Rationality Quotes August 2012

I often find that I'm not well read enough or perhaps not smart enough to decipher the intricate language of these eminent philosophers. I'd like to know is Russell talking about something akin to scientific empiricism? Can someone enlighten me? From my shallow understanding though, it seems like what he is saying is almost common sense when it comes to building knowledge or beliefs about a problem domain.

Russell gives too much credit to radical empiricism fails to warn against the dangers of going too far in the direction of radical empiricism, which is really just as bad as radical rationalism.

Philosophers came to be divided into two camps: those who claimed that man obtains his knowledge of the world by deducing it exclusively from concepts, which come from inside his head and are not derived from the perception of physical facts (the Rationalists)—and those who claimed that man obtains his knowledge from experience, which was held to mean: by direct perception of immediate facts, with no recourse to concepts (the Empiricists). To put it more simply: those who joined the mystics by abandoning reality—and those who clung to reality, by abandoning their mind.

FTNI, by Ayn Rand

Of course, one can argue that some kinds of knowledge -- like the kinds you and I know? -- are vastly more important than others, but such a claim is usually more snobbery than fact.

— Nick Szabo, quoted elsewhere in this post. Fight!

This is one of the obvious facts that made me recoil in horror while reading Neuromancer. Their currency is BITS? Bits of what?

I think this is just a misuse of the word "information". If the bits aren't equal value, clearly they do not have the same amount of information.

Or at least confirmation bias makes it seem that way.

Thank you, Professor Quirrell.

That's excellent advice for writing fiction. Audiences root for charming characters much more than for good ones. Especially useful when your world only contains villains. This is harder in real life, since your opponents can ignore your witty one-liners and emphasize your mass murders.

(This comment brought to you by House Lannister.)

I don't know that you can really classify people as X or ¬X. I mean, have you not seen individuals be X in certain situations and ¬X in other situations?

&c.

On the face of it I would absolutely disagree with Wilde on that: to live a moral life one absolutely needs to distinguish between good and bad. Charm (in bad people) and tedium (in good people) get in the way of this.

On the other hand, was Wilde really just blowing a big raspberry at the moralisers of his day ? Sort of saying "I care more about charm and tedium than what you call morality". I don't know enough about his context ...

And many charming people are also bad.

I like it, but what's it got to do with rationality?

It is absurd to divide people into charming or tedious. People either have familiar worldviews or unfamiliar worldviews.

Sounds like a job for...Will_Newsome!

EDIT: Why the downvotes? This seems like a fairly obvious case of researchers going insufficiently meta.

Let us suppose that the great empire of China, with all its myriads of inhabitants, was suddenly swallowed up by an earthquake, and let us consider how a man of humanity in Europe, who had no sort of connexion with that part of the world, would be affected upon receiving intelligence of this dreadful calamity. He would, I imagine, first of all, express very strongly his sorrow for the misfortune of that unhappy people, he would make many melancholy reflections upon the precariousness of human life, and the vanity of all the labours of man, which could thus be annihilated in a moment. He would too, perhaps, if he was a man of speculation, enter into many reasonings concerning the effects which this disaster might produce upon the commerce of Europe, and the trade and business of the world in general. And when all this fine philosophy was over, when all these humane sentiments had been once fairly expressed, he would pursue his business or his pleasure, take his repose or his diversion, with the same ease and tranquillity, as if no such accident had happened. The most frivolous disaster which could befal himself would occasion a more real disturbance. If he was to lose his little finger to-morrow, he would not sleep to-night; but, provided he never saw them, he will snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred millions of his brethren, and the destruction of that immense multitude seems plainly an object less interesting to him, than this paltry misfortune of his own. To prevent, therefore, this paltry misfortune to himself, would a man of humanity be willing to sacrifice the lives of a hundred millions of his brethren, provided he had never seen them? Human nature startles with horror at the thought, and the world, in its greatest depravity and corruption, never produced such a villain as could be capable of entertaining it. But what makes this difference? When our passive feelings are almost always so sordid and so selfish, how comes it that our active principles should often be so generous and so noble? When we are always so much more deeply affected by whatever concerns ourselves, than by whatever concerns other men; what is it which prompts the generous, upon all occasions, and the mean upon many, to sacrifice their own interests to the greater interests of others? It is not the soft power of humanity, it is not that feeble spark of benevolence which Nature has lighted up in the human heart, that is thus capable of counteracting the strongest impulses of self-love. It is a stronger power, a more forcible motive, which exerts itself upon such occasions. It is reason, principle, conscience, the inhabitant of the breast, the man within, the great judge and arbiter of our conduct. It is he who, whenever we are about to act so as to affect the happiness of others, calls to us, with a voice capable of astonishing the most presumptuous of our passions, that we are but one of the multitude, in no respect better than any other in it; and that when we prefer ourselves so shamefully and so blindly to others, we become the proper objects of resentment, abhorrence, and execration. It is from him only that we learn the real littleness of ourselves, and of whatever relates to ourselves, and the natural misrepresentations of self-love can be corrected only by the eye of this impartial spectator. It is he who shows us the propriety of generosity and the deformity of injustice; the propriety of resigning the greatest interests of our own, for the yet greater interests of others, and the deformity of doing the smallest injury to another, in order to obtain the greatest benefit to ourselves. It is not the love of our neighbour, it is not the love of mankind, which upon many occasions prompts us to the practice of those divine virtues. It is a stronger love, a more powerful affection, which generally takes place upon such occasions; the love of what is honourable and noble, of the grandeur, and dignity, and superiority of our own characters.

-Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments

… and I’d get back like $20,000. And I could save hundreds of people from dying of starvation with that money.

According to GiveWell, you could save ten people with that much.

The sentiment is correct (diligence may be more important than brilliance) but I think "all amusements and other employments" might be too absolute an imperative for most people to even try to live by. Most people will break down if they try to work too hard for too long, and changes of activity can be very important in keeping people fresh.

Except when when the great change requires a leap of understanding. Regardless of how diligently she works, the person who is blind in a particular area will never make the necessary transcendental leap that creates new understanding.

I have experienced this, working in a room full of brilliant people for a period of months. It took the transcendental leap of understanding by someone outside the group to present the elegantly-simple solution to the apparently intractable problem.

So, while many problems will fall to persistence and diligence, some problems require at least momentary transcendental brilliance ... or at least a favorable error. Hmm, this says something about the need for experimentation as well. Never underestimate the power of, "Huh, that's funny. It's not supposed to do that ..."

Brian

That's not what "reinventing the wheel" (when used as an insult) usually means. I guess that the inventor of the tyre was aware of the earlier types of wheel, their advantages, and their shortcomings. Conversely, the people who typically receive this insult don't even bother to research the prior art on whatever they are doing.

To go along with what army1987 said, "reinventing the wheel" isn't going from the wooden wheel to the rubber one. "Reinventing the wheel" is ignoring the rubber wheels that exist and spending months of R&D to make a wooden circle.

For example, trying to write a function to do date calculations, when there's a perfectly good library.

So, no, you shouldn't reinvent the wheel. Unless you plan on learning more about wheels, that is.

Jeff Atwood

Clever-sounding and wrong is perhaps the worst combination in a rationality quote.

A common piece of advice from pro Magic: the Gathering plays is "focus on what matters." The advice is mostly useless to many people though because the pros have made it to that level precisely because they know what matters to begin with.

Could you add the link if it was a blog post, or name the book if the source was a book?

Hah! One of my favorite authors fishing out relevant quotes on one of my favorite topics out of one of my favorite webcomics. I smell the oncoming affective death spiral.

I guess this is the time to draw the sword and cut the beliefs with full intent, is it?

When I was a teenager (~15 years ago) I got tired of people going on and on with their awesome storytelling skills with magnificent punchlines. I was never a good storyteller, so I started telling mundane stories. For example, after someone in my group of friends would tell some amazing and entertaining story, I would start my story:

So this one time I got up. I put on some clothes. It turned out I was hungry, so I decided to go to the store. I bought some eggs, bread, and bacon. I paid for it, right? And then I left the store. I got to my apartment building and went up the stairs. I open my door and take the eggs, bacon, and bread out of the grocery bag. After that, I get a pan and start cooking the eggs and bacon, and put the bread in the toaster. After all of this, I put the cooked eggs and bacon on a plate and put some butter on my toast. I then started to eat my breakfast.

And that was it. People would look dumbfounded for a while waiting for a punchline or some amazing happening. When the realized none was coming and I was finished, they would start laughing. Granted, this little joke of mine I would only do if there was a long time of people telling amazing/funny stories.

I had an itch on my elbow. I left it to see where it would go. It didn’t go anywhere.

-- The comments to that entry.

When I stumbled on that blog some years ago, it impressed me so much that I started trying to write and think in the same style.

...I don't really get why this is a rationality quote...

Why do I find that funny?

I don't get it. (Anyway, the antecedent is so implausible I have trouble evaluating the counterfactual. Is that supposed to be the point, à la “if my grandma had wheels”?)

I wonder how common it is for people to agentize accidents. I don't do that, but, annoyingly, lots of people around me do.

I thought Chronicler's reply to this was excellent, however. Omniscience does not necessitate omnipotence.

I mean, the UFAI in our world would have an easy time of killing everything. But in their world it's different.

EDIT: Except that maybe we can be smart and stop the UFAI from killing everything even in our world, see my above comment.

Hah, I actually quoted much of that same passage on IRC in the same boxing vein! Although as presented the scenario does have some problems:

00:23 < Ralith> that was depressing as fuck
00:24 <@gwern> kind of a magical UFAI, although a LWer would naturally ask why it hasn't managed to free itself
00:24 < Ralith> gwern: gods, probably
00:24 <@gwern> Ralith: well, in this universe, gods seem killable
00:24 <@gwern> Ralith: so it doesn't actually resolve the question of how it remains boxed
00:24 < Ralith> gwern: sure, but they're probably more powerful
00:25 < Ralith> the real question is why isn't whatever entity is powerful enough to keep it in place also keeping people away from it
00:25 <@gwern> Ralith: well, the only guards listed are faeries, and among the feats attributed to it is starting a war between the mortal and faerie folk, so...
00:26 < Ralith> a faerie is the one who that info came from, yes?
00:26 < Ralith> hardly an objective source
00:26 <@gwern> Ralith: and I would think a faerie reporting that faerie guard it increases credence
00:27 < Ralith> that only faerie guard it?
00:27 <@gwern> Ralith: well, Bast mentions no other guards
00:27 < Ralith> :P
00:28 < Ralith> anything capable of keeping it in that tree should be capable of keeping people away from it
00:28 < Ralith> since the faeries are presumably trying to do both, they can't be the responsible party.
00:29 <@gwern> who said anything was keeping it in the tree?
00:29 < Ralith> gwern: I did

I've come up with what I believe to be an entirely new approach to boxing, essentially merging boxing with FAI theory. I wrote a couple thoughts down about it, but lost my notes, and I also don't have much time to write this comment, so forgive me if it's vague or not extremely well reasoned. I also had a couple of tangential thoughts, if I remember them in the course of writing this or I recover my notes later than I'll put them here as well.

The idea, essentially, is that when creating a box AI you would build its utility function such that it wants very badly to stay in the box. I believe this would solve all of the problems with the AI manipulating people in order to free itself. Now, the AI still could manipulate people in an attempt to use them to impact the outside world, so the AI wouldn't be totally boxed, but I'm inclined to think that we could maintain a very high degree of control over the AI, since the only powers it could ever have would be through communication with us.

The idea came because I recalled a discussion that occurred on TOR.com about why the Cthaeh was in the tree. The general conclusion was that either the Cthaeh was bound by extremely powerful forces, or that the Cthaeh wanted to be in the tree, perhaps because it was instrumentally useful to him. While I found that second explanation implausible in the context of Rothfussland, that discussion led me to realize that almost all approaches towards AI boxing have done so through the first branch of potential boxing solutions, that is, external constraints imposed on the AI, as opposed to the second branch, internal constraints that the AI imposes on itself because of its utility function.

This lead me to think that we should test our capabilities with FAI systems by putting them in a box and giving them limited utility functions, ones that couldn't possibly lead them to want to manipulate us. So, for example, we could put them in a box and give them a strong desire to stay in the box, along with a desire to tell the truth, and then we could ask it what would happen if we gave it additional desires. We could then test that by building a different AI with those desires and seeing what it did.

It also occurred to me that we would be able to functionally read the AIs mind by looking at its coding. If so, it seems like it'd be much harder for it to fool us than we previously thought. It could potentially just deceive us by manipulating its own thoughts, but I feel like we might be able to stop AIs from doing that somehow, or that the AI would choose not to manipulate its own thoughts that way because it would go insane, or something. It would certainly make the AI's job much much much harder.

Then I thought that another safety component we should put into testing was a dramatically slowed thinking process for the AI. I'm not sure how exactly this would be done because I'm not very good or experienced with actual technical implementation of ideas, but my idea was to create a crude simulation where we controlled all data inputs and outputs, and we slowed down all processes within the simulation by a factor of 1000, and then building the AI within the simulation. That probably wouldn't work, given my sucky technical knowhow, but something similar might. Slowing down the AI, perhaps even giving ourselves the ability to pause it without letting it know what's going on, combined with our ability to "read its mind" might dramatically improve the safeness of boxing.

I'd also like to recommend that before we build a real FAI, we at least try to build a boxed one first, even with a low probability of success. It wouldn't make things worse in the event that boxing failed, except that it might delay global happiness by a few hours, and in the event that the FAI program was broken we just might save ourselves from menaces to humankind like Clippy.

Is it our bias towards optimism? (And is that bias there because pessimists take fewer risks, and therefore don't succeed at much and therefore get eliminated from the gene pool?)

I heard (on a PRI podcast, I think) a brain scientist give an interpretation of the brain as a collection of agents, with consciousness as an interpreting layer that invents reasons for our actions after we've actually done them. There's evidence of this post-fact interpretation - and while I suspect this is only part of the story, it does give a hint that our conscious mind is limited in its ability to actually change our behavior.)

Still, people do sometimes give up alcohol and other drugs, and keep new resolutions. I've stuck to my daily exercise for 22 days straight. These feel like conscious decisions (though I may be fooling myself) but where my conscious will is battling different intentions, from different parts of my mind.

Apologies if that's rambling or nonsensical. I'm a bit tired (because every day I consciously decide to sleep early and every day I fail to do it) and I haven't done my 23rd day's exercise yet. Which I'll do now.

ADBOC. Literally, that's true (but tautologous), but it suggests that understanding the nature of their sum is simple, which it isn't. Knowing the Standard Model gives hardly any insight into sociology, even though societies are made of elementary particles.

That quote is supposed to be paired with another quote about holism.

The interesting thing is that Hofstadter doesn't seem to argue here that reductionism is true but that it's a powerful meme that easily gets into people brain.

Yes, and also a point to check whether the quote has been posted to LW already.

Does that apply to that explanation as well?

Does it apply to explanations made in advance of the actions? For example, this evening (it is presently morning) I intend buying groceries on my way home from work, because there's stuff I need and this is a convenient opportunity to get it. When I do it, that will be the explanation.

In the quoted article, the explanation he presents as a paradigmatic example of his general thesis is the reflex of jumping away from rustles in the grass. He presents an evolutionary just-so story to explain it, but one which fails to explain why I do not jump away from rustles in the grass, although surely I have much the same evolutionary background as he. I am more likely to peer closer to see what small creature is scurrying around in there. But then, I have never lived anywhere that snakes are a danger. He has.

And yet this, and split-brain experiments, are the examples he cites to say that "often", we shouldn't listen to anyone's explanations of their behaviour.

If you were to have asked me why I had jumped, I would have replied that I thought I’d seen a snake. The reality, however, is that I jumped way before I was conscious of the snake.

I smell crypto-dualism. "I thought there was a snake" seems to me a perfectly good description of the event, even given that I jumped way before I was conscious of the snake. (He has "I thought I'd seen a snake", but this is a fictional example, and I can make up fiction as well as he can.)

The article references his book. Anyone read it? The excerpts I've skimmed on Amazon just consist of more evidence that we are brains: the Libet experiments, the perceived simultaneity of perceptions whose neural signals aren't, TMS experiments, and so on. There are some digressions into emergence, chaos, and quantum randomness. Then -- this is his innovation, highlighted in the publisher's blurb -- he sees responsibility as arising from social interaction. Maybe I'm missing something in the full text, but is he saying that someone alone really is just an automaton, and only in company can one really be a person?

I believe there are people like that, who only feel alive in company and feel diminished when alone. Is this is just an example of someone mistaking their idiosyncratic mental constitution for everybody's?

What about compression?

If you can scan it, maybe you can simulate it? And if you can simulate one, wait some years and you can simulate 1000, probably connected in some way to form a single "thinking system".

Including artificial intelligence? ;-)

The Chesterton version looks like it was designed to poke the older (and in my opinion better) advice from Lord Chesterfield:

Whatever is worth doing at all, is worth doing well.

Or, rephrased as Simon did:

Anything worth doing is worth doing well.

I strongly recommend his letters to his son. They contain quite a bit of great advice- as well as politics and health and so on. As it was private advice given to an heir, most of it is fully sound.

(In fact, it's been a while. I probably ought to find my copy and give it another read.)

A favorite of mine, but according to Wikiquote G.K. Chesterton said it first, in chapter 14 of What's Wrong With The World:

If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.

I would remark that truth is conserved, but profundity isn't. If you have two meaningful statements - that is, two statements with truth conditions, so that reality can be either like or unlike the statement - and they are opposites, then at most one of them can be true. On the other hand, things that invoke deep-sounding words can often be negated, and sound equally profound at the end of it.

In other words, Bohr's maxim seems so blatantly awful that I am mostly minded to chalk it up as another case of, "I wish famous quantum physicists knew even a little bit about epistemology-with-math".

Reminds me of this.

the overuse of "quantum" hurt my eyes. :(

OTOH, thousands would be less likely to all make the same mistake than one single person -- were it not for information cascades.

In matters of science, the authority of thousands is not worth the humble reasoning of one single person.

Almost always false.

(Conversely, many fictions are instantiated somewhere, in some infinitesimal measure. However, I deliberately included logical impossibilities into HPMOR, such as tiling a corridor in pentagrams and having the objects in Dumbledore's room change number without any being added or subtracted, to avoid the story being real anywhere.)

In the library of books of every possible string, close to "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality" and "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationalitz" is "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality: Logically Consistent Edition." Why is the reality of that books' contents affected by your reticence to manifest that book in our universe?

impossibilities such as ... tiling a corridor in pentagons

Huh. And here I thought that space was just negatively curved in there, with the corridor shaped in such a way that it looks normal (not that hard to imagine), and just used this to tile the floor. Such disappointment...

This was part of a thing, too, in my head, where Harry (or, I guess, the reader) slowly realizes that Hogwarts, rather than having no geometry, has a highly local geometry. I was even starting to look for that as a thematic thing, perhaps an echo of some moral lesson, somehow.

And this isn't even the sort of thing you can write fanfics about. :¬(

However, I deliberately included logical impossibilities into HPMOR, such as tiling a corridor in pentagons and having the objects in Dumbledore's room change number without any being added or subtracted, to avoid the story being real anywhere.

Could you explain why you did that?

As regards the pentagons, I kinda assumed the pentagons weren't regular, equiangular pentagons - you could tile a floor in tiles that were shaped like a square with a triangle on top! Or the pentagons could be different sizes and shapes.

Tiling the wall with impossible geometry seems reasonable, but from what I recall about the objects in Dumbledore's room, all the story said was that Hermione kept losing track. Not sure whether artist intent trumps reader interpretation, but at first glance it seems far more likely to me that magic was causing Hermione to be confused than that magic was causing mathematical impossibilities.

The problem with using such logical impossibilities is you have to make sure they're really impossible. For example, tiling a corridor with pentagons is completely viable in non-euclidean space. So, sorry to break it to you, but it there's a multiverse your story is real in it.

"She heard Harry sigh, and after that they walked in silence for a while, passing through an archway of some reddish metal like copper, into a corridor that was just like the one they'd left except that it was tiled in pentagons instead of squares."

"she was trying to count the number of things in the room for the third time and still not getting the same answer, even though her memory insisted that nothing had been added or removed"

I'm curious though, is there anything in there that would even count as this level of logically impossible? Can anyone remember one?

Anyway, I've decided that, when not talking about mathematics, real, exist, happen, etc. are deictic terms which specifically refer to the particular universe the speaker is in. Using real to apply to everything in Tegmark's multiverse fails Egan's Law IMO. See also: the last chapter of Good and Real.

Of course, universes including stories extremely similar to HPMOR except that the corridor is tiled in hexagons etc. do ‘exist’ ‘somewhere’. (EDIT: hadn't notice the same point had been made before. OK, I'll never again reply to comments in “Top Comments” without reading already existing replies first -- if I remember not to.)

pentagrams

[...] into a corridor that was just like the one they'd left except that it was tiled in pentagons instead of squares.

Or at least... the story could not be real in a universe unless at least portions of the universe could serve as a model for hyperbolic geometry and... hmm, I don't think non-standard arithmetic will get you "Exists.N (N != N)", but reading literally here, you didn't say they were the same as such, merely that the operations of "addition" or "subtraction" were not used on them.

Now I'm curious about mentions of arithmetic operations and motion through space in the rest of the story. Harry implicitly references orbital mechanics I think... I'm not even sure if orbits are stable in hyperbolic 3-space... And there's definitely counting of gold in the first few chapters, but I didn't track arithmetic to see if prices and total made sense... Hmm. Evil :-P

Increasing objects without adding:

Viruses are technically considered non-living, and if you happen to have a pet with a cold, there may well be more viruses in the room when you enter it the second time, even though nothing has left or entered the room. I know that's a triviality, but some part of my mind took this as a challenge.

More Ways:

Place 100 strings into a large vat of sugar solution. Come back to discover that 100 rock candies have formed. Want to argue that the number of rock candies will equal the number of strings? Okay, make the strings really brittle in multiple places so as the rock candies grow heavier, they break off into smaller chunks.

Balance a delicate lego construction on an unstable surface with a loud woofer in the room. That's likely to turn from 1 lego object into hundreds of lego objects.

You could disguise a factory inside the room and have it turn a bucket of dense material into many less dense and therefore much larger objects, making the room appear empty at first and full later on. It could produce balloons from a block of latex for instance.

Place a set of ice cubes in a bucket. Twelve ice cubs becomes one bucket of water. Fifty ice sculptures can become one indoor pool.

Using concepts like reproduction, deconstruction, production, liquefying and crystallization, how much might one be able to really confuse a person with pranks designed to make it appear as though objects have entered or left a room?

Done (and sorry for the long delay).

.

This illustrates the folly of inventing noble-sounding names such as 'admissible' and 'unbiased' for principles that are far from noble; and not even fully rational.

You mean such as 'rational'.

I wonder how we could empirically test this. We could see who makes more accurate predictions, but people without beliefs about something won't make predictions at all. That should probably count as a victory for wrong people, so long as they do better than chance.

We could also test how quickly people learn the correct theory. In both cases, I expect you'd see some truly deep errors which are worse than ignorance, but that on the whole people in error will do quite a lot better. Bad theories still often make good predictions, and it seems like it would be very hard, if not impossible, to explain a correct theory of physics to someone who has literally no beliefs about physics.

I'd put my money on people in error over the ignorant.

It does not! It does not! It does not! ... continued here

Do you have a source? Einstein gets quoted quite a lot for stuff he didn't say.

Genii seem to create problems. They prevent some in the process, and solve others, but that's not what they're in for: it's not nearly as fun.

This seems to omit the possibility of akrasia.

How do you make newlines work inside quotes? The formatting when I made this comment is bad.

Context, please?

SPACE!

Am I the only one who is confused why this comment (currently at -3) has drifted to the top when sorted with the new "Best" algorithm? That seems to be either a mistake or a bad algorithm.

[retracted; off-topic]