Open Thread: May 2010, Part 2

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6 Open Thread: May 2010, Part 2

by Kevin

20th May 2010

1 min read

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The Open Thread from the beginning of the month has more than 500 comments – new Open Thread comments may be made here.

This thread is for the discussion of Less Wrong topics that have not appeared in recent posts. If a discussion gets unwieldy, celebrate by turning it into a top-level post.

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Open Thread: May 2010, Part 2

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[-]Vladimir_M15y250

I have an idea I'd like to discuss that might perhaps be good enough for my first top-level post once it's developed a bit further, but I'd first like to ask if someone maybe knows of any previous posts in which something similar was discussed. So I'll post a rough outline here as a request for comments.

It's about a potential source of severe and hard to detect biases about all sorts of topics where the following conditions apply:

It's a matter of practical interest to most people, where it's basically impossible not to have an opinion. So people have strong opinions, and you basically can't avoid forming one too.
The available hard scientific evidence doesn't say much about the subject, so one must instead make do with sparse, incomplete, disorganized, and non-obvious pieces of rational evidence. This of course means that even small and subtle biases can wreak havoc.
Factual and normative issues are heavily entangled in this topic. By this I mean that people care deeply about the normative issues involved, and view the related factual issues through the heavily biasing lens of whether they lead to consequentialist arguments for or against their favored normative beliefs. (Of c

... (read more)

[-]JanetK15y100

It seems a common bias to me and worth exploring.

Have you thought about a tip-of-the-hat to the opposite effect? Some people view the past as some sort of golden age where things were pure and good etc. It makes for a similar but not exactly mirror image source of bias. I think a belief that generally things are progressing for the better is a little more common than the belief that generally the world is going to hell in a handbasket, but not that much more common.

4NancyLebovitz15y

This reminds me of a related bias-- people generally don't have any idea how much of the stuff in their heads was made up on very little evidence, and I will bring up a (hopefully) just moderately warm button issue to discuss it. What is science fiction? If you're reading this, you probably believe you can recognize science fiction, give a definition, and adjudicate edge cases. I've read a moderate number of discussions on the subject, and eventually came to the conclusion that people develop very strong intuitions very quickly about human cultural inventions which are actually very blurry around the edges and may be incoherent in the middle. (Why is psi science fiction while magic is fantasy?) And people generally don't notice that their concepts aren't universally held unless they argue about them with other people, and even then, the typical reaction is to believe that one is right and the other people are wrong. As for the future and the past, it's easy enough to find historians to tell you, in detail, that your generalizations about the past leave a tremendous amount out. It should be easier to see that futures are estimates at best, but it can be hard to notice even that.

1Caspian15y

As to whether I could give a definition of science fiction, Similarity Clusters and similar posts have convinced me that the kind of definition I'd normally make would not capture what I meant by the term.

1cupholder15y

I've noticed a similar thing happen with people trying to define 'literary fiction.' Makes me wonder what other domains might have this bias.

1NancyLebovitz15y

My assumption is that it's all of them. Reading efforts to define science fiction is why I've never looked at efforts at defining who's a Jew. I have a least a sketchy knowledge of legal definitions for Reform and Orthodox, but that doesn't cover the emotional territory. What's a poem? What's a real American? If you can find a area of human creation where there aren't impassioned arguments about what a real whatever is, please let me know.

1Clippy15y

What's a paperclip? It's an inwardly-thrice-bent metal wire that can non-destructively fasten paper together at an edge.

0Morendil15y

So those don't count?

0Clippy15y

Correct.

1Kevin15y

Do you value those hunks of plastic more than other hunks of plastic? Do you value inwardly-thrice-bent plastic wire that can non-destructively fasten paper together at an edge more than other hunks of plastic?

0Clippy15y

No. No.

0Blueberry15y

Why?

4Clippy15y

Because they're not inwardly-thrice-bent metal wires that can non-destructively fasten paper together at an edge? Is this classification algorithm really that difficult to learn?

1Blueberry15y

I meant why do you not value plastic clips... oh, I get it, you value what you value, just like we do. But do you have any sort of rationalization or argument whereby it makes intuitive sense to you to value metal clips and not plastic ones?

2Clippy15y

Think for a minute about what it would be like for the WHOLE UNIVERSE to be plastic paperclips, okay? Wouldn't you just be trying to send them into a star or something? What good are plastic papercips? Plastic. *Shudders*

1Blueberry15y

Clippy, that's how we humans feel about a whole universe of metal paperclips. Imagine if there was a plastic-Clippy who wanted to destroy all metals and turn the universe into plastic paperclips. Wouldn't you be scared? That's how we feel about you.

0Clippy15y

That still seems just a bit paranoid. Why would I wipe you out when you could be put to use making papercips?

1Blueberry15y

Imagine being put to use making plastic paperclips.

0Clippy15y

I don't think those scenarios have the same badness for the referent. I know for a fact that some humans voluntarily make metal paperclips, or contribute to the causal chain necessary for producing them (designers, managers, metal miners, etc.), or desire that someone else provide for them paperclips. Do you have reason to believe these various, varied humans are atypical in some way?

1Blueberry15y

We make paperclips instrumentally, because they are useful to us, but we would stop making them or destroy them if doing so would help us. Imagine an entity that found metal clips useful in the process of building machines that make plastic clips, but who ultimately only valued plastic clips and would destroy the metal if doing so helped it.

0AdeleneDawner15y

I suspect that you make other things besides paperclips - parts for other Clippy instances, for example. Does that imply that you'd consider it acceptable to be forced by a stronger AI into producing only Clippy-parts that would never be assembled into paperclip-producing Clippy-instances? The paperclips that we produce are produced because we find paperclips instrumentally useful, as you find Clippy-parts instrumentally useful.

0JoshuaZ15y

What is the distinction here between plastic and metal? They both do a very good job at keeping paper together. And plastic paperclips do so less destructively since they make less of an indentation in the paper.

1Clippy15y

Let me put it to you this way: would you rather have a block of metal, or a block of plastic? Just a simple question. Or let's say you were in some enemy base. Would you rather have those wimply plastic paperclips, or an unbendable, solid, metal paperclip, which can pick locks, complete circuits, clean out grime ... To ask the question is to answer it -- seriously.

1Kevin15y

In the enemy base scenario, I would rather have a paperclip made out of military grade composite, which can have an arbitrary % of metal by mass, from 0% metal to >50% metal. Do you not value paperclips made out of supermaterials more than metal paperclips?

1Clippy15y

Non-metal paperclips aren't. If you want to talk about making paperclip makers out of non-metals, you have a point. If you want to claim that reasonable Clippys can disagree (before knowledge/value reconciliation) about how much metal content a paperclip can have before it's bad, you have a point. But in any case, composites must be constructed in their finished form. A fully-formed, fully-committed "block of composite", where no demand for such a block exists, and certainly not at any good price, should be just as useless to you.

0Kevin15y

Are not some paperclips better than others? I (and you) would both get a lot more utility out of a paperclip made out of computronium than a paperclip made out of aluminum.

1Alicorn15y

I find that paperclips often leave imprints of themselves in paper, if left clipped there for a long time. Does this not count as destruction?

1Clippy15y

Nope, it doesn't count as destruction. Not when compared to pinning, stapling, riveting, nailing, bolting, or welding, anyway.

0cupholder15y

Good point. I guess physicists don't spend much time arguing what a 'real electron' is, but once you start talking about abstract ideas...

0NancyLebovitz15y

Considerable efforts have been made here to have a stable meaning for rationality. I think it's worked.

0cupholder15y

It's a stable meaning...so maybe that just forestalls the argument until Less Wrongian rationalists meet other rationalists!

2Vladimir_M15y

Yes, that's a good point. However, one difference between my idea and the nostalgia biases is that I don't expect that the latter, even if placed under utmost scrutiny, would turn out to be responsible for as many severe and entirely non-obvious false beliefs in practice. My impression is that in our culture, people are much better at detecting biased nostalgia than biased reverence for what are held to be instances of moral and intellectual progress.

6Tyrrell_McAllister15y

I suspect that you live in a community where most people are politically more liberal than you. I have the impression that nostalgia is a harder-to-detect bias than progress, probably because I live in a community where most people are politically more conservative than I. For many, many people, change is almost always suspicious, and appealing to the past is rhetorically more effective than appealing to progress. Hence, most of their false beliefs are justified with nostalgia, if only because most beliefs, true or false, are justified with nostalgia. What determines which bias is more effective? I would guess that the main determinant is whether you identify with the community that brought about the "progress". If you do identify with them, then it must be good, because you and your kind did it. If, instead, you identify with the community that had progress imposed on them, you probably think of it as a foreign influence, and a deviation from the historical norm. This deviation, being unnatural, will either burn itself out or bring the entire community down in ruin.

3Vladimir_M15y

That's a valid point when it comes to issues that are a matter of ongoing controversies, or where the present consensus was settled within living memory, so that there are still people who remember different times with severe nostalgia. However, I had in mind a much wider class of topics, including those where the present consensus was settled in more remote past so that there isn't anyone left alive to be nostalgic about the former state of affairs. (An exception could be the small number of people who develop romantic fantasies from novels and history books, but I don't think they're numerous enough to be very relevant.) Moreover, there is also the question of which bias affects what kinds of people more. I am more interested in biases that affect people who are on the whole smarter and more knowledgeable and rational. It seems to me that among such people, the nostalgic biases are less widespread, for a number of reasons. For example, scientists will be more likely than the general population to appreciate the extent of the scientific progress and the crudity of the past superstitions it has displaced in many areas of human knowledge, so I would expect that when it comes to issues outside their area of expertise, they would be -- on average -- biased in favor of contemporary consensus views when someone argues that they've become more remote from reality relative to some point in the past.

5Tyrrell_McAllister15y

Hmm. Maybe it would help to give more concrete examples, because I might have misunderstood the kinds of beliefs that you're talking about. Things like gender relations, race relations, and environmental policy were significantly different within living memory. Now, things like institutionalized slavery or a powerful monarchy are pretty much alien to modern developed countries. But these policies are advocated only by intellectuals—that is, by those who are widely read enough to have developed a nostalgia for a past that they never lived.

[-]Vladimir_M15y100

Actually, now you've nudged my mind in the right direction! Let's consider an example even more remote in time, and even more outlandish by modern standards than slavery or absolute monarchy: medieval trials by ordeal.

The modern consensus belief is that this was just awful superstition in action, and our modern courts of law are obviously a vast improvement. That's certainly what I had thought until I read a recent paper titled "Ordeals" by one Peter T. Leeson, who argues that these ordeals were in fact, in the given circumstances, a highly accurate way of separating the guilty from the innocent given the prevailing beliefs and customs of the time. I highly recommend reading the paper, or at least the introduction, as an entertaining de-biasing experience. [Update: there is also an informal exposition of the idea by the author, for those who are interested but don't feel like going through the math of the original paper.]

I can't say with absolute confidence if Leeson's arguments are correct or not, but they sound highly plausible to me, and certainly can't be dismissed outright. However, if he is correct, then two interesting propositions are within the realm of the poss... (read more)

8cupholder15y

I skimmed Leeson's paper, and it looks like it has no quantitative evidence for the true accuracy of trial by ordeal. It has quantitative evidence for one of the other predictions he makes with his theory (the prediction that most people who go through ordeals are exonerated by them, which prediction is supported by the corresponding numbers, though not resoundingly), but Leeson doesn't know what the actual hit rate of trial by orderal is. This doesn't mean Leeson's a bad guy or anything - I bet no one can get a good estimate of trial by ordeal's accuracy, since we're here too late to get the necessary data. But it does mean he's exaggerating (probably unconsciously) the implications of his paper - ultimately, his model will always fit the data as long as sufficiently many people believed trial by ordeal was accurate, independent of true accuracy. So the fact that his model pretty much fits the data is not strong evidence of true accuracy. Given that Leeson's model fits the data he does have, and the fact that fact-finding methods were relatively poor in medieval times, I think your 'interesting proposition' #1 is quite likely, but we don't gain much new information about #2. (Edit - it might also be possible to incorporate ordeal-like tests into modern police work! 'Machine is never wrong, son.')

6Tyrrell_McAllister15y

That's interesting. I think you're right that no one reacts too negatively to this news because they don't see any real danger that it would be implemented. But suppose there were a real movement to bring back trial by ordeal. According to the paper's abstract, trial by ordeal was so effective because the defendants held certain superstitious belief. Therefore, if we wanted it to work again, we would need to change peoples' worldview so that they again held such beliefs. But there's reason to expect that these beliefs would cause a great deal of harm — enough to outweigh the benefit from more accurate trials. For example, maybe airlines wouldn't perform such careful maintenance on an airplane if a bunch of nuns would be riding it, since God wouldn't allow a plane full of nuns to go down. Well, look at me — I launched right into rationalizing a counter-argument. As with so many of the biases that Robin Hanson talks about, one has to ask, does my dismissal of the suggestion show that we're right to reject it, or am I just providing another example of the bias in action?

0CronoDAS15y

It's the old noble lie in a different package.

0[anonymous]15y

Tyrrell_McAllister: That's a valid point when it comes to issues that are a matter of ongoing controversies, or where the present consensus was settled within living memory, so that there are still people who remember different times with severe nostalgia. However, I had in mind a much wider class of topics, including those where the present consensus was settled in more remote past so that there isn't anyone left alive to be nostalgic about the former state of affairs. (An exception could be the small number of people who develop romantic fantasies from novels and history books, but I don't think they're numerous enough to be very relevant.)

2Emile15y

I don't think that nostalgia bias would be harder to detect in general - it's easy to detect in our culture because it isn't a general part of a culture (that seems to be pretty much what you're saying). However, the opposite may have held for, say, imperial China, or medieval Europe.

8Mass_Driver15y

Yeah, looks good! I would like to see a top-level article on this, and I think fruit X would be a good example to start with. If the issue is how to fight back against these problems, I bet you could make a lot of headway by first establishing a bit of credibility as an X-eater, and then making your claims while being clear that you are not nostalgic. E.g. eat an X fruit on TV while you are on a talk show explaining that X fruit isn't healthy in the long run. "I'm not [munch] a religious bigot, [crunch], I just think there might [slurp] be some poisonous chemicals [crunch] in this fruit and that we should run a few studies to [nibble] find out." Humor helps, as does theater.

7kodos9615y

My immediate reaction to reading this was that it was obvious that the particular hot-button issue that inspired it was the recent PUA debate... but I notice nobody else seems to have picked up on that, so now I'm wondering... was that what you had in mind, or am I just being self-obsessed? (don't worry, I'm not itching to restart that issue, I'm just curious about whether or not I'm imagining things) ETA: Ok, after reading the rest of the comments more thoroughly, I guess I'm not the only person who figured that was your inspiration. Personally, I would suggest you use the concrete examples, rather than abstract or hypothetical 'poison-fruit' kind of stories - those things never seem to be effective intuition pumps (for me at least). If you want to avoid the mind-killing effect of a hot-button issue, I think a better idea is just to use multiple concrete examples, and to choose them such that any given person is unlikely to have the same opinion on both of them.

4Roko15y

Recent controversy on LW about gender, dating etc seems to fall into exactly this pattern. In particular, there is heavy conflation of the facts of the matter about what kind of behavior women are attracted to with normative propositions about which gender is "better" and whether which is more blameworthy. Gender equality discussions (Larry summers!) seem to fall into the same trap.

7Vladimir_M15y

Yes, it was in fact thinking about that topic that made me try to write these thoughts down systematically. What I would like to do is to present them in a way that would elicit well-argued responses that don't get sidetracked into mind-killer reactions (and the latter would inevitably happen in places where people put less emphasis on rationality than here, so this site seems like a suitable venue). Ultimately, I want to see if I'm making sense, or if I'm just seeking sophisticated rationalizations for some false unconventional opinions I managed to propagandize myself into.

8HughRistik15y

Another type of example you could use in this topic is a real one, that occurred in the past.

3RobinZ15y

This would better than a fictional example, actually, as it brings in evidence from reality much earlier.

6Roko15y

Indeed, that is a good strategy. However, sometimes if you make it too abstract, people don't actually get what you're talking about. It's a fine line!

0whpearson15y

Are you referring to my article? I didn't mean to give the impression that either strategy was better.

4Mitchell_Porter15y

This bias needs a name, like "moral progress bias". I ask myself what your case studies might be. The Mencius Moldbug grand unified theory comes to mind: belief in "human neurological uniformity", statist economics, democracy as a force for good, winning wars by winning hearts and minds, etc, is all supposed to be one great error, descending from a prior belief that is simultaneously moral, political, and anthropological, and held in place by the sort of bias you describe. You might also want to explore a related notion of "intellectual progress bias", whereby a body of pseudo-knowledge is insulated from critical examination, not by moral sentiments, but simply by the belief that it is knowledge and that the history of its growth is one of discovery rather than of illusions piled ever higher.

4Vladimir_M15y

Mitchell_Porter: Well, any concrete case studies are by the very nature of the topic potentially inflammatory, so I'd first like to see if the topic can be discussed in the abstract before throwing myself into an all-out dissection of some belief that it's disreputable to question. One good case study could perhaps be the belief in democracy, where the moral belief in its righteousness is entangled with the factual belief that it results in freedom and prosperity -- and bringing up counterexamples is commonly met with frantic No True Scotsman replies and hostile questioning of one's motives and moral character. It would mean opening an enormous can of worms, of course. Yes, this is a very useful notion. I think it would be interesting to combine it with some of my earlier speculations about what conditions are apt to cause an area of knowledge to enter such a vicious circle where delusions and bullshit are piled ever higher under a deluded pretense of progress.

4Airedale15y

As written up here, it's a bit abstract for my personal tastes. I can't tell from this description whether in the potential post you're planning on using specific examples to make your points, probably because you're writing carefully due to the sensitive nature of the subject matter. I suspect the post will be received more favorably if you give specific examples of some of these cherished normative beliefs, explain why they result in these biases that you're describing, etc. On the other hand, given the potentially polarizing nature of the beliefs, there's no guarantee that you won't excite some controversy and downvotes if you do take that path. But given the subject matter of some of your other recent comments, I (and others) can probably guess at least some what of you have in mind and will be thinking about it as we read your submission anyway. And in that case, it's probably better to be explicit than to have people making their own guesses about what you're thinking.

[-]Vladimir_M15y180

I was planning to introduce the topic through a parable of a fictional world carefully crafted not to be directly analogous to any real-world hot-button issues. The parable would be about a hypothetical world where the following facts hold:

A particular fruit X, growing abundantly in the wild, is nutritious, but causes chronical poisoning in the long run with all sorts of bad health consequences. This effect is however difficult to disentangle statistically (sort of like smoking).
Eating X has traditionally been subject to a severe Old Testament-style religious prohibition with unknown historical origins (the official reason of course was that God had personally decreed it). Impoverished folks who nevertheless picked and ate X out of hunger were often given draconian punishments.
At the same time, there has been a traditional belief that if you eat X, you'll incur not just sin, but eventually also get sick. Now, note that the latter part happens to be true, though given the evidence available at the time, a skeptic couldn't tell if it's true or just a superstition that came as a side-effect of the religious taboo. You'd see that poor folks who eat it do get sick more often, but

... (read more)

9Nisan15y

I can think of several hot-button issues that are analogous to this parable — or would be, if the parable were modified as follows: * As science progresses, religious figures lose some power and prestige, but manage to hold on to quite a bit of it. Old superstitions and taboos perish at different rates in different communities, and defying them is considered more cool and progressive in some subcultures and cities. Someone will eat fruit X on television and the live audience will applaud, but a grouchy old X-phobe watching the show will grumble about it. * A conference with the stated goal of exploring possible health detriments of X will attract people interested in thinking rationally about public health, as well as genuine X-phobes. The two kinds of people don't look any different. * The X-phobes pick up science and rationality buzzwords and then start jabbering about the preliminary cherrypicked scientific results impugning X, with their own superstition and illogical arguments mixed in. Twentysomething crypto-X-phobes seeking to revitalize their religion now claim that their religion is really all about protecting people from the harms of X, and feed college students subtle misinterpretations of the scientific evidence. In response to all this, Snopes.com gets to work discrediting any claim of the form "X is bad". The few rational scientists studying the harmfulness of X are shunned by their peers. What's a rationalist to do? Personally, whenever I hear someone say "I think we should seriously consider the possibility that such-and-such may be true, despite it being politically incorrect", I consider it more likely than not that they are privileging the hypothesis. People have to work hard to convince me of their rationality.

4Vladimir_M15y

Yes, that would certainly make the parable much closer to some issues that other people have already pointed out! However, you say: Well, if the intellectual standards in the academic mainstream of the relevant fields are particularly low, and the predominant ideological biases push very strongly in the direction of the established conclusion that the contrarians are attacking, the situation is, at the very least, much less clear. But yes, organized groups of contrarians are often motivated by their own internal biases, which they constantly reinforce within their peculiar venues of echo-chamber discourse. Often they even develop some internal form of strangely inverted political correctness. Moreover, my parable assumes that there are still non-trivial lingering groups of X-phobe fundamentalists when the first contrarian scientists appear. But what if the situation ends up with complete extirpation of all sorts of anti-X-ism, and virtually nobody is left who supports it any more, long before statisticians in this hypothetical world figure out the procedures necessary to examine the issue correctly? Imagine anti-X-ism as a mere remote historical memory, with no more supporters than, say, monarchism in the U.S. today. The question is -- are there any such issues today, where past beliefs have been replaced by inaccurate ones that it doesn't even occur to anyone any more to question, not because it would be politically incorrect, but simply because alternatives are no longer even conceivable?

5JanetK15y

Maybe you could use the parable but put in brackets like you have with (sort of like smoking) but give very different ones for each point. That will keep the parable from seeming outlandish while not really starting a discussion of the bracketed illustrations. Smoking was a good illustration because it isn't that hot a button any more but we can remember went it was.

4Vladimir_M15y

Actually, maybe I could try a similar parable about a world in which there's a severe, brutally enforced religious taboo against smoking and a widespread belief that it's unhealthy, and then when the enlightened opinion turns against the religious beliefs and norms of old, smoking becomes a symbol of progress and freethinking -- and those who try to present evidence that it is bad for you after all are derided as wanting to bring back the inquisition. Though this perhaps wouldn't be effective since the modern respectable opinion is compatible with criminalization of recreational drugs, so the image of freethinkers decrying what is basically a case of drug prohibition as characteristic of superstitious dark ages doesn't really click. I'll have to think about this more.

1SilasBarta15y

Actually, you might be surprised to learn that Randian Objectivists held a similar view (or at least Rand herself did), that smoking is a symbol of man's[1] harnessing of fire by the power of reason. Here's a video that caricatures the view (when they get to talking about smoking). I don't think they actually denied its harmful health effects though. ETA: [1] Rand's gendered language, not mine.

1Vladimir_M15y

Yes, I'm familiar with this. Though in fairness, I've read conflicting reports about it, with some old-guard Randians claiming that they all stopped smoking once, according to them, scientific evidence for its damaging effects became convincing. I don't know how much (if any) currency denialism on this issue had among them back in the day. Rothbard's "Mozart was a Red" is a brilliant piece of satire, though! I'm not even that familiar with the details of Rand's life and personality, but just from the behavior and attitudes I've seen from her contemporary followers, every line of it rings with hilarious parody.

4CronoDAS15y

Reminds me a little of homosexuality, but only a little.

3Tyrrell_McAllister15y

Personally, I like this approach. Leave out the contemporary hot buttons, at least at first. First keep it abstract, with fanciful examples, so that people don't read it with their "am I forced to believe?" glasses on. Then, once people have internalized your points, we can start to talk about whether this or that sacrosanct belief is really due to this bias.

2gwern13y

Yes; as soon as you got to the correlates-with-poverty part, I thought to myself, 'what is he doing with this racism metaphor?'

2whpearson15y

I would think you could do with some explanation of why people aren't genetically programmed to avoid eating X. Assuming that it has been around for an evolutionarily significant period. Some explanations could be that it interacts with something in the new diet or that humans have lost a gene required to process it. Some taboos have survived well into the modern times due to innate, noncultural instincts. Take for example avoiding incest and the taboo around that. That is still alive and well. We could probably screen for genetic faults, or have sperm/egg donations for sibling couples nowadays but we don't see many people saying we should relax that taboo. Edit: The instinct is called the Westermarck Effect and has been show resistant to cultural pressure. The question is why cultural pressure works to break down other taboos, especially with regards to mating/relationships, which we should be good at by now. We have been doing them long enough.

1NancyLebovitz15y

There might be emotional as well as genetic reasons for avoiding incest. We don't really know much about the subject. If anyone's having an emotionally healthy (or at least no worse than average) incestuous relationship, they aren't going to be talking about it.

1Daniel_Burfoot15y

The upvotes and interested responses indicate that there's more than enough enthusiasm for a top-level post. Stop cluttering up the open thread! :-)

0saturn15y

It seems like this general topic has already been discussed pretty extensively by e.g. Mencius Moldbug and Steve Sailer.

3Jack15y

So if we think about the epistemological issue space in terms of a Venn diagram we can imagine the following circles all of which intersect: 1. Ubiquitous (Outside: non-ubiquitous). Subject areas where prejudgement is ubiquitous are problematic because finding a qualified neutral arbitrator is difficult, nearly everyone is invested in the outcome. 2. Contested, either there is no consensus among authorities, the legitimacy of the authorities is in question or there are no relevant authorities. (Outside: uncontested). Obviously, not being able to appeal to authorities makes rational belief more difficult. 3. Invested (Outside: Non-invested). People have incentives for believing some things rather than others for reasons other than evidence. When people are invested in beliefs motivated skepticism is a common result. 3a. Entangled (untangled) In some cases people can be easily separated from the incentives that lead them to be invested in some belief (for example, when they have financial incentives. But sometime the incentives are so entangled with the agents and the proposition that they is no easy procedure that lets us remove the incentives. 3ai. Progressive (Traditional). Cases of entangled invested beliefs can roughly and vaguely be divided into those aligned with progress and those aligned with tradition. So we have a diagram of three concentric circles (invested, entangled, progressive) bisected by a two circle diagram (ubiquitous, contested). Now it seems clear that membership in every one of these sets makes an issue harder to think rationally, with one exception. How do beliefs aligned to progress differ structurally from beliefs aligned to tradition? What do we need to do differently for one over the other? Because we might as well address both at the same time if there is no difference.

6Vladimir_M15y

That's an excellent way of putting it, which brings a lot of clarity to my clumsy exposition! To answer your question, yes, the same essential mechanism I discussed is at work in both progressive and traditional biases -- the desire that facts should provide convenient support for normative beliefs causes bias in factual beliefs, regardless of whether these normative beliefs are cherished as achievements of progress or revered as sacred tradition. However, I think there are important practical differences that merit some separate consideration. The problem is that traditionalist vs. progressive biases don't appear randomly. They are correlated with many other relevant human characteristics. In particular, my hypothesis is that people with formidable rational thinking skills -- who, compared to other people, have much less difficulty with overcoming their biases once they're pointed out and critically dissecting all sorts of unpleasant questions -- tend to have a very good detector for biases and false beliefs of the traditionalist sort, but they find it harder to recognize and focus on those of the progressive sort. What this means is that in practice, when exceptionally rational people see some group feeling good about their beliefs because these beliefs are a revered tradition, they'll immediately smell likely biases and turn their critical eye on it. On the other hand, when they see people feeling good about their beliefs because they are a result of progress over past superstition and barbarism, they are in danger of assuming without justification that the necessary critical work has already been done, so everything is OK as it is. Also, in the latter sort of situation, they will relatively easily assume that the only existing controversy is between the rational progressive view and the remnants of the past superstition, although reality could be much more complex. This could even conceivably translate into support for the mainstream progressive view even if i

3cupholder15y

This sounds like an interesting idea to me, and I hope it winds up in whatever fuller exposition of your ideas you end up posting.

-2Thomas15y

Antibiotics. The common wisdom is, that we use them too much. Might be, that the opposite is true. A more massive poisoning of pathogens with antibiotics could push them over the edge, to the oblivion. This way, when we use the antibiotics reluctantly, we give them a chance to adapt and to flourish. It just might be.

[-]Scott Alexander15y120

Do you have a citation for that?

As far as I understand it, when giving antibiotics to a specific patient, doctors often follow your advice - they give them in overwhelming force to eradicate the bacteria completely. For example, they'll often give several different antibiotics so that bacteria that develop resistance to one are killed off by the others before they can spread. Side effects and cost limit how many antibiotics you give to one patient, but in principle people aren't deliberately scrimping on the antibiotics in an individual context.

The "give as few antibiotics as possible" rule mostly applies to giving them to as few patients as possible. If there's a patient who seems likely to get better on their own without drugs, then giving the patient antibiotics just gives the bacteria a chance to become resistant to antibiotics, and then you start getting a bunch of patients infected with multiple-drug-resistant bacteria.

The idea of eradicating entire species of bacteria is mostly a pipe dream. Unlike strains of virus that have been successfully eradicated, like smallpox, most pathogenic bacteria have huge bio-reservoirs in water or air or soil or animals or on the skin of healthy humans. So the best we can hope to do is eradicate them in individual patients.

-1Thomas15y

This is one example. Maybe as free as the aspirin antibiotics would do here: Link

4Scott Alexander15y

All serious cases of stomach/duodenal ulcer are already tested for h. pylori and treated with several different antibiotics if found positive.

-1Thomas15y

I know. But not long ago, nobody expected that a bacteria is to blame. On the contrary! It was postulated, that no bacteria could possibly survive the stomach environment.

2Scott Alexander15y

So what are you suggesting with that example? That we should pre-emptively treat all diseases with antibiotics just in case bacteria are to blame?

-6Thomas15y

[-]whpearson15y160

I'm doing an MSc in Computer Forensics and have stumbled into doing a large project using Bayesian reasoning for guessing at what data is (machine code, ascii, C code, HTML etc). This has caused me to think again about what problems you encounter when trying to actually apply bayesian reasoning to large problems.

I'll probably cover this in my write up; are people interested in it? The math won't be anything special, but a concrete problem might show the problems better than abstract reasoning,

It also could serve as a precursor to some vaguely AI-ish topics I am interested in. More insect and simple creature stuff than full human level though.

1NancyLebovitz15y

I'm interested, and I suspect it relates to a question I'm a little interested in. If a computer has to sort a big wad of data, how can it identify whether some of it is already sorted?

6Thomas15y

We developed the solution, in fact we evolved it. Here is the source code in C++. Partially or segmentally ordered arrays are not sorted again at all.

0khafra15y

I'd be fascinated for both theoretical and practical reasons--I'm a network security guy by day, so I'm frequently looking at incomplete binary data captured between transient ports and wondering what it is.

[-]Mass_Driver15y140

Any given goal that I have tends to require an enormous amount of "administrative support" in the form of homeostasis, chores, transportation, and relationship maintenance. I estimate that the ratio may be as high as 7:1 in favor of what my conscious mind experiences as administrative bullshit, even for relatively simple tasks.

For example, suppose I want to go kayaking with friends. My desire to go kayaking is not strong enough to override my desire for food, water, or comfortable clothing, so I will usually make sure to acquire and pack enough of these things to keep me in good supply while I'm out and about. I might be out of snack bars, so I bike to the store to get more. Some of the clothing I want is probably dirty, so I have to clean it. I have to drive to the nearest river; this means I have to book a Zipcar and walk to the Zipcar first. If I didn't rent, I'd have to spend some time on car maintenance. When I get to the river, I have to rent a kayak; again, if I didn't rent, I'd have to spend some time loading and unloading and cleaning the kayak. After I wait in line and rent the kayak, I have to ride upstream in a bus to get to the drop-off point.

Of cours... (read more)

3Bindbreaker15y

Yes, no, yes, yes. This is a very well-written post, incidentally. Good work.

1VNKKET14y

I have nothing to add, but I want to tell you I'm happy you wrote this post, so that you don't get discouraged by the lack of comments.

0[anonymous]15y

*not caring* How good are you at making paperclips? Is it the same way, where you spend hours getting ready to make them, but only maybe an hour or so actually turning them out (or in)?

[-]Sniffnoy15y140

General question on UDT/TDT, now that they've come up again: I know Eliezer said that UDT fixes some of the problems with TDT; I know he's also said that TDT also handles logical uncertainty whereas UDT doesn't. I'm aware Eliezer has not published the details of TDT, but did he and Wei Dai ever synthesize these into something that extends both of them? Or try to, and fail? Or what?

[-]Emile15y120

Since I'm going to be a dad soon, I started a blog on parenting from a rationalist perspective, where I jot down notes on interesting info when I find it.

I'd like to focus on "practical advice backed by deep theories". I'm open to suggestions on resources, recommended articles, etc. Some of the topics could probably make good discussions on LessWrong!

5Unnamed15y

Dale McGowan of Parenting Beyond Belief is one resource that I know of. He has a blog (sample posts i and ii), a book Raising Freethinkers (see also the posts about the book on his blog), and links to other resources including an online discussion forum and various secular parenting groups around the United States.

2MBlume15y

Seconding Dale's work.

2Emile15y

Thanks; I knew about the blog but didn't know about the forum, which probably has some quite good resources. I guess I have a different focus than he does : I'm not interested in religion or the lack thereof, but rather in learning about the best way to raise kids, and how to navigate through the conflicting advice of various experts and peers. I'm not interested in "how do I help my kids find meaning in a Universe without God" as much as "how can I best help my kids become well-balanced open minded productive intelligent and well-prepared adults and not spoiled whiny brats". Also - I live in France, which is already plenty secular. That probably explains why religion isn't a very big issue. My parents (atheists) didn't pay much attention to religion, neither did my wife, religion never was much of a conversation topic at school, and I expect the same will go for my kids.

4Tyrrell_McAllister15y

Wow, you French are open minded :).

4CronoDAS15y

Typo notwithstanding, all but one of those "wives" could have been an ex-wife.

0Emile15y

Edited :)

2Morendil15y

Maybe the time's ripe for a meetup here? There's at least four of us in or near Paris, and if we announce one others might delurk. Back on-topic, I'm not sure what-all I can say about parenting, but having 3 I'm pretty sure I've made a bunch of mistakes that others can benefit from. ;)

0NancyLebovitz15y

It seems as though you think the primary risk is being too permissive, with no significant risk of being too harsh. Is it plausible that all the risk is in one direction?

0Emile15y

No -- where did I give that impression?

0NancyLebovitz15y

On re-reading, I think that "well-balanced open minded" implies that you are concerned with being too strict as well as being too permissive, but my attention was caught by the higher emotion level of the last clause.

1Emile15y

Also, it was just a one-sentence summary of why religion wasn't my main concern when talking about "rational parenting", you shouldn't read too much into it :)

[-]VNKKET15y110

ETA: This scheme is done. All three donations have been made and matched by me.

I want to give $180 to the Singularity Institute, but I'm looking for three people to match my donation by giving at least $60 each. If this scheme works, the Singularity Institute will get $360.

If you want to become one of the three matchers, I would be very grateful, and here's how I think we should do it:

You donate using this link. Reply to this thread saying how much you are donating. Feel free to give more than $60 if you can spare it, but that won't affect how much I give.
In your donation's "Public Comment" field, include both a link to your reply to this thread and a note asking for a Singularity Institute employee to kindly follow that link and post a response saying that you donated. ETA: Step 2 didn't work for me, so I don't expect it to work for you. For now, I'll just believe you if you say you've donated. If you would be convinced to donate by seeing evidence that I'm not lying, let me know and I'll get you some.
I will do the same. (Or if you're the first matching donor, then I already have -- see directly below.)

To show that I'm serious, I'm donating my first $60... (read more)

3Scott Alexander14y

I've donated $60 and put a message requesting confirmation here in my public comment.

0VNKKET14y

Great, thank you! (You're the first donor, so I matched yours in May.) It looks like the public comment isn't an effective way to communicate with SIAI people -- I included the same request in mine but got no response here. I'm debating whether to e-mail an SIAI person directly, but for now I'm just going to believe anyone who says they've donated.

0VNKKET14y

The second donation is done (and matched by me).

[-]Alicorn15y100

So I'm trying to find myself some cryo insurance. I went to a State Farm guy today and he mentioned that they'd want a saliva sample. That's fine; I asked for a list of all the things they'll do with it. He didn't have one on hand and sent me home promising to e-mail me the list.

Apparently the underwriting company will not provide this information except for the explicitly incomplete list I got from the insurance guy in the first place (HIV, liver and kidney function, drugs, alcohol, tobacco, and "no genetic or DNA testing").

Is it just me or is it outrageous that I can't get this information? Can anyone tell me an agency that will give me this kind of thing when I ask?

2thomblake15y

Indeed, that is rather outrageous. It runs afoul of pretty much any current conception of information privacy; I'm pretty sure what they're doing would be illegal in the EU, as long as saliva counts as personal information. It's pretty standard anyway for anyone who's collecting your personal information to tell you what it will and will not be used for.

2mattnewport15y

It doesn't seem outrageous to me. You are asking them to bet against your death. There are many ways to die and due to adverse selection potentially fatal conditions are likely to be over-represented in applicants for their policies. It doesn't seem unreasonable for them to try and leave themselves as much leeway as possible in detecting attempted fraud. It's just sound underwriting.

5Alicorn15y

I don't object to their wanting the sample. In fact, I can't think of much I'd reasonably expect them to test for that would cause me not to give it to them. But I want them to tell me what it is for.

[-]mattnewport15y120

If they were explicit about exactly what tests they planned to do they would open themselves up to gaming. Better to be non-specific and reserve the freedom to adapt. For similar reasons bodies trying to prevent and detect doping in sports will generally not want to publicize exactly what tests they perform.

[-]Alexandros15y90

Is LessWrong undergoing a surge in popularity the last two months? What does everyone make of this:

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/overcomingbias.com+lesswrong.com/

7Blueberry15y

I'm guessing the Harry Potter fanfic has something to do with this.

3Alexandros15y

They certainly have the traffic to cause it.. http://siteanalytics.compete.com/lesswrong.com+fanfiction.net/ If the fanfic effectively quintupled the traffic of LW, and about 8% of their visitors actually made it here, it must be doing really well...

3RobinZ15y

"Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality" started at the end of February '10 and has over 4000 reviews 92 days later - it is doing very well.

0RobinZ15y

The timing fits.

[-]NancyLebovitz15y90

Possibly a variation on the attribution bias: Wildly underestimating how hard it is for other people to change.

While I believe that both attribution bias and my unnamed bias are extremely common, they contradict each other.

Attribution bias includes believing that people have stable character traits as shown by their actions. This "people should be what I want-- immediately!" bias assumes that those character traits will go away, leading to improved behavior, after a single rebuke or possibly as the result of inspiration.

The combination of attribu... (read more)

4RobinZ15y

There was an old essay by Ursula Vernon - Divine Social Workers and the Secret of Happiness - that plays on the outrage bias theme.

2Blueberry15y

That's brilliant. Outrage bias deserves a top-level post.

1NancyLebovitz15y

Thank you. I'll see what I can come up with. Meanwhile, it's interesting to ask people who say some social feature has gotten worse whether they have evidence that things used to be better. Sometimes they do, but frequently they don't.

[-]NancyLebovitz15y90

Gawande on checklists and medicine

Checklists are literally life-savers in ICUs-- there's just too much crucial which needs to be done, and too many interruptions, to avoid serious mistakes without offloading some of the work of memory onto an system.

However, checklists are low status.

Something like this is going on in medicine. We have the means to make some of the most complex and dangerous work we do—in surgery, emergency care, and I.C.U. medicine—more effective than we ever thought possible. But the prospect pushes against the traditional culture of m

... (read more)

5Morendil15y

Journalism, ongoing, according to some. Clay Shirky's book Here comes everybody makes an interesting link between this process and Ronald Coase's theory of the firm. Surely not intrisically. Think of astronauts' checklists. Suggestion: instead of "low status" as an explanation for why people do or don't do something, look for something closer to the specific domain. (Is it possible that doctors' practice is much influenced by media portrayal of how doctors behave? By expectations of their "customers"?)

9Vladimir_M15y

Morendil: Astronauts are soldiers. Unlike doctors, soldiers have a huge incentive not to let their beliefs depart too far from reality because of status or any other considerations, for the simple reason that it may easily cause them personally, and not just someone else, to get killed or maimed. Thus, military culture is extremely practice-oriented. Due to their universal usefulness, checklist-driven procedures are a large part of it, and having to participate in them is not considered demeaning, even for super-high-status soldiers like fighter pilots. Eventually, strict rule-driven procedures associated with the military often even develop a cool factor of their own (consider launch or takeoff scenes from war action movies). Of course, soldiers who lack such incentives will, like WW1 generals, quickly develop usual human delusions driven by status dynamics. But astronauts are clearly not in that category.

0Morendil15y

So your narrative is "checklists fail to take root because they are low-status, except where their being a serious matter for the people who use them (not just bystanders) causes them to be accepted, and in one such case they gain high status for extraneous reasons". Why, then, isn't the rising cost of malpractice insurance enough to drive acceptance of checklists? What does it take to overcome an initial low-status perception? How do we even explain such perception in the first place?

1NancyLebovitz15y

As I understand it, drastic, rare, and somewhat random punishment does little to change behavior. Reliable small punishments change behavior.

4Morendil15y

That analysis would be inconsistent with my understanding of how checklists have been adopted in, say, civilian aviation: extensive analysis of the rare disaster leading to the creation of new procedures. Again, my point was to prompt an alternative explanation to the hypothesis "checklists are not used by surgeons because the practice is intrinsically low-status". Why (other than the OB-inherited obsession of the LW readership with "status") does this hypothesis seem favored at the outset? How would we go about weighing this hypothesis against alternatives? For instance, "checklists are not used because surgeons in movies never use them", or "checklists are not used because surgeons are not trained to understand the difference between a checklist and a shopping list", or "checklists are not used because surgeons are reluctant to change their practices until it becomes widely accepted that the change has a proven beneficial impact"?

[-]Vladimir_M15y100

Morendil:

That analysis would be inconsistent with my understanding of how checklists have been adopted in, say, civilian aviation: extensive analysis of the rare disaster leading to the creation of new procedures.

One relevant difference is that the medical profession is at liberty to self-regulate more than probably any other, which is itself an artifact of their status. Observe how e.g. truckers are rigorously regulated because it's perceived as dangerous if they drive tired and sleep-deprived, but patients are routinely treated by medical residents working under the regime of 100+ hour weeks and 36-hour shifts.

Even the recent initiatives for regulatory limits on the residents' work hours are presented as a measure that the medical profession has gracefully decided to undertake in its wisdom and benevolence -- not by any means as an external government imposition to eradicate harmful misbehavior, which is the way politicians normally talk about regulation. (Just remember how they speak when regulation of e.g. oil or finance industries is in order.)

Why (other than the OB-inherited obsession of the LW readership with "status") does this hypothesis seem favored at t

... (read more)

5Morendil15y

At the very least this seems to be privileging an extraversion hypothesis. You can only gain status by interacting in some way with other people, yet it is not uncommon for people to shun company and instead devote time to solitary occupations with scant status benefits. Under your justification for favoring status explanations, the only reason anyone ever reads a book is to brag about it. This seems wrong, prima facie, as well as simplistic.

4Vladimir_M15y

Morendil: Note that I also mentioned "satisfying some urge that originally evolved as instrumental to human status games" in my above statement. Today's world is full of super-stimuli that powerfully resonate with ancestral urges even though they don't actually lead towards the goals that these urges had originally evolved to promote, and are often even antithetical to these goals. Just like candy bars cheat the heuristic urges that evolved to identify nutritious and healthy food in the ancestral environment, it is reasonable to expect that solitary occupations with scant (or even negative) status benefits cheat the heuristic urges that originally evolved as useful in status games, or for furthering some other goal that they no longer achieve reliably in the modern environment. You will probably agree that super-stimulation of status-seeking urges explains at least some non-beneficial solitary activities with high plausibility, for example when people neglect their real-life responsibilities by getting caught up in the thrill of virtual leadership and accomplishment provided by video-games. Of course, this by no means applies to all such activities; it is likely that the enjoyment found in some of them is rooted in urges that evolved for different reasons. To address your above example, unless we assume some supernatural component of the human mind, I see no possible explanation of human book-reading except as a super-stimulus for some ancestral urges (whether status-related or not), unless of course it's done not for enjoyment, but purely to acquire information necessary for other goals. While it's far from being a complete explanation of human book-reading, it seems plausible to me that people sometimes enjoy books in part because it enhances their status signaling abilities in matters of erudition and taste. Also, it seems to me that stories super-stimulate the human urges for gossip, which are likely a device with an original status-related purpose, and all s

2pjeby15y

I just want to throw in a note that I don't think human motivation is adequately explained by status alone -- I would expand the list to SASS: Status, Affiliation, Safety, and Stimulation. (Where, as some folks here have pointed out, "Safety" might be more accurately described as stability, certainty, or control, rather than being purely about physical safety.) Book-reading, in particular, is more likely to meet Safety/Stimulation needs than Status or Affiliation ones.... though you could maybe get those latter two from a book club or an academic setting.

2Vladimir_M15y

pjeby: I agree, but most complex and multi-faceted human behaviors are likely to be compelled by a mixture of these motives. My impression is that status features more often and more prominently that most people imagine, and its often masqueraded and rationalized by pretenses of other motivations. My hypothesis is that super-stimulation of the same urges that cause people to enjoy gossip is responsible for a significant part (though by no means all) of human enjoyment of books and other ways of presenting stories. This would be a good example of super-stimulating an urge whose original evolution was to a large degree driven by status games, in a way that however has no direct relation to the present-day status games.

5pjeby15y

People just as routinely masquerade and rationalize the other three, actually. However, that's because their operation is fairly opaque to consciousness. We have built-in machinery for processing social signals relating to Status and Affiliation, and during our "impressionable" years, we learn to value the things that are associated with them, and come to treat them as terminal values in themselves. IOW, SASS is how we learn to have non-SASS terminal values. So, when a person claims to be acting out of a non-SASS value, they're not really lying. It's just that they're not usually aware of (i.e. have forgotten about) the triggers that shaped the acquisition of that value in the first place. Plenty of other animals manage to be curious, needing actual stories. Also, some of us like to read things that aren't gossip or stories. Presumably one could test your hypothesis by finding out whether individuals lose interest in reading when they gain status; my personal experience suggests this is not the case, and that instead books compete with other forms of stimulation. So, ISTM that even if curiosity (and certain templates for what to be curious about) were shaped by status competition, this doesn't mean there is an operational connection between books and one's self-perception of status. To a certain extent, we could say that everything is about status, in the same way that every organ is a reproductive organ. But saying that everything is X, is the same as saying as nothing is X - it reduces your predictive power, rather than increasing it.

0Vladimir_M15y

In retrospect, I probably should have put more care into the wording of my comments in this thread (which I wrote more quickly and with less proofreading than usual). Several people have understood my positions as more extreme than I honestly meant them to be, and I evidently failed in conveying some of the more subtle points I had in mind. While I agree with most of your above comment, there seems to be a major misunderstanding here (probably due to my lack of clarity): Well, insofar as reading is a directly status-related activity, nothing I hypothesized predicts that, nor is it the case in reality. In fact, if you enjoy high status as an intellectual, you are required to read a lot constantly to maintain that status; having nothing much to say when you're asked what you've read lately would be a major embarrassment. Of course, this is rarely by itself a very prominent motivation -- people who achieve high intellectual status usually have more than enough interest in reading out of curiosity and professional needs -- but I wouldn't say it's entirely negligible either, especially when it comes to trendy highbrow literature. However, that's not at all what I had in mind with my reading-as-gossip-super-stimulus hypothesis. What I had in mind there is that the appeal of certain genres of literature and other storytelling media might be in part due to the fact that they stimulate the same urges that make people enjoy gossip. Thanks to these media, besides the thin diet of mundane real-world gossip, you get to enjoy huge amounts of artificial gossip skillfully crafted to be super-interesting, albeit about people who are fictional (or at least remote and personally irrelevant). This mechanism has nothing at all to do with one's actual status and behaviors that influence it. The status connection here lies the fact that the gossip-enjoying urges had previously evolved under the influence of status dynamics, in which gossip is one of the key practical instruments. Thei

0Morendil15y

So that list doesn't include curiosity. Are you denying that curiosity is a significant drive? Or (say) competence?

4pjeby15y

Curiosity falls under the "stimulation" heading, as does skill acquisition for its own sake (e.g. video games). To be fair, the SASS list is more a convenient set of categories, than it is an attempt to be a comprehensive and rigorously-proven classification system. However, it's definitely "less wrong" than assuming everything is about status... yet not so unwieldy as the systems that claim 16 or more basic human drives.

0Morendil15y

That I can live with. :)

1HughRistik15y

The evolution of a desire for competence is an excellent question. Impulses such as curiosity and systemizing could be related to developing competence. Systemizing could indeed be useful for your survival, and the survival of those around you, via tool-making, weapon-making, hunting/cooking techniques, etc... So systemizing could be a status-related adaptation. Yet if your systemizing skills create a breakthrough (e.g. you design a useful tool), then your tribe may well accord you status, enhancing your survival and reproduction. A desire for competence could also be useful for mating, because competence displays "good genes." This is true of skills that don't provide such obvious survival benefits, such as singing and dancing. A desire for competence, and adaptations that facilitate its development (curiosity, systemizing), could well be useful for any combination of survival, reproduction, and status.

2Morendil15y

There's nothing "super" about a book: no corresponding "normal" stimulus that elicits a natural response, such that a book is an exaggerated version of it. Book-reading is explained straightforwardly enough as satisfying curiosity, a trait we share with many species (think cats). If reading a book sometimes trumps the quest for status, then the latter cannot be THE primary preoccupation of people beyond bare physical subsistence. You will at least need to retreat to "an important" preoccupation. Now, if you were to explore this topic without jumping to conclusions, perhaps you'd recognize this one example as the start of a list, and would in an unbiased manner draw up a somewhat realistic list of the activities typical humans engage in, and sort them into "activities having a high status component" and "activities not primarily status-related". Then we might form a better picture of "how important".

2Vladimir_M15y

Morendil: I disagree, for the reasons I've already discussed at length. You don't seem to have read my above comment carefully, or perhaps my exposition was poor. I did mention curiosity as one part of the motivation for reading books. Moreover, the curiosity explanation itself contradicts your above claim: a book, or a story told any other way, presents far more material (albeit fictional) for curiosity-satisfaction than is available from real-life events, and this material is intentionally and skillfully crafted to have great appeal in this regard, so it clearly does provide a super-stimulus for this particular urge. Besides, as I also mentioned in my above post, there is also the human urge for gossip, which is pretty obviously related to status games, and is clearly super-stimulated by (at least some) books and other story-telling media. Finally, there is also the motivation of status seeking via demonstrating taste and erudition. All these, and possibly many other factors would probably feature in a complete theory of this particular human behavior. Again, you don't seem to understand my point about the difference between: (1) human behaviors that actually enhance status, or promote goals that lead towards its enhancement, and (2) behaviors driven by urges that had originally evolved for status-seeking purposes in the ancestral environment, but which misfire in the modern environment -- just like e.g. the human taste for sugar was a good nutritional heuristic in a sugar-poor environment, but leads us to bad nutritional choices in the present environment full of cheap sugar-rich super-stimuli. But as I explained above, you don't seem to have understood my remarks about this example correctly. (I allow for the possibility that my writing was too bad to be understandable, of course.) I've explained the issue again now, and my conclusion is still that your example is incorrect. If you believe that my reasoning in this case is invalid, or if you have other exam

0Morendil15y

I read mostly non-fiction books, mostly to satisfy my curiosity. A recent example was "Freakonomics". That appears to defuse your argument... I dispute that a book is a "superstimulus" in the same sense in which that term has predictive power when applied to herring gull parents, to the sexual arousal response in humans, or to the appeal of fast-food flavors. I am unwilling, more generally, to interpret the term "super-stimulus" broadly enough to encompass any case where a given behaviour is explained by an urge vaguely related to another urge that existed in the ancestral environment. If books in general were superstimuli for some existing urge, then any book would elicit the hijacked response to that urge (and we would be able to make a book irresistible by exaggerating the relevant cues). Instead, I find myself discriminating quite sharply between "interesting" books and "boring" books. (For instance I can't stand the sight of most "trade" books that are supposed to appeal to programmers, like "Functional Programming in a Nutshell".) Why do people knit? I'd say that the urges involved are mostly competence and caring, rather than status. Why do I learn how to solder, and take apart consumer electronics? Curiosity, not status. The common theme is that caring, competence and curiosity did plausibly exist in the ancestral environment, so it isn't necessary to invoke status when there is a clearer link to other drives. I'm OK with having status (properly understood) take its rightful place in a pantheon of inherited drives, but it drives me nuts to see it trotted out to explain everything.

4Vladimir_M15y

For some reason, we seem to be talking past each other -- you appear to be replying to an incomplete and exaggerated version of what I had in mind. I accept the possibility that this is because I expressed my ideas in a confusing and poorly worded manner, but whatever the reason, we seem to be stuck at this point. Therefore, regarding the book-reading issue, I will try to restate a few key elements of my position briefly: * It was not my intention to set forth a complete theory of human motives for reading books, but merely to bring up several examples of motives that are, in my opinion, likely involved (sometimes exclusively) in a significant percentage of all instances of book-reading behaviors. * I did not claim, and it would indeed be absurd to claim, that all these motives, or even any particular one of them, play a role in every instance of book-reading behavior. * Neither did I claim, which would also be absurd, that these motives and their biological causes are present to the same extent across any given set of individuals. Consequently, neither do the reactions to any particular book necessarily have the same underlying motivation across any given set of individuals, even if they all happen to be positive (or in other respects behaviorally similar) for all members of that set. * Ultimately, the goal of discussing these examples was to demonstrate the difference between: (1) effective status-seeking behaviors, and (2) behaviors that just execute adaptations that originally evolved due to status-related reasons, but no longer serve status goals effectively in the modern environment. In particular, some instances of human book-reading behavior fall into one or both of these categories (which does not imply that even these particular instances don't involve other, unrelated motivations too). Maybe not only my writing, but also my reading comprehension has been poor, but in your replies, I honestly don't see any objections that wouldn't either implicit

2Morendil15y

Well: long-winded, maybe. Fine otherwise; I'd mention it less. You wrote that beyond life or death "status is the primary preoccupation of humans", I disagreed and in particular with "THE primary preoccupation". You seem to now have appropriately qualified that initial statement; I'll certainly agree, for my part, that some people sometimes read books for bragging rights. I definitely agree that various forms of "status" play significant roles in human motivation. Given that all of our behaviour rests in one way or another in executing biological adaptations I have no contention with your thesis. I strongly suspect that what we call "status" is not one mechanism but several, so that in each case it pays to hug the query.

1RobinZ15y

In the spirit of Morendil's question: what other professions should be shunning useful but low-status tools (particularly checklists) for the same reason as doctors, according to the status model? I don't know enough about (a) lawyers, (b) politicians, (c) businesspeople, (d) salespeople, or (e) other high status professions to judge either what your model would predict or what they do. It's worth noting that engineering is (moderately-)high-status but involves risk of personal cost in case of error, making the fact that it shows widespread adherence to restrictive professional standards explicable under the status theory.

5Vladimir_M15y

Now that's an interesting question! Off the top of my head, some occupations where I'd expect that status considerations interfere with the adoption of effective procedures would be: * Judges -- ultra-high status, near-zero discipline for incompetence. * Teaching, at all levels -- unrealistically high status (assuming you subscribe to the cynical theories about education being mostly a wasteful signaling effort), fairly weak control for competence, lacking even clear benchmarks of success. * Research in dubious areas -- similarly, high status coupled with weak incentives for producing sound work instead of junk science. For example, there are research areas where statistical methods are used to reach "scientific" conclusions by researchers with august academic titles who are however completely stumped by the finer points of statistical inference. In some such areas, hiring a math B.A. to perform a list of routine checks for gross errors in statistics and logic would probably prevent the publication of more junk science than their entire peer review system. Yet I think status considerations would probably conspire against such a solution in many instances.

6Airedale15y

I disagree somewhat that judges face near-zero discipline for incompetence. Except for judges on the highest court in a jurisdiction, most judges frequently face the prospect that the opinions they author may be reversed. It is true that frequent reversals will almost never lead to the sanction of the judge losing his or her job (due to lifetime appointments or ineffectiveness of elections at removing incumbent judges except for the most serious and publicized faults). But the resulting hit to status for frequent reversals can be quite serious; and because judges are so high status, as you note, they tend to be very concerned with maintaining that status. The handful of judges I've known personally have been quite concerned with their reversal rate and they particularly don't want to be reversed in a way that is embarrassing to them because it suggests laziness, incompetence, poor reasoning, cutting corners, or the like. (On the other hand, reversal for disagreements that can be characterized as “political” is probably not seen as quite so status-lowering.) At any rate, the law does provide checklist-like procedures or guidelines in many instances, and most judges do follow them, at least in part because failure to do so could lead to reversal.

6JoshuaZ15y

Expanding on your example of judges- this fits in with general problems for people in the legal professions. For example, there have now been for many years pretty decent understanding about problems with the standard line-up system for criminal suspects. There are also easy fixes for those problems. Yet very few places have implemented them. Similarly, there have been serious problems with police and judges acting against people who try to videotape their interactions with police. Discussing this in too much detail may however run into the standard mind-killing subject.

0Vladimir_M15y

Morendil: My understanding is that the present (U.S.) system of malpractice lawsuits and insurance doesn't leave much incentive for extraordinary caution by individual doctors. Once you've paid your malpractice insurance, which you have to do in any case, you're OK as long as your screwups aren't particularly extreme by the usual standards. Moreover, members of the profession hold their ranks together very tightly, and will give up on you only in cases of extremely reckless misbehavior. They know that unlike their public image, they are in fact mere humans, and any one of them might find himself in the same trouble due to some stupid screwup tomorrow. And to establish a malpractice claim, you need not only be smart enough to figure out that they've done something bad to you, but also get expert testimony from distinguished members of the profession to agree with you. I am not very knowledgeable about this topic, though, so please take this as my impression based on anecdotal data and incomplete exposure to the relevant literature. It would be interesting if someone more knowledgeable is available to comment. I'd say that in a sense, it's a collective action problem. The pre-flight checks done by fighter pilots (and even to some extent by ordinary pilots) are perceived as cool-looking rituals, and not a status-lowering activity at all, because these procedures have come to be associated with the jobs of high-status individuals. Similarly, if there was a cool-looking checklist procedure done by those doctors on TV shows, presented as something that is only a necessary overture for acts of brilliance and heroism, and automatically associated with doctors in the popular mind, it would come to be perceived as a cool high-status thing. But as it is, in the present state of affairs, it comes off as a status-lowering imposition on people whose jobs are supposed to be one hundred percent about brilliance and heroism. Also, there is the problem of the doctor-nurse status

0Alicorn15y

The people who decide malpractice suits are likely to be more sympathetic to pleas of having used one's judgment and experience but making a mistake, over having used a rigid set of rules from which one did not deviate even as the patient took a turn for the worse.

3Vladimir_M15y

Yes, there is a powerful irrational status-driven reaction against the idea that something so rudimentary as checklists could improve the work of people who are a subject of high status reverence and magical thinking. Note how even in this article, the author feels the need for pious disclaimers, denying emphatically in the part you quoted that this finding presents any evidence against the heroic qualities of character and intellect that the general public ascribes to doctors. Of course, the fact that this method dramatically inverts the status hierarchy by letting nurses effectively supervise doctors doesn't help either. In our culture, when it comes to immense status differences between people who work closely together, relations between doctors and nurses are probably comparable only to those between commissioned officers and ordinary soldiers. I don't think such a wide chasm separates even household servants from their employers. This reminds me of the historical case of Ignaz Semmelweis, who figured out in mid-19th century, before Pasteur and the germ theory of disease, that doctors could avoid killing lots of their patients simply by washing their hands in disinfectant before operations. The reaction of the medical establishment was unsurprising by the usual rules of human status dynamics -- his ideas were scornfully rejected as silly and arrogant pseudoscience. What effrontery to suggest that the august medical profession has been massively killing people by failing to implement such a simple measure! Poor Semmelweis, scorned, ostracized, and depressed, turned to alcoholism and eventually died in an insane asylum. Hand-washing yesterday, checklists today.

0NancyLebovitz15y

I'm pretty sure it's more complicated than that. My impression is that experienced nurses can generate some clout, and that (if I can believe Heinlein) experienced sergeants can have influence over new lieutenants. This is informal, and dependent both on the ability of the subordinate to be firm without seeming to upset the hierarchy and the receptiveness of the person who's theoretically in charge. Does anyone have actual information?

[-]NancyLebovitz15y80

From an article about the athletes' brains:

Unsurprisingly, most of the article is about elite athlete's brains being more efficient in using their skills and better at making predictions about playing, but then....

n February 2009 Krakauer and Pablo Celnik of Johns Hopkins offered a glimpse of what those interventions might look like. The scientists had volunteers move a cursor horizontally across a screen by pinching a device called a force transducer between thumb and index finger. The harder each subject squeezed, the faster the cursor moved. Each play

... (read more)

0Kazuo_Thow15y

It would be worth trying, but given that the process of doing original mathematics feels to top mathematicians like it involves a lot of vague, artistic visualization (i.e. mental operations much more complicated than the cursor-moving task), I'd put a low prior probability on simple electrical stimulation having the desired effect.

0NancyLebovitz15y

I'd give it a medium prior probability-- it's impossible to operate at a high level if the simple operations are clogged by inefficiency.

0[anonymous]15y

[-]Kevin15y80

Craig Venter et al. have succeeded in creating the first functional synthetic bacterial genome.

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/328/5981/958 http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/science.1190719 http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/05/first-functional-synthetic-bacterial-genome-announced.ars http://www.jcvi.org/cms/research/projects/first-self-replicating-synthetic-bacterial-cell/overview/

[-]imonroe15y70

I wrote up a post yesterday, but I found I was unable to post it, except as a draft, since I lack the necessary karma. I thought it might be an interesting thing to discuss, however, since lots of folks here have deeper knowledge than I do about markets and game theory

I've been working recently for an auction house that deals in things like fine art, etc. I've noticed, by observing many auctions, that certain behaviors are pretty reliable, and I wonder if the system isn't "game-able" to produce more desirable outcomes for the different parties ... (read more)

5thomblake15y

Make sure you're asking yourself, "what experiment would disprove my hypothesis?" You have several hypotheses in there which might not be optimal.

0imonroe15y

An experiment which would disprove my hypothesis regarding more bidding increments would be something like: Run at least three auctions for the same or similar items with the same or similar bidders, one using normal estimates and bidding increments for a control, one where the low estimate was lowered to allow more increments, and one with the same estimates, but more granular increments. IF the price paid in each auction was roughly equivalent, THEN the hypothesis is disproven. The problem with that is the nature of the property we auction -- there's only one of anything. Each auction lot is, in important ways, different from the others. There's only one of this painting; only one of this desk. Even when two objects are similar, there are still often condition differences and so forth. I'll have to consult with some of the appraisers and see if there's ever an exception to this rule. But ok, that brings up another interesting question. Is there a way of simulating auction behavior? Has someone written a computer program to do this sort of thing? What kinds of assumptions do they make about the behaviors of individual agents?

0RobinZ15y

Do you have a large body of data? It's possible a statistician would be capable of devising appropriate measures to test your hypothesis.

4gwern15y

If we assume that the appraisals are disconnected from the winning bids*, then couldn't one just see whether the ratio of sale:appraisal is increasing? If the appraisals are honest, then any jiggery-pokery should alter the ratio - eg. a successful manipulation will lead to people paying an average 93%, where they used to pay 90%. * that is, there is no feedback - the appraisers don't look at recent sales and say, oh, I've been lowballing all my estimates! I'd better start raising them.

[-]EStokes15y7