I can't help but remember you talking about a teacher who always had an error in his lectures, and over the course of the semester made them harder and harder to find. The last lecture, which was the most complex, didn't have a flaw.
I was more or less surrounded by people of average sanity when I grew up, but they still seemed pretty nuts to me. (Completely off-topic, but I really wonder why people tell children known-fantasies such as Santa Clause and the Easter Bunny)
I don't think its really accurate to say most people are insane. Clearly they need to be sane for the world to keep on running. IMO, they are insane when they can afford to be - which is pretty common in politics, religion and untestable hypothesizes, but a LOT less common in the workplace. Most people just aren't interested in truth because truth doesn't pay out in a lot of circumstances. I wonder if science might change in your direction (and how quickly?) if betting markets were more commonly accepted?
When they taught me about the scientific method in high school, the last step was "go back to the beginning and repeat." There was also a lot about theories replacing other theories and then being replaced later, new technologies leading to new measurements, and new ideas leading to big debates.
I don't remember if they explicitly said, "You can do science right and still get the wrong answer," but it was very strongly (and logically) implied.
I don't know what you were taught, but I expect it was something similar.
All this "emotion...
I can't speak for him, but I developed below-average social curiosity after I realized that people usually talk about things that aren't really interesting.
People who've had their trust broken in the sanity of the people around them, seem to be able to evaluate strange ideas on their merits.
I'd say instead that this prod produces a high variance response. Some rise to the challenge and become more rational, while others fall even deeper into delusion. Yes the most rational people tend to have experienced this, but so also for the most irrational people.
Science is captitalised, suggesting an abnormal definition of the term. Can this definition be found somewhere? What is "Science" - if it it different from science - and if it is not different, then why captialise it?
I started to seriously think about rationality only when I started to think about AI, trying to understand grounding. When I saw that meaning, communication, correctness and understanding are just particular ways to characterize probabilistic relations between "representation" and "represented", it all started to come together, and later was transferred to human reasoning and beyond. So, it was the enigma of AI that acted as a catalyst in my case, not a particular delusion (or misplaced trust). Most of the things I read on the subject w...
The idea that flaws need to be added - and that the final lecture will be flawless - is both silly and presumptuous. There will almost certainly be flaws, whether they are added or not, and our judgment is not adequate to determine whether our own work has them or not.
Eliezer, all of your problems with "Science" seem to stem not from any problems with the method itself, but from your personal tendency to treat the method as a revelation that people have an emotional investment in: in other words, a religion.
There are a variety of ways people ca...
I agree with your general view, but I came to the same view by a more conventional route: I got a PhD in philosophy of science. If you study philosophy of science, you soon find that nobody really knows what science is. The "Science" you describe is essentially Popper's view of science, which has been extensively criticized and revised by later philosophers. For example, how can you falsify a theory? You need a fact (an "observation") that conflicts with the theory. But what is a fact, if not a true mini-theory? And how can you know that it is true, if theories can be falsified, but not proven? I studied philosophy because I was looking for a rational foundation for understanding the world; something like what Descartes promised with "cogito ergo sum". I soon learned that there is no such foundation. Making a rational model of the world is not like making a home, where the first step is to build a solid foundation. It is more like trying to patch a hole in a sinking ship, where you don't have the luxury of starting from scratch. I view science as an evolutionary process. Changes must be made in small increments: "Natura non facit saltus".
One flaw I see in your post is that the rule "You cannot trust any rule" applies recursively to itself. (Anything you can do, I can do meta.) I would say "Doubt everything, but one at a time, not all at once."
@Caledonian: If it is an old and trivial insight, why do most scientists and near all non-scientists ignore it?
As Eli said in his post, there is a difference between saying the words and knowing, on a gut level, what it means - only then have you truly incorporated the knowledge and it will aid you in your quest to understand the world.
Also, you say: Caledonian: but from your personal tendency to treat the method as a revelation that people have an emotional investment in
Of course people have an emotional investment in this stuff!! Do not make the old mist...
You will have to study [...] and social psychology [...]
Please could you recommend some social psychology material?
As you explain so clearly here, the point is to think for ourselves instead of trusting in any person or system. This valuable insight can be reached by many idiosyncratic paths through life. Your personal path to it, trusting too much in Science itself, is an ironically interesting one, unlikely to be trod by most. That's why your line "Science Isn't Strict Enough" fails to resonate with some readers.
Jared, why should you trust yourself more than someone else? And if there is someone more worthy of trust than you, wouldn't it be a more rational strategy to let him think for you instead of thinking for yourself?
If my own judgment is so faulty that I choose to let somebody else do all my thinking for me, then how can I even trust the thinking behind my choice?
If you think that Science rewards coming up with stupid theories and disproving them just as much as more productive results, I can hardly even understand what you mean by Science beyond the "observe, hypothesize, test, repeat" overview given to small children as an introduction to the scientific method. Was Eliezer-18 blind to anything beyond such simple rote forumulas?
Negative results are forgiven but hardly ever rewarded (unless the theory disproven is widely believed).
If you'd put aside the rather bizarre bitterness and just say: "Baye...
"@Caledonian: If it is an old and trivial insight, why do most scientists and near all non-scientists ignore it?"
They don't. The mismatch between you and them is that they're busy thinking about something else at the moment. I like the rule Turney gave above: "Doubt everything, but one at a time, not all at once." Of course, a single person can't follow that rule completely (there's not enough time in a lifespan to doubt EVERYTHING), and most people pick the wrong things to doubt or are lazy in applying the rule.
Of course, that rule's g...
I find it difficult to be sympathetic towards someone who complains he wasn't warned that the rule "do not take things on faith" wasn't supposed to be taken on faith.
We could provide a warning, of course. But how would we then ensure that people understood and applied the warning? Warn them about the warning, perhaps? And then give them a warning about the warning warning?
We could talk until we're blue in the face, but the simple truth is that you cannot force people to apply a method consistently, rigorously, or intelligently. No amount of adding onto the lesson will make people apply it properly, it merely offers them more things to misunderstand, ignore, and apply inconsistently.
We could provide a warning, of course. But how would we then ensure that people understood and applied the warning? Warn them about the warning, perhaps? And then give them a warning about the warning warning?
That's the problem with discrete reasoning. When you have probabilities, this problem disappears. See http://www.ditext.com/carroll/tortoise.html
@billswift: Emotion might drive every human action (or not). That's beside the point. If an emotion drives you into a dead end, there's something wrong with that emotion.
My point was that if someone tells you the truth and you don't believe them, it's not fair to say they've led you astray. Eliezer said he didn't "emotionally believe" a truth he was told, even though he knew it was true. I'm not sure what that means, but it sounds like a problem with Eliezer, involving his emotions, not a problem with what he was told.
Jared, it is possible to see that someone is more intelligent and trustworthy than you, without therefore being yourself more intelligent and trustworthy than him.
Eliezer didn't trust science too much. He didn't trust it enough. Instead of taking the duties and requirements of skepticism seriously, he treated the scientific method as another faith system.
I'm sure that was a very comforting and familiar approach to take, but it was still wrong. Completely, fundamentally wrong. It's utterly incompatible with the skepticism, open-mindedness, and radical doubt that is essential to the scientific method. And it seems to have had long-lasting implications for the sorts of positions Eliezer takes.
One suggestion for the flaw:
Conclusions from this article: a) you are never safe b) you must understand a) on a emotional basis c) the only way to achieve b) is through an experience of failure after following the rules you trusted
The flaw is that the article actually does the opposite of what it wants to accomplish: by giving the warning(a) it makes people feel safer. In order to convey the necessary emotion of "not feeling safe"(b) Eliezer had to make the PS regarding the flaw.
In a certain sense this also negates c). I think Eliezer doesn't rea...
Roland, agreed.
Does anyone disagree that science does not have nearly as strict quantitative constraints as Bayescraft on what you may believe?
@Vladimir Nesov:
why do you say that the problem disappears when you have probabilities?
I guess you still have the same basic problem which is: what are your priors? You cannot bootstrap from nothing and I think that is what the tortoise was hinting at, that there are hidden assumptions in our reasoning that we are not aware of and that you can't think without using those hidden assumptions.
Roland,
Probabilities allow grades of beliefs, and just as Achilles's pursuit of tortoise can be considered as consisting of infinite number of steps, if you note that steps actually get infinitely short, you can sum them up to a finite quantity. Likewise, you can join infinitely many infinitely unlikely events into a compound event of finite probability. It is a way to avoid regress Caledonian was talking about. Evidence can shift probabilities on all metalevels, even if in some hapless formalism there are infinitely many of them, and still lead to reasonable finite conclusions (decisions).
Likewise, you can join infinitely many infinitely unlikely events into a compound event of finite probability. It is a way to avoid regress Caledonian was talking about.
No, Mr. Nesov, it is not. You and I are talking at cross purposes.
"The experimental method shall decide which hypothesis wins"?
When there are experiments that can reasonably be done, or have already been done, then this works, right?
"Doubt everything, but one at a time, not all at once."
Interestingly, Robin Hanson has an existing post on this subject:
To have the best chance of succeeding in a radical project, you should instead choose just a few related dimensions on which to make radical choices, and then make conservative conventional choices on all the other dimensions. This strategy minimizes the chance that some other project dimension will go badly wrong and take down your central radical idea with it.
I don't know about you guys, but being wrong scares the crap out of me. Or to say it another way, I'll do whatever it takes to get it right. It's a recursive sort of doubt.
Hi,
Once again interesting post, but it doesn't apply to my personal case. I've access to no statistics on the issue so I can't claim how exceptional I am, but my own parents are "more rational than average" (they are atheist maths teachers), and I don't think they are insane. Or not more than anyone else, at least.
I did realize that my parents were not perfect, and that if I could trust them in loving me and caring for me and wanting the best for me, I couldn't blindly trust anything they would say. But that didn't require, for me, such a massive...
Now that we have once again established that 1 and 0 are not probabilities, we have to remember that probabilities are still a strictly ordered set. How do we make it less dangerous?
For me, the discovery that science is too slow was bound up with the realization that science is not safe. My private discovery of the slowness of science didn't come from looking at the process of scientific discovery and reflecting on the time it took - rather, it arose from realizing that the things I learned or discovered via science were slower more painful than those I learned from other methods. "Other methods" encompasses everything from pure mathematics to That Magical Click, the first inescapable and the second, initially, unsupported...
Welcome to the Earth where ethanol is made from corn and environmentalists oppose nuclear power.
I find this to be a very attention grabbing comparison, so much so that I had to re-read this post 5+ times before I could see the forest through the trees (or tree as the case may be).
The reason these two examples strike me so is that I once held both of the underlying beliefs (ie that corn ethanol is bad and so is nuclear power). While I reversed both of these beliefs many years ago (prior to discovering HPMOR and lesswrong) I now see them as "belief ...
No one begins to truly search for the Way until their parents have failed them, their gods are dead, and their tools have shattered in their hand.
Nihil supernum.
That post scriptum.. It's just so amusing to have someone write out your exact thoughts and worries like that. It is very rarely that i get tears in my eyes from giggling, and I can't stop smirking about that. It is quite bothersome indeed that I am so unskilled in this art of reasoning that the best i can do is follow your words and hope they lead me to somewhere where i can eventually realize said flaws. I feel my journey will be riddled with such flaws no matter how hard i try to to avoid it. It's the nagging feeling I have almost constantly, and of which i have trouble explaining
What's trust?
Forget it. It's an honest question but it'll just appear as attention grabbing.
The only flaw I can see it's that this reasoning seems to put a lot of weight on the probability of meeting disaster by sticking with a well thought, well tested but imperfect set of rules, and not enough weight on the probability of meeting disaster by trying to be clever and do better than the rules, either by genuine fear of their limitations, or to follow a course of actions that you favour for reasons that aren't really part of your goals but that you are then free to endorse by using the fear of the rules' limits.
I get that the main ...
Does your experience support the claim that rationalists had their trust in their milieu (e.g. parents, cult, etc.) broken?
P.s. that was my personal experience but I'd really like to hear from others.
This wasn't precisely the reason I got here, but I think the biggest reason that I was open to the idea of rationality when I finally stumbled upon LessWrong and the whole Effective Altruism idea was my experience of becoming gay, after diverging from my christian upbringing.
During my time going to bible school (yes, I was in that deep), there was a lot of theology where I was confused and felt like I didn't understand why something was true, but just accepted that "I'm sure some high-level theologian out there has a reasonable answer for this, I jus...
I don't ask my friends about their childhoods—I lack social curiosity—and so I don't know how much of a trend this really is:
Of the people I know who are reaching upward as rationalists, who volunteer information about their childhoods, there is a surprising tendency to hear things like: "My family joined a cult and I had to break out," or "One of my parents was clinically insane and I had to learn to filter out reality from their madness."
My own experience with growing up in an Orthodox Jewish family seems tame by comparison... but it accomplished the same outcome: It broke my core emotional trust in the sanity of the people around me.
Until this core emotional trust is broken, you don't start growing as a rationalist. I have trouble putting into words why this is so. Maybe any unusual skills you acquire—anything that makes you unusually rational—requires you to zig when other people zag. Maybe that's just too scary, if the world still seems like a sane place unto you.
Or maybe you don't bother putting in the hard work to be extra bonus sane, if normality doesn't scare the hell out of you.
I know that many aspiring rationalists seem to run into roadblocks around things like cryonics or many-worlds. Not that they don't see the logic; they see the logic and wonder, "Can this really be true, when it seems so obvious now, and yet none of the people around me believe it?"
Yes. Welcome to the Earth where ethanol is made from corn and environmentalists oppose nuclear power. I'm sorry.
(See also: Cultish Countercultishness. If you end up in the frame of mind of nervously seeking reassurance, this is never a good thing—even if it's because you're about to believe something that sounds logical but could cause other people to look at you funny.)
People who've had their trust broken in the sanity of the people around them, seem to be able to evaluate strange ideas on their merits, without feeling nervous about their strangeness. The glue that binds them to their current place has dissolved, and they can walk in some direction, hopefully forward.
Lonely dissent, I called it. True dissent doesn't feel like going to school wearing black; it feels like going to school wearing a clown suit.
That's what it takes to be the lone voice who says, "If you really think you know who's going to win the election, why aren't you picking up the free money on the Intrade prediction market?" while all the people around you are thinking, "It is good to be an individual and form your own opinions, the shoe commercials told me so."
Maybe in some other world, some alternate Everett branch with a saner human population, things would be different... but in this world, I've never seen anyone begin to grow as a rationalist until they make a deep emotional break with the wisdom of their pack.
Maybe in another world, things would be different. And maybe not. I'm not sure that human beings realistically can trust and think at the same time.
Once upon a time, there was something I trusted.
Eliezer18 trusted Science.
Eliezer18 dutifully acknowledged that the social process of science was flawed. Eliezer18 dutifully acknowledged that academia was slow, and misallocated resources, and played favorites, and mistreated its precious heretics.
That's the convenient thing about acknowledging flaws in people who failed to live up to your ideal; you don't have to question the ideal itself.
But who could possibly be foolish enough to question, "The experimental method shall decide which hypothesis wins"?
Part of what fooled Eliezer18 was a general problem he had, with an aversion to ideas that resembled things idiots had said. Eliezer18 had seen plenty of people questioning the ideals of Science Itself, and without exception they were all on the Dark Side. People who questioned the ideal of Science were invariably trying to sell you snake oil, or trying to safeguard their favorite form of stupidity from criticism, or trying to disguise their personal resignation as a Deeply Wise acceptance of futility.
If there'd been any other ideal that was a few centuries old, the young Eliezer would have looked at it and said, "I wonder if this is really right, and whether there's a way to do better." But not the ideal of Science. Science was the master idea, the idea that let you change ideas. You could question it, but you were meant to question it and then accept it, not actually say, "Wait! This is wrong!"
Thus, when once upon a time I came up with a stupid idea, I thought I was behaving virtuously if I made sure there was a Novel Prediction, and professed that I wished to test my idea experimentally. I thought I had done everything I was obliged to do.
So I thought I was safe—not safe from any particular external threat, but safe on some deeper level, like a child who trusts their parent and has obeyed all the parent's rules.
I'd long since been broken of trust in the sanity of my family or my teachers at school. And the other children weren't intelligent enough to compete with the conversations I could have with books. But I trusted the books, you see. I trusted that if I did what Richard Feynman told me to do, I would be safe. I never thought those words aloud, but it was how I felt.
When Eliezer23 realized exactly how stupid the stupid theory had been—and that Traditional Rationality had not saved him from it—and that Science would have been perfectly okay with his wasting ten years testing the stupid idea, so long as afterward he admitted it was wrong...
...well, I'm not going to say it was a huge emotional convulsion. I don't really go in for that kind of drama. It simply became obvious that I'd been stupid.
That's the trust I'm trying to break in you. You are not safe. Ever.
Not even Science can save you. The ideals of Science were born centuries ago, in a time when no one knew anything about probability theory or cognitive biases. Science demands too little of you, it blesses your good intentions too easily, it is not strict enough, it only makes those injunctions that an average scientist can follow, it accepts slowness as a fact of life.
So don't think that if you only follow the rules of Science, that makes your reasoning defensible.
There is no known procedure you can follow that makes your reasoning defensible.
There is no known set of injunctions which you can satisfy, and know that you will not have been a fool.
There is no known morality-of-reasoning that you can do your best to obey, and know that you are thereby shielded from criticism.
No, not even if you turn to Bayescraft. It's much harder to use and you'll never be sure that you're doing it right.
The discipline of Bayescraft is younger by far than the discipline of Science. You will find no textbooks, no elderly mentors, no histories written of success and failure, no hard-and-fast rules laid down. You will have to study cognitive biases, and probability theory, and evolutionary psychology, and social psychology, and other cognitive sciences, and Artificial Intelligence—and think through for yourself how to apply all this knowledge to the case of correcting yourself, since that isn't yet in the textbooks.
You don't know what your own mind is really doing. They find a new cognitive bias every week and you're never sure if you've corrected for it, or overcorrected.
The formal math is impossible to apply. It doesn't break down as easily as John Q. Unbeliever thinks, but you're never really sure where the foundations come from. You don't know why the universe is simple enough to understand, or why any prior works for it. You don't know what your own priors are, let alone if they're any good.
One of the problems with Science is that it's too vague to really scare you. "Ideas should be tested by experiment." How can you go wrong with that?
On the other hand, if you have some math of probability theory laid out in front of you, and worse, you know you can't actually use it, then it becomes clear that you are trying to do something difficult, and that you might well be doing it wrong.
So you cannot trust.
And all this that I have said, will not be sufficient to break your trust. That won't happen until you get into your first real disaster from following The Rules, not from breaking them.
Eliezer18 already had the notion that you were allowed to question Science. Why, of course the scientific method was not itself immune to questioning! For are we not all good rationalists? Are we not allowed to question everything?
It was the notion that you could actually in real life follow Science and fail miserably, that Eliezer18 didn't really, emotionally believe was possible.
Oh, of course he said it was possible. Eliezer18 dutifully acknowledged the possibility of error, saying, "I could be wrong, but..."
But he didn't think failure could happen in, you know, real life. You were supposed to look for flaws, not actually find them.
And this emotional difference is a terribly difficult thing to accomplish in words, and I fear there's no way I can really warn you.
Your trust will not break, until you apply all that you have learned here and from other books, and take it as far as you can go, and find that this too fails you—that you have still been a fool, and no one warned you against it—that all the most important parts were left out of the guidance you received—that some of the most precious ideals you followed, steered you in the wrong direction—
—and if you still have something to protect, so that you must keep going, and cannot resign and wisely acknowledge the limitations of rationality—
—then you will be ready to start your journey as a rationalist. To take sole responsibility, to live without any trustworthy defenses, and to forge a higher Art than the one you were once taught.
No one begins to truly search for the Way until their parents have failed them, their gods are dead, and their tools have shattered in their hand.
Post Scriptum: On reviewing a draft of this essay, I discovered a fairly inexcusable flaw in reasoning, which actually affects one of the conclusions drawn. I am leaving it in. Just in case you thought that taking my advice made you safe; or that you were supposed to look for flaws, but not find any.
And of course, if you look too hard for a flaw, and find a flaw that is not a real flaw, and cling to it to reassure yourself of how critical you are, you will only be worse off than before...
It is living with uncertainty—knowing on a gut level that there are flaws, they are serious and you have not found them—that is the difficult thing.