dishonest fellow will start waving the "I'm right" flag.

That doesn't sound like a debate I could learn anything from listening to.

I dont get the distinction between verification and validation.

Well, sort of - the protagonist is a child who tries to decipher a clue for a treasure hunt and so he realizes that a model that can predict anything is useless.

That behaviourally people treat free very differently from even $1, and that effective policymaking requires removing even trivial-seeming barriers to desired actions.

What do you mean with telepathy? You can't just transfer data from one neural net into another with having some sort of common data protocal that makes classifications. You still need some sort of language.

I suspect shared access to the conceptual referents of words would help with that specific problem, yes.
I suspect (with Feynman) that it would make only a small difference.
In particular, I suspect that if we did that we'd run more often into the currently-masked problem that everybody thinks about things a little bit wrong.

(People seem to differ in their interpretations of "telepathy," so I've started trying to develop the habit of Tabooing the word. The irony of this in the current context does not escape me.)

I wonder if telepathy would help with that.

That would depend partly on the specific problems with the words, and partly on the rationality of the people.

If everyone is making the same mistake, telepathy will just amplify the problem. There will be a chorus of agreement which is amplifying the mistake.

If people are using the wrong word, but with different shadings, then perhaps people will look into how well the word fits the concept it is supposed to indicate. However, the odds favor people yelling at each other about who's right.

How meaningful are figures on brain size without figures on overall body size?

Quick Googling shows that there's a paper published that states that European's average cranial capacities is 1347.

That's close enough to not effect his point, or even the order. I think you're engaging in motivated continuing to avoid having to acknowledge conclusions you find uncomfortable.

Rather then describing the facts as they are he paints things as more certain than they are. I think that people who do that in an area, where false beliefs lead to people being descrimited, are in no position to complain when they some social scorn.

Do you also apply the same criticism to the (much larger number of) people how make (much larger errors) in the direction of no difference? Also, could you taboo what you mean by "descrimited". Steelmanning suggests you mean "judged according to inaccurate priors", yet you also seem be implying that inaccurately equaliterian priors aren't a problem.

Source is here. SD for Asians and Europeans is 35, SD for Africans was 85. N=20,000.

What's wrong here? 4 degrees of accuracy for brain size and no error bars? That's a sign of someone being either intentionally or unintentionally dishonest.

...no? Why in the world would he present error bars? The numbers are in line with other studies, without massive uncertainty, and irrelevant to his actual, stated and quoted, point.

4 degrees of accuracy for brain size and no error bars?

Well, he did say “about”.

Is this actually a failure mode though, if you only "compromise" with people you respect intellectually? In retrospect, this sounds kind of like an approximation to Aumann agreement.

Each side should update on the other's arguments and data, and on the fact that the other side believes what it does (inasfar we can't perfectly trust our own reasoning process). This often means they update towards the other's position. But it certainly doesn't mean they're going to update so much as to agree on a common position.

You don't need to try to approximate Aumann agreement because you don't believe that either yourself or the other party is perfectly rational, so you can't treat your or the other's beliefs as having that kind of weight.

Also, people who start out looking for a compromise might be led to compromise in a bad way: A's theory predicts ball will fall down, B's theory predicts ball will fall up, compromise theory predicts it will stay in place, even though both A and B have evidence against that.

Is this actually a failure mode though, if you only "compromise" with people you respect intellectually?

Part of intellectual debate is that you judge arguments on their merits instead of negotiating what's true. Comprosing suggests that you are involved in a negotiation over what's true instead of search for the real truth.

Theoretically, if you treat your own previous position as a prior and the other guy's arguments as some evidence, the standard updating will lead you to have a new position somewhere in between which will look like a compromise.

Obviously there are are lot of caveats -- e.g. the assumption that an intermediate position makes sense (that is, the two positions are on some kind of continuous axis), etc.

I am a fan of SMBC, but the entire explanation is wrong. The events that led to the integration of reproductive and digestive systems happened long before a terrestrial existence of vertebrates, and certainly long before hands. To get a start on a real explanation you have to go back to early bilaterals:

http://www.leeds.ac.uk/chb/lectures/anatomy9.html

As near as I can tell it was about pipe reuse. But you can't make a funny comic about that (or maybe you can?). Zach is a "bard", not a "wizard." He entertains.

Try carrying the fetus and giving birth from any other location. I suppose having the fun parts somewhere else than the reproductive dumping tube could be nice, but wouldn't make any sense.

Having two (three, technically) holes you can breath through has its advantages. Ever had a nasty head cold that clogs your sinuses so bad you can't breathe?

Being able to smell what you're chewing is a huge advantage. I suppose achieving that some other way could get pretty convoluted.

I've read horses can only breathe through their noses.

There is no escape from evolution (variation and selection).

Deliberate genetic selection is just more complicated evolution.

Yep, and the part after the quote alludes to that.

Thanks. I just read the article, so I guess I was assuming it was new and wouldn't have been quoted.

Heinlein's Fair Witnesses show a rationality failure.

It is impossible to report things "just as they are" without imposing implicit interpretation.

All observation and all language depends on an implicit model.

As I recall, Fair Witnesses didn't ever give probabilities, they talked in binary terms. Morris, on the other hand, sounds calibrated.

I'd extend Eugene's reply and point out that both the original and modified version of the sentence are observations. As such, it doesn't matter that the two sentences are grammatically similar; it's entirely possible that one is observed and the other is not. History has plenty of examples of people who are willing to do harm for a good cause and end up just doing harm; history does not have plenty of examples of people who are willing to cut people open to remove cancer and end up just cutting people open.

Also, the phrasing "to end malaria" isn't analogous to "to remove cancer" because while the surgery only has a certain probability of working, the uncertainty in that probability is limited. We know the risks of surgery, we know how well surgery works to treat cancer, and so we can weigh those probabilities. When ending malaria (in this example), the claim that the experiment has so-and-so chance of ending malaria involves a lot more human judgment than the claim that surgery has so-and-so chance of removing cancer.

Yep. I've heard similar speculations regarding surgeons before. Fortunately nowadays we can take appropriate measures to compensate (surgeons are highly paid and closely monitored; we take a lot of care that medicine be evidence-based; the rationale behind specific medical interventions is carefully documented and checked multiple times; we require medical professionals to train for longer than any other profession). But note that for most of human history, the interventions performed by almost all medical professionals were literally worse than nothing.

The second sentence is an empirical observation that is clearly false in your example.

One problem is that if we, say, start admiring people for acting in "more utilitarian" ways, what we may actually be selecting for is psychopathy.

Strawman. Does any moral system anyone's ever proposed say we should never attempt to accomplish goals?

I agree that utilitarianism is "not in our nature," but what has this to do with rationality?

Utilitarianism is pretty fundamental around here. Not everyone here agrees with it, but pretty much all ethical discussions here take it as a precondition for even having a discussion. The assertion that we are not, cannot be, and never will be utilitarians is therefore very relevant.

If you are suggesting by that emphasis on "nature" that we might act to change our nature and remake ourselves into better utilitarians, I would ask, if we are in fact not utilitarians, why should we make ourselves so? Infatuation with the tidiness of the VNM theorem?

Whether, and how much, you trust your own judgment over that of an expert should depend at least in part on the degree to which you think your situation is unusual.

The expert also is better equipped to discern whether a situation is unusual, because the expert has seen more.

To the non-expert, something really mysterious and weird must be going on to explain these puzzling symptoms. Computer A can ping computer B, but B can't ping A? That's so strange! After all, ping is supposed to test whether two computers can talk to each other on the network, right? How could it possibly work one way but not the other? Is something wrong with the switch? Is one of the network cards broken? Is it a virus?!

To the expert, that's not unusual at all. One computer has the wrong subnet mask set. Almost every time. Like, that's 20 to 100 times more likely than a hardware problem or something broken in the network infrastructure, and it can be checked in seconds. And while the machine may have a virus too, that's not what causes these symptoms.

(if in fact he is an expert and not a trained monkey reading a script)

This brings up another related problem, namely how often supposed "experts" actually aren't.

Yup.

if I understand "hastily" to mean, roughly, "more rapidly/sloppily than prudence dictates", then this statement is trivially true.

Trivial statements are often useful as reminders of facts, particularly when those facts are tradeoffs we would rather not have to face.

puts "quantum" + " consciousness"

=> quantum consciousness

Here ignorance is acting as the "+" operator, binding the two strings into one. On reflection, it's not as clever as I thought it was when I read it on Hacker News. Rationality quotes should be scrutable. I'll retract.

It’s something I learned from animal ethology. An “overdetermined” behavior is one for which there are multiple sufficient explanations. To unpack: “For every interesting behavior of animals and humans there is more than one valid and sufficient causal theory.” Evolution likes overdetermined behaviors; they serve multiple functions at once.

Eric Raymond

Google Is My Friend.

What's the difference between "based on computation of the odds" and "based on some model"?

Taleb is doing some handwaving here.

"Some model" in this context is just the assumption of a specific probability distribution. So if, for example, you believe that the observation values are normally distributed with the mean of 0 and the standard deviation of 1, the chance of seeing a value greater than 3 (a "three-sigma value") is 0.13%. The chance of seeing a value greater than 6 (a "six-sigma value") is 9.87e-10. E.g. if your observations are financial daily returns, you effectively should never ever see a six-sigma value. The issue is that in practice you do see such values, pretty often, too.

The problem with Taleb's statement is that to estimate the probabilities of seeing certain values in the future necessarily requires some model, even if implicit. Without one you can not do the "computation of the odds" unless you are happy with the conclusion that the probability to see a value you've never seen before is zero.

Taleb's criticism of the default assumption of normality in much of financial analysis is well-founded. But when he starts to rail against models and assumptions in general, he's being silly.

Maybe it isn't the clearest way of describing it, but it seems that by "computation of odds" he means using at least some observation of frequencies, and is contrasting this with computing the probability of events for which there have as yet been no occurrences, so no observation of frequency has been possible.

But, if you multiply "once in every ten thousand years" by all the different kinds of things that could be said to happen once every ten thousand years, don't you get something closer to "many times a day"?

The computation is not relevant, because when you make a prediction that, say, some excursion in the stock market will happen only once in ten thousand years, you are making a prediction about that specific thing, not ten thousand things. It will be a thing you have never seen, because if you had seen it happen, you could not claim it would only happen once in ten thousand years—the observation would be a refutation of that claim. Since you have not seen it, you are deriving it from a theory, and moreover a theory applied at an extreme it has never been tested at. For such a prediction to be reliable, you need to know that your theory actually grasps the basic mechanism of the phenomenon, so that the observations that you have been able to make justify placing confidence in its extremes. This is a very high bar to reach. Here are a few examples of theories where extremes turned out to differ from reality:

Newtonian gravity --> precession of Mercury

Ideal gas laws --> non-ideal gases

Daltonian atomic theory --> multiple isotopes of the same element

If you made ten million predictions of things that happen once every ten thousand years, and about three times a day one of them happens, then it would be sensible to conclude that a given one happens about once every ten thousand years. Most people don't do this, however. If someone managed to make ten million such predictions, they'd likely end up with a lot more than three of them happening a day.

Thanks, fixed.

The basic gist of it seems to be that we don't have, and ought not expect evolved systems like ourselves to have, the cognitive capability to understand our cognitive limitations, at least not without information about the causes of those limitations that comes from something other than "metacognition".

I'm not sure what Bakker means by "metacognition"; if he means this I'm pretty confident he's just wrong.

Yet, no one has been on the moon in decades. Environmental circumstances cannot be ignored. You can't go to the moon right now -- maybe in some years, most likely not. "What can a twelfth-century peasant do to save themselves from annihilation? Nothing."

Tyrion is frequently put into situations where he relies on his family's reputation for paying debts.

It's a real-life Newcomb-like problem - specifically a case of Parfit's Hitchhiker - illustrating the practical benefits of being seen as the sort of agent who keeps promises. It's not an ordinary quid-pro-quo because there is, in fact, no incentive for Tyrion to keep his end of the bargain once he gets what he wants other than to be seen as the sort of person who keeps his bargain.

Think it's a stretch?

Something about the opposite of Parfit's hitchhiker? Developing a reputation for following through on promises one could renege on.

From the point of view of your genes, likely to reproduce and beneficial are exactly the same thing. That's trivially true.

Also not particularly interesting even if true: crazy beliefs that get you killed or prevent you from breeding have to spread non-parentally. They don't have to be particularly persuasive or virulent, there just has to be some other mechanism (e.g. state control of education, military discipline, enjoyable but idiotic forms of mass entertainment) to spread them.

The prevalence of these means doesn't even have to depend on the ones spreading the memes adopting them for themselves: there can be an economic motive for those who promote them for others to believe crazy things; like there is for drug dealers to sell rather than use heroin.

who reproduces more in the present-day US, white people or black people?

The welfare subsidies that make this a viable strategy are a very recent phenomenon.

Who is this "we" you speak of?

If your objection is that it's mere text and not a quote, well, allow me to add an attribution. I do think you're taking the whole quotes thread idea a little more seriously than it was ever intended to be taken.