The post repeatedly implies that the situation used to be better, and that it is getting worse, while only providing the weakest possible evidence for the trend. As someone who appreciates the Law, I'm disturbed by that. How do you, in one post, both criticize the argument "global warming is true because it was very hot yesterday" and make the argument "people used to appreciate the Law more because I've read a couple of fictional stories that suggest so"?
Not every conclusion is easy to conclusively demonstrate to arbitrary smart readers with a short amount of text, so I think it's fine for people to share their beliefs without sharing all the evidence that got them there, and it's good for others to flag the places where they disagree and will need to hear more. I think "... because I've read a couple of fictional stories that suggest so" is misunderstanding Eliezer's reasoning / failing his ITT. (Though it's possible what you meant is that he should be explicit about the fact that he's relying on evidence/arguments that lack a detailed canonical write-up? That seems reasonable to me.)
This post is hardly a "short amount of text" and this view is quite central to the post, but, sure, I can imagine that EY is hiding some stronger arguments for his view that he didn't bother to share. That's not the problem. The problem is that his post about the value of local validity is not locally valid (in the sense that he himself suggests). The argument, about how people appreciate the Law less now, that he makes, is exactly as valid or invalid as the argument, about global warming, that he criticizes (the validity of both arguments is somewhat debatable).
Some people will think to themselves, "Well, it's important to use only valid arguments... but there was a sustained pattern of record highs worldwide over multiple years which does count as evidence, and that particular very hot day was a part of that pattern, so it's valid evidence for global warming."
Remember this paragraph? I think you might be one of these people. What you said is all technically true, but would you really use the same argument to defend someone in your outgroup? You see, I could take your post, change a few words, and get a comment that criticizes EY for failing to pass the ITT of the climate change denier/supporter (your first sentence is in fact fully general, it can support anything without modifications). It would be a valid and reasonable argument, so I wonder why you didn't make it.
This post is hardly a "short amount of text"
I think a satisfactory discussion of the memetic collapse claim would probably have to be a lot longer, and a lot of it would just be talking about more data points and considering different interpretations of them.
I think the criticism "isolated data points can cause people to over-update when they're presented in vivid, concrete terms" makes sense, and this is a big part of why it's pragmatically valuable to push back against "one hot day ergo climate change", because even though it's nonzero Bayesian evidence for climate change, the strength of evidence is way weaker than the emotional persuasiveness. I don't have a strong view on whether Eliezer should add some more caveats in cases like this to ensure people are aware that he hasn't demonstrated the memetic collapse thesis here, vs. expecting his readers to appropriately discount vivid anecdotes as a matter of course. I can see the appeal of both options.
I think the particular way you phrased your objection, in terms of "is this a locally valid inference?" rather than "is this likely to be emotionally appealing in a way that causes people to over-update?", is wrong, though, and I think reflects an insufficiently bright line between personal-epistemics norms like "make good inferences" and social norms like "show your work". I think you're making overly strong symmetry claims here in ways that make for a cleaner narrative, and not seriously distinguishing "here's a data point I'll treat as strong supporting evidence for a claim where we should expect there to be a much stronger easy-to-communicate/compress argument if the claim is true" and "here's a data point I'll use to illustrate a claim where we shouldn't expect there to be an easy-to-communicate/compress argument if the claim is true". But it shouldn't be necessary to push for symmetry here in any case; mistake seriousness is orthogonal to mistake irony.
I remain unconvinced by the arguments I've seen for the memetic collapse claim, and I've given some counterarguments to collapse claims in the past, but "I think you're plausibly wrong" and "I haven't seen enough evidence to find your view convincing" are pretty different from "I think you don't have lots of unshared evidence for your belief" or "I think you're making an easily demonstrated inference mistake". I don't think the latter two things are true, and I think it would take a lot of time and effort to actually resolve the disagreement.
(Also, I don't mean to be glib or dismissive here about your ingroup bias worries; this was something I was already thinking about while I was composing my earlier comments, because there are lots of risk factors for motivated reasoning in this kind of discussion. I just want to be clear about what my beliefs and thinking are, factoring in bias risks as a big input.)
The problem is that we don't have the Law for bad arguments written down well enough. You have your ideas of what is bad, I have mine, but I think pointing out irony is still the best most universally acceptable thing I can do. Especially since we're in the comments of a post called "Local Validity as a Key to Sanity and Civilization".
"isolated data points can cause people to over-update when they're presented in vivid, concrete terms"
This is a valid concern, but it is not a valid law. Imagine someone telling you "your evidence is valid, but you presented it in overly vivid, concrete terms, so I downvoted you". It would be frustrating. Who decides what is and isn't too emotionally persuasive? Who even measures or compares persuasiveness? That sort of rule is unenforceable.
I think you're making overly strong symmetry claims here in ways that make for a cleaner narrative.
Oh absolutely, there are many differences between the two claims, though my comparison is less charitable for EY than yours. Let H be "global warming" and let E be "a random day was hot". Then P(E|H) > P(E|not H) is a mathematically true fact, and therefore E is valid, even if weak, evidence for H. Now, let H be "memetic collapse" and let E be "modern fiction has fewer Law abiding characters". Does P(E|H) > P(E|not H) hold? I don't know, if I had to guess, I'd say yes, but it's very dubious. I.e. I can't say for certain that EY's evidence is even technically valid.
a claim where we shouldn't expect there to be an easy-to-communicate/compress argument if the claim is true
This often happens. However the correct response is not the take the single data point provided more charitably. The correct response is to accept that this claim will never have high certainty. If a perfect Bayesian knew nothing at all, and you told it that "yesterday was hot" and that "modern fiction has fewer Law abiding characters", then this Bayesian would update P("global warming") and P("memetic collapse") by about the same amount. It's true that there exist strong arguments for global warming, and that there might not exists strong arguments for memetic collapse, however these facts are not reflected in the Bayesian mathematics. Intuitively this suggests to me that this difference you described is not something we want to look at.
"I think you don't have lots of unshared evidence for your belief"
This is a simple claim that I make. EY seems to be quite certain of memetic collapse, at least that's the impression I get from the text. If EY is more certain than me, then, charitably, that's because he has more evidence than me. Note, the uncharitable explanation would be that he's a crackpot. Now, I don't really know if he has described this evidence somewhere, if he has, I'd love a link.
However the correct response is not the take the single data point provided more charitably.
You're conflating two senses of "take a single data point charitably": (a) "treat the data point as relatively strong evidence for a hypothesis", and (b) "treat the author as having a relatively benign reason to cite the data point even though it's weak". The first is obviously bad (since we're assuming the data is weak evidence), but you aren't claiming I did the first thing. The second is more like what I actually said, but it's not problematic (assuming I have a good estimate of the citer's epistemics).
"Charity" framings are also confusingly imprecise in their own right, since like "steelmanning," they naturally encourage people to equivocate between "I'm trying to get a more accurate read on you by adopting a more positive interpretation" and "I'm trying to be nice/polite to you by adopting a more positive interpretation".
The correct response is to accept that this claim will never have high certainty.
A simple counterexample is "I assign 40:1 odds that my friend Bob has personality trait [blah]," where a lifetime of interactions with Bob can let you accumulate that much confidence without it being easy for you to compress the evidence into an elevator pitch that will push strangers to similar levels of confidence. (Unless the stranger simply defers to your judgment, which is different from them having access to your evidence.)
(a) "treat the data point as relatively strong evidence for a hypothesis", <...>. The first is obviously bad (since we're assuming the data is weak evidence), but you aren't claiming I did the first thing.
Honestly, I'm not sure what you did. You said I should distinguish claims that can have short arguments and claims that can't. I assumed that by "distinguish", you meant we should update on the two claims differently, which sounds like (a). What did "distinguish" really mean?
(b) "treat the author as having a relatively benign reason to cite the data point even though it's weak"
I wasn't considering malicious/motivated authors at all. In my mind the climate supporter either doesn't know about long term measurements, or doesn't trust them for whatever reason. Sure, a malicious author would prefer using weak evidence when strong evidence exists, but they would also prefer topics where strong evidence doesn't exist, so ultimately I don't know in what way I should distinguish the two claims in relation to (b).
A simple counterexample is "I assign 40:1 odds that my friend Bob has personality trait [blah]," where a lifetime of interactions with Bob can let you accumulate that much confidence
The problem with many small pieces of evidence is that they are often correlated, and it's easy not to account for that. The problem with humans is that they are very complicated, so you really shouldn't have very high confidence that you know what's going on in their heads. But I don't think I would be able to show you that your confidence is too high. Of course, it is technically possible to reach high confidence with a large quantity of weak evidence, I just said it as a rule of thumb. By the way, 40:1 could be high or low confidence, depending on the prior probability of the trait.
EY read more than 'a couple of fictional stories'. But I think his pointing toward the general degradation of discourse on the Internet is reasonable. Certainly some segments of Tumblr would seem to be a new low acting as a harbinger of the end times. :P
The problem with this sort of hypothesis, is that it's very hard to prove rigorously. And the reason that's a problem is sometimes hypothesis that are hard to prove rigorously happen to be true anyway. The territory does not relent for a bit because you haven't figured out how to prove your point. People still get lead poisoning even if the levers of authority insist your argument for toxicity is groundless. That's a large part of why I think of measurement as the queen of science. If you can observe things but aren't entirely sure what to make of the observations, that makes it hard to really do rigorous science with them.
The person who says that it was hot yesterday also remembers more than one hot day, but that doesn't make their argument much stronger. In fact, even if EY had read all fiction books in the last 100 years, and counted all the Law abiding characters in them by year, that still wouldn't be a strong argument.
the general degradation of discourse on the Internet is reasonable.
He didn't say anything about the internet. I'm pretty sure he's talking about general public discourse. The internet is very new, and mainstream discourse on it is even newer, so drawing trends from is is a bit fishy. And it's not clear that those trends would imply anything at all about general public discourse.
The problem with this sort of hypothesis, is that it's very hard to prove rigorously. And the reason that's a problem is sometimes hypothesis that are hard to prove rigorously happen to be true anyway.
I feel like you're doing something this EY's post is arguing against.
I feel like you're doing something this EY's post is arguing against.
Care to specify how that is the case?
I'm suggesting that he (Hypothesis) is making an argument that's almost reasonable, but that he probably wouldn't accept if the same argument was used to defend a statement he didn't agree with (or if the statement was made by someone of lower status than EY).
It might be true that EY's claim is very hard to prove with any rigor, but that is not a reason to accept it. The text of EY's post suggests that he is quite confident in his belief, but if he has no strong arguments (and especially if no strong arguments can exist), then his confidence is itself an error.
Of course, I don't know what Hypothesis is thinking, but I think we can all agree that "sometimes hypothesis that are hard to prove rigorously happen to be true anyway" is a complete cop-out. Because sometimes hard-to-prove hypotheses also happen to be false.
I'm suggesting that he (Hypothesis) is making an argument that's almost reasonable, but that he probably wouldn't accept if the same argument was used to defend a statement he didn't agree with (or if the statement was made by someone of lower status than EY).
This kind of claim is plausible on priors, but I don't think you've provided Bayesian evidence in this case that actually discriminates pathological ingroup deference from healthy garden-variety deference. "You're putting more stock in a claim because you agree with other things the claimant has said" isn't in itself doing epistemics wrong.
In a community where we try to assign status/esteem/respect based on epistemics, there's always some risk that it will be hard to notice evidence of ingroup bias because we'll so often be able to say "I'm not biased; I'm just correctly using evidence about track records to determine whose views to put more weight on". I could see an argument for having more of a presumption of bias in order to correct for the fact that our culture makes it hard to spot particular instances of bias when they do occur. On the other hand, being too trigger-happy to yell "bias!" without concrete evidence can cause a lot of pointless arguments, and it's easy to end up miscalibrated in the end; the goal is to end up with accurate beliefs about the particular error rate of different epistemic processes, rather than to play Bias Bingo for its own sake.
So on the whole I still think it's best to focus discussion on evidence that actually helps us discriminate the level of bias, even if it takes some extra work to find that evidence. At least, I endorse that for public conversations targeting specific individuals; making new top-level posts about the problem that speak in generalities doesn't run into the same issues, and I think private messaging also has less of the pointless-arguments problem.
It might be true that EY's claim is very hard to prove with any rigor, but that is not a reason to accept it.
Obviously not; but "if someone had a justified true belief in this claim, it would probably be hard to transmit the justification in a blog-post-sized argument" does block the inferences "no one's written a convincing short argument for this claim, therefore it's false" and "no one's written a convincing short argument for this claim, therefore no one has justified belief in it". That's what I was saying earlier, not "it must be true because it hasn't been proven".
The text of EY's post suggests that he is quite confident in his belief, but if he has no strong arguments (and especially if no strong arguments can exist), then his confidence is itself an error.
You're conflating "the evidence is hard to transmit" with "no evidence exists". The latter justifies the inference to "therefore confidence is unreasonable", but the former doesn't, and the former is what we've been talking about.
I think we can all agree that "sometimes hypothesis that are hard to prove rigorously happen to be true anyway" is a complete cop-out. Because sometimes hard-to-prove hypotheses also happen to be false.
It's not a cop-out to say "evidence for this kind of claim can take a while to transmit" in response to "since you haven't transmitted strong evidence, doesn't that mean that your confidence is ipso facto unwarranted?". It would be an error to say "evidence for this kind of claim can take a while to transmit, therefore the claim is true", but no one's said that.
In a community where we try to assign status/esteem/respect based on epistemics, there's always some risk that it will be hard to notice evidence of ingroup bias because we'll so often be able to say "I'm not biased; I'm just correctly using evidence about track records to determine whose views to put more weight on". I could see an argument for having more of a presumption of bias in order to correct for the fact that our culture makes it hard to spot particular instances of bias when they do occur. On the other hand, being too trigger-happy to yell "bias!" without concrete evidence can cause a lot of pointless arguments, and it's easy to end up miscalibrated in the end.
I'd also want to explicitly warn against confusing epistemic motivations with 'I want to make this social heuristic cheater-resistant' motivations, since I think this is a common problem. Highly general arguments against the existence of hard-to-transmit evidence (or conflation of 'has the claimant transmitted their evidence?' with 'is the claimant's view reasonable?') raise a lot of alarm bells for me in line with Status Regulation and Anxious Underconfidence and Hero Licensing.
Status Regulation and Anxious Underconfidence and Hero Licensing.
Would it surprise you to know that I have issues with those posts as well?
"bias!"
On one hand, I'd much rather talk about how valid "memetic collapse" is, then about how valid someone's response to "memetic collapse" is. One the other hand, I really do believe that the response to this post is a lot less negative than it should be. Then again, these are largely the same question: why is my reaction to this post seemingly so different from other users'? "Bias" isn't necessarily my favorite answer. Maybe they're all just very polite.
"You're putting more stock in a claim because you agree with other things the claimant has said" isn't in itself doing epistemics wrong.
It's not wrong, but it's not locally valid. Here again, I'm going for that sweet irony.
but "if someone had a justified true be,lief in this claim, it would probably be hard to transmit the justification in a blog-post-sized argument" does block the inferences "no one's written a convincing short argument for this claim, therefore it's false"
Indeed, that inference is blocked. Actually most inferences are "blocked". I could trust EY to be right, but personally I don't. Therefore, EY's post didn't really force me to update my estimate of P("memetic collapse") in either direction. I should point out that my prior for "memetic collapse" is extremely low. I'm not sure if that needs an explanation or if it's something we all agree on.
So, when I finish reading a post and my probability estimate for one of the central claims of the post does not increase, despite apparent attempts by the author to increase it, I say it's a "bad post". Is that not reasonable? What does your P("memetic collapse") look like, and how did the post affect it?
"the evidence is hard to transmit"
You have said this a lot, but I don't really see why it should be true. Did EY even suggest so himself? Sure, it's probably harder to transmit than evidence for climate change, but I don't see how citing some fictional characters is the best EY can do. Of course, there is one case where evidence is very hard to transmit - that's when evidence doesn't exist.
That's what I was saying earlier
Oh, hey, we talked a lot in another thread. What happened to that?
It's not wrong, but it's not locally valid. Here again, I'm going for that sweet irony.
If local validity meant never sharing your confidence levels without providing all your evidence for your beliefs, local validity would be a bad desideratum.
I could trust EY to be right, but personally I don't. Therefore, EY's post didn't really force me to update my estimate of P("memetic collapse") in either direction.
Yes. I think that this is a completely normal state of affairs, and if it doesn't happen very often then there's probably something very wrong with the community's health and epistemic hygiene:
This situation is a sign of a healthy community (though not a strong sign). There's no realistic way for everyone to have the same judgments about everyone else's epistemic reliability — this is another case where it's just too time-consuming for everyone to fully share all their evidence, though they can do some information-sharing here and there (and it's particularly valuable to do so with people like Eliezer who get cited so much) — so this should be the normal way of things.
I'm not just saying that B and C's conduct in this hypothetical is healthy; I think A's is healthy too, because I don't think people should hide their conclusions just because they can't always concisely communicate their premises.
Like I said earlier, I'm sympathetic to the idea that Eliezer should explicitly highlight "this is a point I haven't defended" in cases like this. I've said that I think your criticisms have been inconsistent, unclear, or equivocation-prone on a lot of points, and that I think you've been failing a lot on other people's ITTs here; but I continue to fully endorse your interjection of "I disagree with A on this point" (both as a belief a reasonable person can hold, and as a positive thing for people to express given that they hold it), and I also continue to think that doing more signposting of "I haven't defended this here" may be a good idea. I'd like to see it discussed more.
You have said this a lot, but I don't really see why it should be true.
It's just a really common state of affairs, maybe even the default when you're talking about most practically important temporal properties of human individuals and groups. Compare claims like "top evopsych journals tend to be more careful and rigorous than top nutrition science journals" or "4th-century AD Roman literature used less complex wordplay and chained literary associations than 1st-century AD Roman literature".
These are the kinds of claims where it's certainly possible to reach a confident conclusion if (as it happens) the effect size is large, but where there will be plenty of finicky details and counter-examples and compressing the evidence into an easy-to-communicate form is a pretty large project. A skeptical interlocutor in those cases could reasonably doubt the claim until they see a lot of the same evidence (while acknowledging that other people may indeed have access to sufficient evidence to justify the conclusion).
(Maybe the memetic collapse claim, at the effect size we're probably talking about, is just a much harder thing to eyeball than those sorts of claims, such that it's reasonable to demand extraordinary evidence before you think that human brains can reach correct nontrivial conclusions about things like memetic collapse at all. I think that sort of skepticism has some merit to it, and it's a factor going into my skepticism; I just don't think the particular arguments you've given make sense as factors.)
I've said that I think your criticisms have been inconsistent, unclear, or equivocation-prone on a lot of points
Elaborate please. My claims about EY's "memetic collapse" should be clear and simple: it's a bad idea supported by bad arguments. My claims about how reasonable your response to "memetic collapse" is, are much weaker and more complicated. This is largely because I can't read your mind, and you haven't shared your reasoning much. What was your prior for "memetic collapse" before you read this? What is your probability estimate after reading it? Do you agree that EY does try to make multiple arguments, and that they are all very bad? Maybe you actually agree that it is a very bad post, maybe you even downvoted it, I wouldn't know.
There's no realistic way for everyone to have the same judgments about everyone else's epistemic reliability
You example with A, B, C is correct, but it's irrelevant. Nobody is saying that the statement "I believe X" is bad. The problem is with statement "I believe X because Y", where X does not follow from Y. "Memetic collapse" is not some sidenote in this post, EY does repeatedly try to share his intuitions about it. The argument about fictional characters is the one I've cited, because it's the most valid argument he's made (twice), and I was being charitable. But he also cites, e.g. Martin Shkreli trial and other current events, without even bothering to compare those situations to events in the past. Surely this is an implicit argument "it's bad now, so it was better in the past". How is that acceptable?
Epistemic reliability of the author is useful when he provides no arguments. But when he does write arguments, you're supposed to consider them.
You may point out that the claim "author used bad argument for X" is does not imply "X is false", and this is correct, but I believe that faulty arguments need to be pointed out and in some way discouraged. Surely this is what comments are for.
The level of charity you are exhibiting is ridiculous. Your arguments are fully general. You could take any post, no matter how stupid, and say "the author didn't have time to share his hard-to-transmit evidence", in defense of it. This is not healthy reasoning. I could believe that you're just that charitable to everyone, but then I'm not feeling quite that much charity directed at myself. Why did you feel a need to reply to my original comment, but not a need to leave a direct comment on EY's post?
If local validity meant never sharing your confidence levels without providing all your evidence for your beliefs, local validity would be a bad desideratum.
Local validity is a criteria that rejects the argument "climate change is true because it was hot yesterday". EY does not consider whether the climate supporter had the time to lay out his evidence, and he is not worried about passing the climate supporter's ITT. I think half of your criticisms directed to me would fit EY just fine, so I don't really understand why you wouldn't say them to him.
"top evopsych journals tend to be more careful and rigorous than top nutrition science journals" or "4th-century AD Roman literature used less complex wordplay and chained literary associations than 1st-century AD Roman literature"
These aren't actually much harder to transmit then "climate change" (i.e. "daily temperatures over the recent years tend to be higher than daily temperatures over many years before that"). You examples are more subjective (and therefore shouldn't have very high confidences), but apart from that, their evidence would look a lot like the evidence for climate change: counts and averages of some simple features, performed by a trusted source. And even if you didn't have that, citing one example of complex wordplay and one example of lack of it, would be a stronger argument than what EY did.
Regarding "memetic collapse", you haven't yet explained to me why the fictional character argument is the best EY could do. I feel like even I can find better ones myself (although it is hard to find good arguments for false claims). E.g. take some old newspaper and suggest that it is more willing to consider the outgroup's views than current papers.
The level of charity you are exhibiting is ridiculous. Your arguments are fully general. You could take any post, no matter how stupid, and say "the author didn't have time to share his hard-to-transmit evidence", in defense of it. This is not healthy reasoning.
If Fully General Counterargument A exists, but is invalid, then any defense against Counterargument A will necessarily also be Fully General.
I don't understand what you're trying to say. All fully general arguments are invalid, and pointing out that an argument is fully general is a reasonable defence against it. This defence is not fully general, in the sense that it only works when the original argument is, in fact, fully general.
Rob isn't saying that "complex ideas are hard to quickly explain" supports Yudkowsky's claim. He's saying that it weakens your argument against Yudkowsky's claim. The generality of Rob's argument should be considered relative to what he's defending against. You are saying that since the defense can apply to any complex idea, it is fully general. But it's a defense against the implied claim that only quick-to-explain ideas are valid.
A fully general counter-argument can attack all claims equally. A good defense against FGCAs should be capable of defending all claims just as equally. Pointing out that you can defend any complex idea by saying "complex ideas are hard to quickly explain" does not, in fact, show the defense to be invalid. (Often FGCAs can't attack all claims equally, but only all claims within a large reference class which is guaranteed to contain some true statements. Mutandis mutandum.)
Here is what our exchange looks like from my point of view.
Me: EY's arguments are bad.
Rob: But EY didn't have time to transmit his evidence.
Indeed he is not saying "EY is correct". But what is he saying? What is the purpose of that reply? In what way is it a reasonable reply to make? I'd love to hear an opinion from you as a third party.
Here is my point of view. I'm trying to evaluate the arguments, and see if I want to update P("memetic collapse") as well as P("EY makes good arguments") or P("EY is a crackpot"), and then Rob tells me not to, while providing no substance as to why I shouldn't. Indeed I should update P("EY is a crackpot"), and so should you. And if you don't, I need you to explain to me how exactly that works.
And I'm very much bothered by the literal content of the argument. Not enough time? Quickly? Where are these coming from? Am I the only one seeing the 3000 word post that surely took hours to write? You could use the "too little time" defense for a tweet, or a short comment on LW. But if you have the time to make a dozen bad arguments and emotional appeals, then surely you could also find the time for one decent argument. How long does a post have to be for Rob to actually engage with its arguments?
As I see it, Rob is defending the use of [(possibly shared) intuition?] in an argument, since not everything can be feasibly and quickly proved rigorously to the satisfaction of everyone involved:
These are the kinds of claims where it's certainly possible to reach a confident conclusion if (as it happens) the effect size is large, but where there will be plenty of finicky details and counter-examples and compressing the evidence into an easy-to-communicate form is a pretty large project. A skeptical interlocutor in those cases could reasonably doubt the claim until they see a lot of the same evidence (while acknowledging that other people may indeed have access to sufficient evidence to justify the conclusion).
(My summary is probably influenced by my memory of Wei Dai's top-level comment, which has a similar view, so it's possible that Rob wouldn't use the word "intuition", but I think that I have the gist of his argument.)
It appears that Yudkowsky simply wasn't trying to convince a skeptic of memetic collapse in this post - Little Fuzzy provided more of an example than a proof. This is more about connecting the concepts "memetic collapse" and "local validity" and some other things. Not every post needs to prove the validity of each concept it connects with. And in fact, Yudkowsky supported his idea of memetic collapse in the linked Facebook post. Does he need to go over the same supporting arguments in each related post?
Not every post needs to prove the validity of each concept it connects with.
Nobody ever said that it does. It's ok not to give any arguments. It's bad when you do give arguments and those arguments are bad. Can you confirm whether you see any arguments in the OP and whether you find them logically sound? Maybe I am hallucinating.
Yudkowsky simply wasn't trying to convince a skeptic of memetic collapse in this post
That would be fine, I could almost believe that it's ok to give bad arguments when the purpose of the post is different. But then, he also linked to another facebook post which is explicitly about explaining memetic collapse, and the arguments there are no better.
Rob is defending the use of [(possibly shared) intuition?]
What is that intuition exactly? And is it really shared?
I'm a bit late to this but I'm glad to see that you were pointing this stuff out in thread. I see this post as basically containing 2 things:
i think you're seeing (2) as more central to the post than I am, so I'm less bothered by its inclusion.
But I think you're correct to point out that it's unsupported, and i'm in agreement that it's probably false, and I'm glad you pointed out the irony of giving locally-invalid evidence in a post about how doing that is bad, and it seems to me that Rob spent quite a lot of words totally failing to engage with your actual criticism.
Yes, I saw, but I don't find the arguments there more compelling (rather, it's mostly just the same fiction argument). To be clear, the claim that something is changing isn't that controversial. It's the claim that this change is "bad", that needs stronger arguments.
This is critically important, and I want to focus on where our community can establish better norms for local validity. There are some relevant legal issues (is everyone here planning to pay capital gains tax on their Bitcoins?), but our core concern is epistemic.
We usually do a good job of not falling for outright fallacies, but there's always a temptation to sort of glide over them in the pursuit of a good cause. I see this a lot in conversations about effective altruism that go something like this:
Someone: Cash transfers have an even larger impact that the dollar amount itself, because people mostly use it to buy income-generating assets such as a cow or a sowing machine.
Me: Really? I thought most of the money was spent on quality-of-life things like metal roofs and better food.
Someone: What, you think that malnourished people don't deserve to buy a bit of food?
This is different from doubling down and claiming that food is actually an income-generating asset because well-fed people make more money. It's a nimble change of subject that prevents the person from actually admitting that their argument was bad.
I don't think it's as big a problem as some people claim, but I think it's critical for us to get this right. There are huge gains for us to be had as a community from being at 99% argument-validity and honesty as opposed to 95%. If you could trust that every rationalist is both arguing in good faith and is vigilant about bad arguments, we'll be able to learn much more from each other, and with a lot less noise, and build a solid rampart of common knowledge that will serve everyone.
I'd like nothing more than that. Unfortunately, this is hard to do. It's not like you can formalize and then formally verify all arguments. Do you have ideas? I wish there was more discussion on this in LW.
Formally verifying all arguments takes work, and how easy it is depends on how nuanced or complex a given argument is. But noticing and pointing out obvious errors is something I think most people can do.
In Jacob's exchange above, a passerby can easily notice that the goalposts have shifted and say "hey, it seems like you're shifting your goalposts."
Whether this works depends a lot on whether people expect that sort of criticism to be leveled fairly. In many corners of the internet, people (rightly) assume that complaining about goal-post-moving is a tactic employed against your outgroup.
I'm quite optimistic about solving this problem on LessWrong in particular. I'm much less optimistic about solving it in all corners of the EA-and-Rationalsphere.
Jacob's example is presumably a caricature, but even then, with a little charity, I can empathize with Someone. Here's how I might translate the debate:
Someone: I believe hypothesis "most people buy cows" is most likely, therefore "cash-transfers are good".
Jacobian: Really? I believe hypothesis "most people buy food" is more likely (presumably I'm saying this to imply "cash-transfers are bad")
Someone: I don't agree that hypothesis "most people buy food" implies "cash-transfers are bad".
Ideally, the two people would do battle until they agree on the values of P("most people buy cows") and P("most people buy food"), but that would take a lot of work, and if they don't agree on the implications of those hypotheses, there is no point in it. The reply "I don't think your counterargument disagrees with my conclusion" is reasonable. It is based on the assumption that Jacobian really was disagreeing with the conclusion, rather than just the argument. This assumption is both easy to make and easy to correct though.
Or another way to put it, is that "someone" unskillfully said "the argument I offered is not a crux for me."
Regarding solutions, I wish we could force people to explicitly answer questions. For example, suppose Someone's last reply said
Someone: Yes, really. But regardless, do you think that malnourished people don't deserve to buy a bit of food?
Jacobian: I don't actually think that. Now, why really?
And even better if we also forced people to ask specific questions with useful answers we could have
Jacobian: Why do you believe this? I thought most of the money was spent on quality-of-life things like metal roofs and better food.
Someone: I read it in [X]. But regardless, do you think that malnourished people don't deserve to buy a bit of food?
Jacobian: I don't actually think that. Now, regarding [X], I think it disagrees with [Y].
The point is that Someone isn't derailing the discussion by saying what they wanted to say. They are derailing the discussion by ignoring earlier questions. If they did answer those, then the original thread of discussion would be easy to preserve.
Also, this is easy to enforce. It should be clearly visible, which questions have explicit answers and which don't, even without an understanding of what is being discussed.
Of course, I might not want to answer a question if I don't think it's relevant. But at that point, you, or some third party, should be able to say "why didn't you answer question X?", and I should answer it (or say "I don't know"/"I don't understand the question").
I generally liked this post, but have some caveats and questions.
Why does local validity work as well as it does in math? This post explains why it will lead you only to the truth, but why does it often lead to mathematical truths that we care about in a reasonable amount of time? In other words, why aren't most interesting math questions like P=NP, or how to win a game of chess?
Relying purely on local validity won't get you very far in playing chess, or life in general, and we instead have to frequently use intuitions. As Jan_Kulveit pointed out, it's generally not introspectively accessible why we have the intuitions that we do, so we sometimes make up bad arguments to explain them. So if someone points out the badness of an argument, it's important to adjust your credence downwards only as much as you considered the bad argument to be additional evidence on top of your intuitions.
Lastly, I can see the analogy between proofs and more general arguments, but I'm not sure about the third thing, law/coordination. I mean I can see some surface similarities between them, but are there also supposed to be deep correspondences between their underlying mechanisms? If so, I'm afraid I didn't get what they are.
Relying purely on local validity won't get you very far in playing chess
The equivalent of local validity is just mechanically checking "okay, if I make this move, then they can make that move" for a bunch of cases. Which, first, is a major developmental milestone for kids learning chess. So we only think it "won't get you very far" because all the high-level human play explicitly or implicitly takes it for granted.
And secondly, it's pretty analogous to doing math; proving theorems is based on the ability to check the local validity of each step, but mathematicians aren't just brute-forcing their way to proofs. They have to develop higher-level heuristics, some of which are really hard to express in language, to suggest avenues, and then check local validity once they have a skeleton of some part of the argument. But if mathematicians stopped doing that annoying bit, well, then after a while you'll end up with another crisis of analysis when the brilliant intuitions are missing some tiny ingredient.
Local validity is an incredibly important part of any scientific discipline; the fact that it's not a part of most political discourse is merely a reflection that our society is at about the developmental level of a seven-year-old when it comes to political reasoning.
I suspect there may be a miscommunication here. To elaborate on "Relying purely on local validity won’t get you very far in playing chess", what I had in mind is that if you decided to play a move only if you can prove that's it's the optimal move, you won't get very far, since we can't produce proofs of this form (even by using higher-level heuristics to guide us). Was your comment meant as a response to this point, or to a different interpretation of what I wrote?
My comment was meant to explain what I understood Eliezer to be saying, because I think you had misinterpreted that. The OP is simply saying "don't give weight to arguments that are locally invalid, regardless of what else you like about them". Of course you need to use priors, heuristics, and intuitions in areas where you can't find an argument that carries you from beginning to end. But being able to think "oh, if I move there, then they can take my queen, and I don't see anything else good about that position, so let's not do that then" is a fair bit easier than proving your move optimal.
Oh, I see. I think your understanding of Eliezer makes sense, and the sentence you responded to wasn't really meant as an argument against the OP, but rather as setup for the point of that paragraph, which was "if someone points out the badness of an argument, it’s important to adjust your credence downwards only as much as you considered the bad argument to be additional evidence on top of your intuitions."
To elaborate, I thought there was a possible mistake someone might make after reading the OP and wanted to warn against that. Specifically the mistake is that someone makes a bad argument to explain an intuition, the badness of the argument is pointed out, they accept that and then give up their intuition or adjust their credence downward too much. This is not an issue for most people who haven't read the OP because they would just refuse to accept the badness of the argument.
(ETA: On second thought maybe I did initially misinterpret Eliezer and meant to argue against him, and am now forgetting that and giving a different motivation for what I wrote. In any case, I currently think your interpretation is correct, and what I wrote may still be valuable in that light. :)
Why does local validity work as well as it does in math? <...> In other words, why aren't most interesting math questions like P=NP, or how to win a game of chess?
Why do you think that it works well? Are you sure most possible mathematical questions aren't exactly like P=NP, or worse? The set of "interesting" questions isn't representative of all questions, this set starts with "2+2=?" and grows slowly, new questions become "interesting" only after old ones are answered. There is also some intuition about which questions might be answerable and which might be too hard, that further guides the construction of this set of "interesting" questions.
I think the key difference between math and chess is that chess is a two player game with a simple goal. In math there is no competitive pressure to be right about statements fast. If you have an intuition that says P=NP, then nobody cares, you get no reward from being right, unless that intuition also leads to a proof (sometimes it does). But if you have an intuition that f3 is the best chess opening move, you win games and then people care. I'm suggesting that if there was a way to "win" math by finding true statements regardless of proof, then you'd see how powerless local validity is.
This is all a bit off topic though.
I think about this post a lot, and sometimes in conjunction with my own post on common knowlege.
As well as it being a referent for when I think about fairness, it also ties in with how I think about LessWrong, Arbital and communal online endeavours for truth. The key line is:
For civilization to hold together, we need to make coordinated steps away from Nash equilibria in lockstep.
You can think of Wikipedia as being a set of communally editable web pages where the content of the page is constrained to be that which we can easily gain common knowledge of its truth. Wikipedia's information is only that which comes from verifiable sources, which is how they solve this problem - all the editors don't have to get in a room and talk forever if there's a simple standard of truth. (I mean, they still do, but it would blow up to an impossible level if the standard were laxer than this.)
I understand a key part of the vision for Arbital was that, instead of the common standard being verifiable facts, it was instead to build a site around verifiable steps of inference, or alternatively phrased, local validity. This would allow us to walk through argument space together without knowing whether the conclusions were true or false yet.
I think about this a lot, in terms of what steps a community can make together. I maybe will write a post on it more some day. I'm really grateful that Eliezer wrote this post.
The point that the Law needs to be simple and local so that humans can cope with it is also true of other domains. And this throws up an important constraint for people designing systems that humans are supposed to interact with: you must make it possible to reason simply and locally about them.
This comes up in programming (to a man with a nail everything looks like a hammer): good programming practice emphasises splitting programs up into small components that can be reasoned about in isolation. Modularity, compositionality, abstraction, etc. aside from their other benefits, make it possible to reason about code locally.
Of course, some people inexplicably believe that programs are mostly supposed to be consumed by computers, which have very different simplicity requirements and don't care much about locality. This can lead to programs that are very difficult for humans to consume.
Similarly, if you are writing a mathematical proof, it is good practice to try and split it up into small lemmas, transform the domain with definitions to make it simpler, and prove sub-components in isolation.
Interestingly, these days you can also write mathematical proofs to be consumed by a computer. And these often suffer some of the same problems that computer programs do - because what is simple for the computer does not necessarily correspond to what is simple for the human.
(Tendentious speculation: perhaps it is not a coincidence that mathematicians tend to gravitate towards functional programming.)
I find it deeply sad that many of us feel the need to frequently link to this article - I don't think I have ever done so, because if I need to explain local validity, then perhaps I'm talking to the wrong people? But certainly the ignoring of this principle has gotten more and more blatant and common over time since this post, so it's becoming less reasonable to assume that people understand such things. Which is super scary.
I'm actually somewhat rolling to disbelieve on how frequently people link to the article (I guess because of my own experience which I'm now typical minding).
I haven't personally linked to this because someone was failing at local validity. What I've done is refer to this article while (attempting to) work towards a deeper, comprehensive culture that takes it seriously. What I found valuable about this was not "here's a thing that previously we didn't know and now we know it", it's "we were all sort of acting upon this belief, but not in a coordinated fashion. Now we have a good reference and common knowledge of it, which enables us to build off of it."
This post should be included in the Best-of-2018 compilation.
This is not only a good post, but one which cuts to the core of what this community is about. This site began not as a discussion of topics X, Y, and Z, but as a discussion of how to be... less wrong than the world around you (even/especially your own ingroup), and the difficulties this entails. Uncompromising honesty and self-skepticism are hard, and even though the best parts are a distillation of other parts of the Sequences, people need to be reminded more often than they need to be instructed.
It strikes me as pedagogically unfortunate that sections i. and ii. (on arguments and proof-steps being locally valid) are part of the same essay as as sections iii.–vi. (on what this has to do with the function of Law in Society). Had this been written in the Sequences-era, one would imagine this being (at least) two separate posts, and it would be nice to have a reference link for just the concept of argumentative local validity (which is obviously correct and important to have a name for, even if some of the speculations about Law in sections iii.–vi. turned out to be wrong).
I link this post (and use the phrase "local validity") a lot as a standard reference for the "This particular step of an argument either makes sense or doesn't make sense, indpendently of whether you agree with the conclusion of the broader argument" idea.
The game-theoretic function of law can make following those simple rules feel like losing something, taking a step backward. You don't get to defect in the Prisoner's Dilemma, you don't get that delicious (5, 0) payoff instead of (3, 3). The law may punish one of your allies. You may be losing something according to your actual value function, which feels like the law having an objectively bad immoral result. You may coherently hold that the universe is a worse place for an instance of the enforcement of a good law, relative to its counterfactual state if that law could be lifted in just that instance without affecting any other instances. Though this does require seeing that law as having a game-theoretic function as well as a moral function.
Growing up I've been firmly in the camp of "rules and the law are bullshit!". At the beginning of going down the rationality path, that meme was only bolstered by being able to see through people's inconsistent explanations for why things were. I've since moved away from that, but this post made me realize that my old "rules are bullshit" attitude is still operating in the background of my mind and having a non-trivial negative impact on my ability to evenly apply my best approximation of the Law. There's still a twinge of "this is stupid bureaucracy!" any time a rule inconveniently applies to me, and that feeling seems to mostly come from a shallow pattern matching of the situation.
I understand that this post seems wise to some people. To me, it seems like a series of tautologies on the surface, with an understructure of assumptions that are ultimately far more important and far more questionable. The basic assumption being made is that society-wide "memetic collapse" is a thing; the evidence given for this (even if you follow the links) is weak, and yet the attitude throughout is that further debate on this point is not worth our breath.
I am a co-author of statistics work with somebody whose standards of mathematical rigour are higher than mine. I often take intuitive leaps that she questions. There are three different common outcomes: one, that once we add the necessary rigour to my initial claim, it turns out to be right; two, that we recognize a mistake, but are able to fix things with some relatively minor claim to the original claim; and three, that I turn out to have been utterly wrong. So yes, it's good that she demands rigour, but I think that if she said "you are a Bad Person for making a locally-invalid argument" every time I made a leap, our collaboration would be less productive overall.
Overall, I don't object to the basic valid points made by this post, and I understand that it's a useful and clarifying exposition for some people (including people who are smarter than I am). Still, I wouldn't want to include this post in a "best of" (that is, I wouldn't use it to demonstrate how cool I find Less Wrong) because I find it gives an impression of self-satisfaction that I find off-putting.
I think this post is worthy of inclusion basically because it contributes to solving this problem:
I've been musing recently about how a lot of the standard Code of the Light isn't really written down anywhere anyone can find.
That said, I think it's marred a little bit by reference to events and people in 2018 that might quickly pass from memory (as I think the main 3 names referred to have left public life, at least temporarily). This seems easy to fix with footnotes (which seems better than taking them out or otherwise making the point less specific).
Two similar ideas:
There is a group evolutionary advantage for a society to support punishing those who defect from the social contract.
We get the worst democracy that we're willing to put up with. If you are not prepared to vote against 'your own side' when they bend the rules, that level of rule bending becomes the new norm. If you accept the excuse "the other side did it first", then the system becomes unstable because there are various baises (both cognitive, and deliberately induced by external spin) that make people more harshly evaluate the transgressions of other, than they evaluate those of their own side.
This is one reason why a thriving civil society (organisations, whether charities or newspapers, minimally under or influenced by the state) promotes stability - because they provide a yardstick to measure how vital it is to electorally punish a particular transgression that is external to the political process.
A game of soccer in which referee decisions are taken by a vote of the players turns into a mob.
I'm not sure what to make of this argument.
There's one ideal of disagreement where you focus on disagreeing with the central point and steelman what the other person says. We frequently advocate for that norm on LessWrong.
To me this post seems to point in the opposite direction. Instead of steelmanning a bad argument that's made, you are supposed to challenge the bad argument directly.
What kind of norm do we want to value on LessWrong?
Eliezer wrote this in a private Facebook thread February 2017:
Reminder: Eliezer and Holden are both on record as saying that "steelmanning" people is bad and you should stop doing it.
As Holden says, if you're trying to understand someone or you have any credence at all that they have a good argument, focus on passing their Ideological Turing Test. "Steelmanning" usually ends up as weakmanning by comparison. If they don't in fact have a good argument, it's falsehood to pretend they do. If you want to try to make a genuine effort to think up better arguments yourself because they might exist, don't drag the other person into it.
And he FB-commented on Ozy's Against Steelmanning in August 2016:
Be it clear: Steelmanning is not a tool of understanding and communication. The communication tool is the Ideological Turing Test. "Steelmanning" is what you do to avoid the equivalent of dismissing AGI after reading a media argument. It usually indicates that you think you're talking to somebody as hapless as the media.
The exception to this rule is when you communicate, "Well, on my assumptions, the plausible thing that sounds most like this is..." which is a cooperative way of communicating to the person what your own assumptions are and what you think are the strong and weak points of what you think might be the argument.
Mostly, you should be trying to pass the Ideological Turing Test if speaking to someone you respect, and offering "My steelman might be...?" only to communicate your own premises and assumptions. Or maybe, if you actually believe the steelman, say, "I disagree with your reason for thinking X, but I'll grant you X because I believe this other argument Y. Is that good enough to move on?" Be ready to accept "No, the exact argument for X is important to my later conclusions" as an answer.
"Let me try to imagine a smarter version of this stupid position" is when you've been exposed to the Deepak Chopra version of quantum mechanics, and you don't know if it's the real version, or what a smart person might really think is the issue. It's what you do when you don't want to be that easily manipulated sucker who can be pushed into believing X by a flawed argument for not-X that you can congratulate yourself for being skeptically smarter than. It's not what you do in a respectful conversation.
It seems like in the vast majority of conversations, we find ourselves closer to the "exposed to the Deepak Chopra version of quantum mechanics and haven't seen the actual version yet" situation than we do to the "Arguing with someone who is far less experienced and knowledgeable than you are on this subject." In the latter case, it's easy to see why steelmanning would be counterproductive. If you're a professor trying to communicate a difficult subject to a student, and the student is having trouble understanding your position, it's unhelpful to try to "steelman" the student (i.e. try to present a logical-sounding but faulty argument in favor of what the student is saying), but it's far more helpful to the student to try to "pass their ITT" by modeling their confusions and intuitions, and then use that to try to help them understand the correct argument. I can imagine Eliezer and Holden finding themselves in this situation more often than not, since they are both experts in their respective fields and have spent many years refining their reasoning skills and fine-tuning the arguments to their various positions on things.
But in most situations, for most of us who may not quite know how strong the epistemological ground we stand on really is, are probably using some mixture of flawed intuitions and logic to present our understandings of some topic. We might also be modeling people whom we really respect as being in a similar situation as we are. In which case it seems like the line between steelmanning and ITT becomes a bit blurry. If I know that both of us are using some combination of intuition (prone to bias and sometimes hard to describe), importance weighting of various facts, and different logical pathways to reach some set of conclusions, both trying to pass each other's ITT as well as steelmanning potentially have some utility. The former might help to iron out differences in our intuitions and harder to formalize disagreements, and the latter might help with actually reaching more formal versions of arguments, or reasoning paths that have yet to be explored.
But I do find it easy to imagine that as I progress in my understanding and expertise in some particular topic, the benefits of steelmanning relative to ITT do seem to decrease. But it's not clear to me that I (or anyone outside of the areas they spend most of their time thinking about) have actually reached this point in situations where we are debating with or cooperating on a problem together with respected peers.
I don't see him as arguing against steelmanning. But the opposite of steelmanning isn't arguing against an idea directly. You've got to be able to steelman an opponent's argument well in order to argue against it well too, or perhaps determine that you agree with it. In any case, I'm not sure how to read a case for locally valid argumentation steps as being in favor of not doing this. Wouldn't it help you understand how people arrive at their conclusions?
There are plenty of times where someone writes a LessWrong post and while I do agree with the central point of the post I disagree with a noncentral part of the post.
A person might use some historical example and I disagree with the example. In those cases it's for me an open question whether or not it's useful to write the comment that disagrees or whether that's bad for LW. It might be bad because people feel like they are getting noncentral feedback and that discourages them.
From the linked fb post on memetic collapse:
We're looking at a collapse of reference to expertise
I think this much might be true, and I think there is a single meme responsible for a large part of the collapse. That is the "think for yourself, don't be a sheep" meme. Problem is that everyone likes this meme. I'm sure it's popular on LW too. And, of course, there are healthy ways to "think for yourself". But if you tell someone not to be a sheep, and they start rejecting reasonable experts in favor of their intuitions, you can't really act surprised.
Note that general meanness and tribalism do not explain this collapse well, because some of the experts are in your tribe. Hedonism might explain why Bob isn't referring to experts, but it does not explain why he isn't demanding for Alice to refer to them.
A small note, which would probably have been better before it get published. For someone not following US politics, the story of Doug Jones is hard to follow as I don't have any context about it. My first reading suggest that some people would have wanted to expel a senator, leaving the senate with one less member on the democratic side. But it does not seems to make sens, unless some party have the power to expell a senator from the whole senate
This seems like such a core idea. I can't recall employing it, but it's stuck in my mind as distinction that makes our community especially valuable and helps me understand that the lack of this is what's behind so much insanity I see in others. So I guess I don't feel like I "use", but it has sunk deep into my models of how people reason.
Eric Ries of the Lean Startup frequently says that every company should have a chief officer of innovation because unless it's someone's job to focus on innovation that function isn't done well.
In a similar way, every government should have a minister of deregulation that oversees a bunch of professionals that work on proposing ways to make the government simpler.
Deregulation and we simply need to make it more of a political or policy priority to invest enough manpower into working on it.
The notion that you can "be fair to one side but not the other", that what's called "fairness" is a kind of favor you do for people you like, says that even the instinctive sense people had of law-as-game-theory is being lost in the modern memetic collapse. People are being exposed to so many social-media-viral depictions of the Other Side defecting, and viewpoints exclusively from Our Side without any leavening of any other viewpoint that might ask for a game-theoretic compromise, that they're losing the ability to appreciate the kind of anecdotes they used to tell in ancient China.
(Or maybe it's hormonelike chemicals leached from plastic food containers. Let's not forget all the psychological explanations offered for a wave of violence that turned out to be lead poisoning.)
Is it also possible that it has always been like that? People mostly feeling that the other side is evil and trying to get the better of them, with a few people sticking up for fairness, and overall civilization just barely hanging on?
I like the reference to the Little Fuzzy, but going further, how could we tell whether and how much things have changed on this dimension?
I'd much rather buy a used car from the second person than the first person. I think I'd pay at least a 5% price premium.
I really like this. Illustrating with "who I'd rather buy a used car from". Cool.
Lord Kelvin's careful and multiply-supported lines of reasoning arguing that the Earth could not possibly be so much as a hundred million years old, all failed simultaneously in a surprising way because that era didn't know about nuclear reactions.
I'm told that the biggest reason Kelvin was wrong was that, for many years, no one thought about there being a molten interior subject to convection:
Perry's [1895?] calculation shows that if the Earth has a conducting lid of 50 kilometers' thickness, with a perfectly convecting fluid underneath, then the measured thermal gradients near the surface are consistent with any age up to 2 billion or 3 billion years. Recognizing that heat transfer in the mantle cannot be perfectly efficient, Perry subsequently modeled the deep interior as a solid with high "quasi-diffusivity." His results agreed with the original simple calculation in suggesting that the Earth could be several billions of years old. Full calculations of convection in the mantle (which were impossible until the advent of computers) confirm that Perry's reasoning was sound.
In other words, Perry was able to reconcile a physical calculation of Earth's thermal evolution with the great age that geologists required. Perry needed nothing more than to introduce the idea that heat moved in the deep interior of the Earth more readily than it moved in the outermost layers. Yet to this day, most geologists believe that Kelvin's (understandable) mistake was not to have known about Earth's internal radioactivity.
Of course, 2-3 billion is also too young, and with radioactive decay we can raise the age to ~4 billion years.
But wait, shouldn't convection also increase the cooling rate, so that the Earth in Perry's model should be cooler even if it were the same age as Kelvin's Earth? I am confused.
P.S. I find this piece abstract and hard to decipher, especially the discussion of law/Law; your early works were easier. More examples and detail are needed to connect the words to reality.
Is this different than logical validity? If not, how do they relate?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Validity_(logic)
https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/valid-argument
I could believe that adding the word "local" might help people communicate the concept more clearly, but I'm curious if it's doing anything else here.
I've curated this post for these reasons:
Biggest hesitations I had with curating this:
In general I will be less likely to curate facebook re-posts, but this one seemed especially important.
---
I also feel the desire to add that, while I (and others on the mod team) make decisions on which posts to curate and write down my reasons like this, this doesn't mean I have a stronger understanding of rationality than some of the other writers on the site - especially Eliezer, original creator of the site and author of the A to Z of rationality.
Nonetheless, given that it is me (and not e.g. Eliezer, Scott, others) who is putting time into reading a vast swathe of writing and choosing which posts to curate, I think it makes sense for to write up how I think the post connects to rationality as I see it, and whatever other reasons bore on my decision to curate the post. This doesn't mean I'm right, or that I don't expect others would do it better than me, it just means that because I'm in fact the person who's doing the work, the transparency of my decision-making is useful for users trying to understand the norms on the site. I (and other mods) will have a different take on rationality than some of the older writers in this community, and that's basically the only way it could be. As a great writer on this site once said, you have no choice but to form your own opinions.
There will be scorching days even if the climate is slowly cooling. It's really not a significant amount of evidence - certainly not worth talking about. It's not worth the air you would talk it into.
There are weaker and stronger versions of this attribute. Some people will think to themselves, “Well, it’s important to use only valid arguments… but there was a sustained pattern of record highs worldwide over multiple years which does count as evidence, and that particular very hot day was a part of that pattern, so it’s valid evidence for global warming.” Other people will think to themselves, “I’d roll my eyes at someone who offers a single very cold day as an argument that global warming is false. So it can’t be okay to use a single very hot day to argue that global warming is true.”
I’d much rather buy a used car from the second person than the first person. I think I’d pay at least a 5% price premium.
Suppose the first person says his thing, and the second person responds with his thing. Might the first person not counter thusly:
“But maybe you shouldn’t roll your eyes at someone who offers a single very cold day as an argument that global warming is false. One person’s modus tollens is another’s modus ponens, after all.”
Where is the dishonesty in that? It seems entirely consistent, to me.
(Cross-posted from Facebook.)
0.
Tl;dr: There's a similarity between these three concepts:
i.
The notion of a locally evaluated argument step is simplest in mathematics, where it is a formalizable idea in model theory. In math, a general type of step is 'valid' if it only produces semantically true statements from other semantically true statements, relative to a given model. If x = y in some set of variable assignments, then 2x = 2y in the same model. Maybe x doesn't equal y, in some model, but even if it doesn't, the local step from "x = y" to "2x = 2y" is a locally valid step of argument. It won't introduce any new problems.
Conversely, xy = xz does not imply y = z. It happens to work when x = 2, y = 3, and z= 3, in which case the two statements say "6 = 6" and "3 = 3" respectively. But if x = 0, y = 4, z = 17, then we have "0 = 0" on one side and "4 = 17" on the other. We can feed in a true statement and get a false statement out the other end. This argument is not locally okay.
You can't get the concept of a "mathematical proof" unless on some level—though often an intuitive level rather than an explicit one—you understand the notion of a single step of argument that is locally okay or locally not okay, independent of whether you globally agreed with the final conclusion. There's a kind of approval you give to the pieces of the argument, rather than looking the whole thing over and deciding whether you like what came out the other end.
Once you've grasped that, it may even be possible to convince you of mathematical results that sound counterintuitive. When your understanding of the rules governing allowable argument steps has become stronger than your faith in your ability to judge whole intuitive conclusions, you may be convinced of truths you would not otherwise have grasped.
ii.
More generally in life, even outside of mathematics, there are such things as bad arguments for good conclusions.
There are even such things as genuinely good arguments for false conclusions, though of course those are much rarer. By the Bayesian definition of evidence, "strong evidence" is exactly that kind of evidence which we very rarely expect to find supporting a false conclusion. Lord Kelvin's careful and multiply-supported lines of reasoning arguing that the Earth could not possibly be so much as a hundred million years old, all failed simultaneously in a surprising way because that era didn't know about nuclear reactions. But most of the time this does not happen.
On the other hand, bad arguments for true conclusions are extremely easy to come by, because there are tiny elves that whisper them to people. There isn't anything the least bit more difficult in making an argument terrible when it leads to a good conclusion, since the tiny elves own lawnmowers.
One of the marks of an intellectually strong mind is that they are able to take a curious interest in whether a particular argument is a good argument or a bad argument, independently of whether they agree with the conclusion of that argument.
Even if they happen to start out believing that, say, the intelligence explosion thesis for Artificial General Intelligence is false, they are capable of frowning at the argument that the intelligence explosion is impossible because hypercomputation is impossible, or that there's really no such thing as intelligence because of the no-free-lunch theorem, and saying, "Even if I agree with your conclusion, I think that's a terrible argument for it." Even if they agree with the mainstream scientific consensus on anthropogenic global warming, they still wince and perhaps even offer a correction when somebody offers as evidence favoring global warming that there was a really scorching day last summer.
There are weaker and stronger versions of this attribute. Some people will think to themselves, "Well, it's important to use only valid arguments... but there was a sustained pattern of record highs worldwide over multiple years which does count as evidence, and that particular very hot day was a part of that pattern, so it's valid evidence for global warming." Other people will think to themselves, "I'd roll my eyes at someone who offers a single very cold day as an argument that global warming is false. So it can't be okay to use a single very hot day to argue that global warming is true."
I'd much rather buy a used car from the second person than the first person. I think I'd pay at least a 5% price premium.
Metaphorically speaking, the first person will court-martial an allied argument if they must, but they will favor allied soldiers when they can. They still have a sense of motion toward the Right Final Answer as being progress, and motion away from the right final answer as anti-progress, and they dislike not making progress.
The second person has something more like the strict mindset of a mathematician when it comes to local validity. They are able to praise some proof steps as obeying the rules, irrespective of which side those steps are on, without a sense that they are thereby betraying their side.
iii.
This essay has been bubbling in the back of my mind for a while, since I read that potential juror #70 for the Martin Shkreli trial was rejected during selection when, asked if they thought they could render impartial judgment, they replied, "I can be fair to one side but not the other." And I thought maybe I should write something about why that was possibly a harbinger of the collapse of civilization. I've been musing recently about how a lot of the standard Code of the Light isn't really written down anywhere anyone can find.
The thought recurred during the recent #MeToo saga when some Democrats were debating whether it made sense to kick Al Franken out of the Senate. I don't want to derail into debating Franken's behavior and whether that degree of censure was warranted per se, and I'll delete any such comments. What brought on this essay was that I read some unusually frank concerns from people who did think that Franken's behavior was per se cause to not represent the Democratic Party in the Senate; but who worried that the Democrats would police themselves, the Republicans wouldn't, and so the Republicans would end up controlling the Senate.
I've heard less of that since some upstanding Republican voters in Alabama stayed home on election night and put Doug Jones in the Senate.
But at the time, some people were replying, "That seems horrifyingly cynical and realpolitik. Is the idea here that sexual line-crossing is only bad and worthy of punishment when Republicans do it? Are we deciding that explicitly now?" And others were saying, "Look, the end result of your way of doing things is to just hand over the Senate to the Republican Party."
This is a conceptual knot that, I'm guessing, results from not explicitly distinguishing game theory from goodness.
There is, I think, a certain intuitive idea that ideally the Law is supposed to embody a subset of morality insofar as it is ever wise to enforce certain kinds of goodness. Murder is bad, and so there's a law against this bad behavior of murder. There's a lot of places where the law is in fact evil, like the laws criminalizing marijuana; that means the law is departing from its purpose, falling short of what it should be. Those who are not real-life straw authoritarians (who are sadly common) will cheerfully agree that there are some forms of goodness, even most forms of goodness, that it is not wise to try to legislate. But insofar as it is ever wise to make law, there's an intuitive sense that law should reflect some particular subset of morally good behavior that we have decided it is wise to enforce with guns, such as "Don't kill people."
It's from this perspective that "As a matter of pragmatic realpolitik we are going to not enforce sexual line-crossing rules against Democratic senators" seems like giving up, and maybe a harbinger of the fall of civilization if things have really gotten that bad.
But there's more than one function of legal codes, the way that money is both a store of value and a medium of exchange but these are different functions of money.
You can also look at laws as a kind of game theory played with people who might not share your morality at all. Some people take this perspective almost exclusively, at least in their verbal reports. They'll say, "Well, yes, I'd like it if I could walk into your house and take all your stuff, but I would dislike it even more if you could walk into my house and take my stuff, and that's why we have laws." I'm never quite sure how seriously to take the claim that they'd be happy walking into my house and taking my stuff. It seems to me that law enforcement and even social enforcement are simply not effective enough to count for the vast majority of human cooperation, and I have a sense that civilization is free-riding a whole lot on innate altruism... but game theory is certainly a function served by law.
The same way that money is both medium of exchange and store of value, the law is both collective utility function fragment and game theory.
In its function as game theory, the law (ideally) enables people with different utility functions to move from bad Nash equilibria to better Nash equilibria, closer to the Pareto frontier. Instead of mutual defection getting a payoff of (2, 2), both sides pay 0.1 for law enforcement and move to enforced mutual cooperation at (2.9, 2.9).
From this perspective, everything rests on notions like "fairness", "impartiality", "equality before the law", "it doesn't matter whose ox is being gored". If the so-called law punishes your defection but lets the other's defection pass, and this happens systematically enough and often enough, it is in your interest to blow up the current equilibrium if you have a chance.
It is coherent to say, "Crossing this behavioral line is universally bad when anyone does it, and also we're not going to punish Democratic senators unless you also punish Republican senators." Though as the saga of Senator Doug Jones of Alabama also shows, you should be careful about preemptively assuming the other side won't cooperate; there are sad lost opportunities there.
iv.
The way humans do law, it depends on the existence of what feel like simple general rules that apply to all cases.
This is not a universal truth of decision theory, it's a consequence of our cognitive limitations. Two superintelligences could negotiate a compromise with complicated detailed boundaries going right up to the Pareto frontier. They could agree on mutually verified pieces of cognitive code designed to intelligently decide future events according to known principles.
Humans use simpler laws than that.
To be clear, the kind of "law" I'm talking about here is not to be confused with the enormous modern morass of unreadable regulations. Think of, say, the written laws that actually got enforced in a small town in California in 1820. Or Democrats debating whether to enforce a sanction against Democratic senators if it's not being enforced against Republican senators. Or a small community's elders' star-chamber meeting to debate an accusation of sexual assault. Or the laws that cops will enforce even against other cops. These are the kinds of laws that must be simple in order to exist.
The reason that hunter-gatherer tribes don't have 100,000 pages of written legalism... is not that they've wisely realized that lengthy rules are easier to fill with loopholes, and that complicated regulations favor large corporations with legal departments, and that laws often have unintended consequences which don't resemble their stated justifications, and that deadweight losses increase quadratically. It's very clear that a supermajority of human beings are not that wise. Rather, hunter-gatherers just don't have enough time, energy, and paper to screw up that badly.
When humans try to verbalize The Law that isn't to be confused with written law, the law that cops will enforce against other cops, it comes out in universally quantified short sentences like "Anyone who defects in the Prisoner's Dilemma will be penalized TEN points even if that costs us fifteen" or "If you kill somebody who wasn't attacking you first, we'll exile you."
At one point somebody had the bright idea of trying to write down The Law. That way everyone could have common knowledge of what The Law was; and if you didn't break what was written, you could know you were safe from at least the official sanctions. Robert Heinlein called it the most important moment in political history, declaring that the law was above the politicians.
I for one rather doubt the Code of Hammurabi was universally enforced. I expect that hunter-gatherer tribes long before writing had a sense of there being Laws that were above the decisions of individual elders. I suspect that even in the best of times most of the The Law was never written down, and that more than half of what was written down was never really The Law.
But unfortunately, once somebody had the bright idea of writing down The Law, somebody else had the bright idea of writing down more words on the same clay tablet.
Today we live in a post-legalist era, when almost all of that which serves the true function of Law can no longer be written down. The government legalist system is too expensive in time and money and energy, too unreliable, and too slow, for any sane victim of sexual assault to appeal to the criminal justice system instead of the media justice system or the whispernet justice system. The civil legalist system outside of small claims court is a bludgeoning contest between entities that can afford lawyers, and the real law between corporations is enforced by merchant reputation and the threat of starting a bludgeoning contest. If you're in a lower-class neighborhood in the US, you can't get together and create order using your own town guards, because the police won't allow it. From your perspective, the function of the police is to prevent open gunfights and to not allow any more effective order than that to form.
But so it goes. We can't always keep the nice things we used to have, like written laws. The privilege was abused, and has been revoked.
When remains of The Law must indeed be simple, because our written-law privileges have been revoked, and so The Law relies on everyone knowing The Law without it being written down. It isn't even recited in memorable verse, as once it was. The Law relies on the community agreeing on the application of The Law without there being professional judges or a precedent-based judiciary. If not universal agreement, it must at least seem that the choices of the elders are trying to appeal to The Law instead of just naked self-interest. To the extent a voluntary association can't agree on The Law in this sense, it will soon cease to be a voluntary association.
The Law also breaks down if people start believing that, when the simple rules say one thing, the deciders will instead look at whose ox got gored, evaluate their personal interest, and enforce a different conclusion instead.
Which is to say: human law ends up with what people at least believe to be a set of simple rules that can be locally checked to test okay behavior. It's not actually algorithmically simple any more than walking is cheaply computable, but it feels simple the way that walking feels easy. Whatever doesn't feel like part of that small simple set won't be systematically enforced by the community, regardless of whether your civilization has reached the stage where police are seizing the cars of black people but not white people who use marijuana.
v.
The game-theoretic function of law can make following those simple rules feel like losing something, taking a step backward. You don't get to defect in the Prisoner's Dilemma, you don't get that delicious (5, 0) payoff instead of (3, 3). The law may punish one of your allies. You may be losing something according to your actual value function, which feels like the law having an objectively bad immoral result. You may coherently hold that the universe is a worse place for an instance of the enforcement of a good law, relative to its counterfactual state if that law could be lifted in just that instance without affecting any other instances. Though this does require seeing that law as having a game-theoretic function as well as a moral function.
So long as the rules are seen as moving from a bad global equilibrium to a global equilibrium seen as better, and so long as the rules are mostly-equally enforced on everyone, people are sometimes able to take a step backward and see that larger picture. Or, in a less abstract way, trade off the reified interest of The Law against their own desires and wishes.
This mental motion goes by names like "justice", "fairness", and "impartiality". It has ancient exemplars like a story I couldn't seem to Google, about a Chinese general who prohibited his troops from looting, and then his son appropriated a straw hat from a peasant; so the general sentenced his own son to death with tears running down his eyes.
Here's a fragment of thought as it was before the Great Stagnation, as depicted in passing in H. Beam Piper's Little Fuzzy, one of the earliest books I read as a child. It's from 1962, when the memetic collapse had started but not spread very far into science fiction. It stuck in my mind long ago and became one more tiny little piece of who I am now.
There is no suggestion in 1962 that the speakers are gullible, or that Pendarvis is a naif, or that Pendarvis is weird for thinking like this. Pendarvis isn't the defiant hero or even much of a side character. It's just a kind of judge you sometimes run into, part of a normal environment as projected from the author's mind that wrote the story.
If you don't have some people like Pendarvis, and you don't appreciate what they're trying to do even when they rule against you, sooner or later your tribe ends.
I mean, I doubt the United States will literally fall into anarchy this way before the AGI timeline runs out. But the concept applies on a smaller scale than countries. It applies on a smaller scale than communities, to bargains between three people or two.
The notion that you can "be fair to one side but not the other", that what's called "fairness" is a kind of favor you do for people you like, says that even the instinctive sense people had of law-as-game-theory is being lost in the modern memetic collapse. People are being exposed to so many social-media-viral depictions of the Other Side defecting, and viewpoints exclusively from Our Side without any leavening of any other viewpoint that might ask for a game-theoretic compromise, that they're losing the ability to appreciate the kind of anecdotes they used to tell in ancient China.
(Or maybe it's hormonelike chemicals leached from plastic food containers. Let's not forget all the psychological explanations offered for a wave of violence that turned out to be lead poisoning.)
vi.
And to take the point full circle:
The mental motion to evenhandedly apply The Rules irrespective of their conclusion is a kind of thinking that human beings appreciate intuitively, or at least they appreciated it in ancient China and mid-20th-century science fiction. In fact, we appreciate The Law more natively than we appreciate the notion of local syntactic rules capturing semantically valid steps in mathematical proofs, go figure.
So the legal metaphor is where a lot of people get started on epistemology: by seeing the local rules of valid argument as The Law, fallacies as crimes. The unusually healthy of mind will reject bad allied arguments with an emotional sense of practicing the way of an impartial judge.
It's ironic, in a way, because there is no game theory and no morality to the true way of the map that reflects the territory. A paperclip maximizer would also strive to debias its cognitive processes, alone in its sterile universe.
But I would venture a guess and hypothesis that you are better off buying a used car from a random mathematician than a random non-mathematician, even after controlling for IQ. The reasoning being that mathematicians are people whose sense of Law was strong enough to be appropriated for proofs, and that this will correlate, if imperfectly, with mathematicians abiding by what they see as The Law in other places as well. I could be wrong, and would be interested in seeing the results of any study like this if it were ever done. (But no studies on self-reports of criminal behavior, please. Unless there's some reason to believe that the self-report metric isn't measuring "honesty times criminality" rather than "criminality".)
I have no grand agenda in having said all this. I've just sometimes thought of late that it would be nice if more of the extremely basic rules of thinking were written down.