Tsuyoku Naritai! (I Want To Become Stronger)

In Orthodox Judaism there is a saying:  "The previous generation is to the next one as angels are to men; the next generation is to the previous one as donkeys are to men."  This follows from the Orthodox Jewish belief that all Judaic law was given to Moses by God at Mount Sinai.  After all, it's not as if you could do an experiment to gain new halachic knowledge; the only way you can know is if someone tells you (who heard it from someone else, who heard it from God).  Since there is no new source of information, it can only be degraded in transmission from generation to generation.

Thus, modern rabbis are not allowed to overrule ancient rabbis.  Crawly things are ordinarily unkosher, but it is permissible to eat a worm found in an apple - the ancient rabbis believed the worm was spontaneously generated inside the apple, and therefore was part of the apple.  A modern rabbi cannot say, "Yeah, well, the ancient rabbis knew diddly-squat about biology.  Overruled!"  A modern rabbi cannot possibly know a halachic principle the ancient rabbis did not, because how could the ancient rabbis have passed down the answer from Mount Sinai to him?  Knowledge derives from authority, and therefore is only ever lost, not gained, as time passes.

When I was first exposed to the angels-and-donkeys proverb in (religious) elementary school, I was not old enough to be a full-blown atheist, but I still thought to myself:  "Torah loses knowledge in every generation.  Science gains knowledge with every generation.  No matter where they started out, sooner or later science must surpass Torah."

The most important thing is that there should be progress.  So long as you keep moving forward you will reach your destination; but if you stop moving you will never reach it.

Tsuyoku naritai is Japanese.  Tsuyoku is "strong"; naru is "becoming" and the form naritai is "want to become".  Together it means "I want to become stronger" and it expresses a sentiment embodied more intensely in Japanese works than in any Western literature I've read.  You might say it when expressing your determination to become a professional Go player - or after you lose an important match, but you haven't given up - or after you win an important match, but you're not a ninth-dan player yet - or after you've become the greatest Go player of all time, but you still think you can do better.  That is tsuyoku naritai, the will to transcendence.

Tsuyoku naritai is the driving force behind my essay The Proper Use of Humility, in which I contrast the student who humbly double-checks his math test, and the student who modestly says "But how can we ever really know?  No matter how many times I check, I can never be absolutely certain."  The student who double-checks his answers wants to become stronger; he reacts to a possible inner flaw by doing what he can to repair the flaw, not with resignation.

Each year on Yom Kippur, an Orthodox Jew recites a litany which begins Ashamnu, bagadnu, gazalnu, dibarnu dofi, and goes on through the entire Hebrew alphabet:  We have acted shamefully, we have betrayed, we have stolen, we have slandered...

As you pronounce each word, you strike yourself over the heart in penitence.  There's no exemption whereby, if you manage to go without stealing all year long, you can skip the word gazalnu and strike yourself one less time.  That would violate the community spirit of Yom Kippur, which is about confessing sins - not avoiding sins so that you have less to confess.

By the same token, the Ashamnu does not end, "But that was this year, and next year I will do better."

The Ashamnu bears a remarkable resemblance to the notion that the way of rationality is to beat your fist against your heart and say, "We are all biased, we are all irrational, we are not fully informed, we are overconfident, we are poorly calibrated..."

Fine.  Now tell me how you plan to become less biased, less irrational, more informed, less overconfident, better calibrated.

There is an old Jewish joke:  During Yom Kippur, the rabbi is seized by a sudden wave of guilt, and prostrates himself and cries, "God, I am nothing before you!"  The cantor is likewise seized by guilt, and cries, "God, I am nothing before you!"  Seeing this, the janitor at the back of the synagogue prostrates himself and cries, "God, I am nothing before you!"  And the rabbi nudges the cantor and whispers, "Look who thinks he's nothing."

Take no pride in your confession that you too are biased; do not glory in your self-awareness of your flaws.  This is akin to the principle of not taking pride in confessing your ignorance; for if your ignorance is a source of pride to you, you may become loathe to relinquish your ignorance when evidence comes knocking.  Likewise with our flaws - we should not gloat over how self-aware we are for confessing them; the occasion for rejoicing is when we have a little less to confess.

Otherwise, when the one comes to us with a plan for correcting the bias, we will snarl, "Do you think to set yourself above us?"  We will shake our heads sadly and say, "You must not be very self-aware."

Never confess to me that you are just as flawed as I am unless you can tell me what you plan to do about it.  Afterward you will still have plenty of flaws left, but that's not the point; the important thing is to do better, to keep moving ahead, to take one more step forward.  Tsuyoku naritai!

Comments

[Robin Hanson]

"Look who thinks he's nothing" - funny. :) Perhaps more general version of your point is beware of taking pride in subgoal measures of accomplishment, if subgoals without the goal are worth little.

[Chris Yi]

Now there's a sentiment I can get behind. That'd make a nice hachimaki...
http://www.jbox.com/SEARCH/zettai/1/

I sometimes wonder about that: As you move away from a point charge, the electric field falls off as 1/r^2. Infinitely long line charges fall off as 1/r, and infinite plates (with a uniform charge distribution) theoretically generate electric fields that are constant, with respect to distance from that plane. Though you are moving away from it, its influence on you doesn't lessen.

Is irrational behavior the same way? One of the mechanisms that allows fortune-telling and astrology to "work" is the mind's ability to recast perception to fit just about any description: "Well, I guess maybe I waaas a bit selfish, I could have donated more to that charity. Gosh, my horoscope sure is accurate!" I wonder if there is some degree of that as well with regards to irrational behavior. Of course I'm not suggesting that it doesn't exist, or can't be identified, but I'm looking at the far off case: behavior that cannot be identified as irrational and biased through any kind of mental algebra at all. I wonder if such a thing exists, and what can be done to achieve it.

[Hal Finney]

That's a great saying about the angels and donkeys. I've read that most ancient civilizations had the same kind of view of history. They did not have our notion of progress; rather, they saw mankind as having fallen from a primordial "golden age", and heading pretty much straight downhill ever since. No doubt this was aided by the near-universal agreement among old people that the young generation just doesn't measure up to how people were in the old days.

So if we go back to the "chronophone" thought experiment, Archimedes might have been spectacularly uninterested in information from the future (especially through such a garbled connection). Unlike today where we would assume that future civilizations would be sources of tremendous knowledge and wisdom, he would have imagined a future of near-bestial creatures who had long lost whatever vestiges of grace mankind had still retained in his age.

[Barkley Rosser]

OTOH, there was this accumulation of Talmud, with later commentaries continuing to be added,
Mishnah, and on and on. So, one can argue that there was this degradation function as one
moves further away from the original source, but this is presumably at least partly offset by
the accumulation of the commentaries themselves. Do they accumulate more rapidly than the
degradation occurs?

BTW, there is something similar in the debates over the various Islamic law codes, the various
Shari'as. An issue is which of the reputed sayings of the Prophet Muhammed, collectively known
as the Hadith, are to be accepted as genuine and therefore to serve as part of the foundation of
a proper Shari's (along with the Qur'an and some other things). The validity of a given saying
was based on a chain of witnesses: Abdul heard it from Abdullah who heard it from Abu-Bakr who
heard the Prophet, and so forth. Part of the argument is that the longer this chain of reputed
witnesses is, the less reliably a part of the Hadith the supposed saying is, and indeed, some
sayings are accepted in some Shari'as, while the stricter ones rule them out for having overly
long chains of witnesses. The strictest of the Sunni Shari'as is the one accepted in Saudi Arabia,
the Hanbali, which accepts only the Qur'an and a very small Hadith as bases for the law.

[Chris Yi]

Hal: I'd like to see a cartoon of a timeline that goes from nothingness to probabilities to subatomic particles to ... to humans ... to AI controlled sentient galaxies ... to discorporated particles floating around in a post heat-death universe...

...all claiming to miss the good old days.

I don't think I would say that the "good old days" belief aided the "hell in a handbasket" belief; I think they are one and the same.

[Eliezer Yudkowsky]

Barkley, the accumulation of Talmud was based on the theory that - I know this will sound strange, but bear with me - the younger rabbis were all simply writing down things that older rabbis had told them. In the Orthodox view the Talmud is the "Torah sheh b'al'Peh", the Oral Torah, which was also given to Moses at Mount Sinai, and then transmitted verbally down through the generations until it was finally written down. All law in the Talmud is supposed to have been transmitted from Mount Sinai - there's nowhere else that wisdom can come from. If there are disputes in the commentaries, then they're both right, and the task of future generations is to figure out how they can both be right, because you can never say an older rabbi is wrong, because they're closer to Mount Sinai than you. The fact that much of the law in the Mishna or Gemara is blatantly medieval or blatantly based on incorrect medieval beliefs is somehow just not thought about.

[Hal Finney]

How would you compare this "tsuyoku naritai" viewpoint with the majoritarian perspective? The majoritarian view is skeptical about the possibility of overcoming bias on an individual basis, similar to the position you criticize of being "loathe to relinquish ignorance" on the basis of evidence and argumentation. But majoritarianism is not purely fatalistic, in that it offers an alternative strategy for acquiring truth, by seeing what other people think.

[mtraven]

Interesting post. Judaism has managed to survive for thousands of years, and maybe part of that is a high copying fidelity for its memes. It seems there are two ways for cultures to ensure long-term survival -- extreme rigidity (as in this case) or in extreme adaptability (which is better at learning but may not be able to preserve group identity).

Not sure what that has to do with overcoming bias, except to suggest that it may be in a culture's interest to maintain their biases.

And what's weird is that when Judaism historically encountered the Enlightenment, it resulted in people who are notably smart and adaptable as individuals and as a group.

[Joseph Hertzlinger]

On the one hand, Judaism (and other traditional religions) accumulate experience that is post-dated to the origin of the religion. On the other hand, when parts of a traditional religion admit that experience can accumulate, the fact that change is actually possible frequently turns into a belief that change is possible at will and you eventually wind up with a "trendier-than-thou" religion.

You can compare this phenomenon to fiat currencies. Gold (or whatever the standard happens to be) might be an arbitrary sign of value, but it's a mistake to think that currency can be changed at will.

[Eliezer Yudkowsky]

Hertzlinger, I would summarize your comment as "Once you've got religion, you've got choice of two different ways to screw up." It's not as if there's anything good about a religion persisting for centuries. Imagine if a cult of 17th-century physicists were still running around.

Finney, I do indeed think there's a conflict between tsuyoku naritai and majoritarianism. Suppose everyone were a majoritarian - information would degrade from generation to generation, as the "average belief" changed a little in transmission. (Where did all that information come from in the first place? Not from majoritarian reasoning.) Further, if you're a majoritarian, once you achieve the level of the average, you hit a brick wall - you're not allowed to aspire to anything above that. Hopefully the reasons for my strong negative reaction to majoritarianism are now clearer.

[Hal Finney]

I don't mean to hijack this thread but I'll offer a couple of ideas about majoritarianism. It is no doubt true that if everyone were a majoritarian, majoritarians would have to do things a little differently (perhaps asking people to publish their estimates of what they would believe if they weren't following the advice of the crowd). But at present I don't think this is a major problem, so majoritarianism still has promise as a strategy to improve one's accuracy, as demanded by the tsuyoku naritai philosophy.

As far as being unable to beat the average, again this is true but keep in mind that for many kinds of problems, the average is really very good. For example in "guess how many beans in the jar" type problems, it is customary for the mean guess to be far better than the median, often in the top few percentiles. Few strategies can offer such high degrees of accuracy. Although not all problems can be quantified in this way, the point is that the majoritarian "average" does not have to mean median.

[Stuart Armstrong]

Finney, I do indeed think there's a conflict between tsuyoku naritai and majoritarianism.

I don't think that's automatic. If you do truly believe that the mean opinion is more reliable in general than any you could construct on your own, then moving towards that mean is something that makes you better. And if you just take majoritism as a guide, rather than a dogma, there's even less problems.

The fact that if everyone did this, it would be a disaster may be an example of what I called moral freeloading - something that may be good for an individual to do, alone, but that would be very dangerous for everyone to imitate.

[Hal Finney]

Here's a citation for my 2nd claim above about the accuracy of the mean:

www.leggmason.com/funds/knowledge/mauboussin/ExplainingWisdom.pdf

"We now turn to the second type of problem, estimating a state. Here, only one person knows the answer and none of the problem solvers do. A classic example of this problem is asking a group to guess the number of jelly beans in a jar. We have been doing this experiment for over a decade at Columbia Business School, and the collective answer has proven remarkably accurate in most trials....

"Our 2007 jelly bean results illustrate the point. The average guess of the class was 1,151 while the actual number of beans was 1,116, a 3.1 percent error. Of the 73 estimates, only two were better than the average... There’s nothing unique about 2007; the results are the same year after year."

[Stuart Armstrong]

Ah, Finney made the same point I was making, and cunningly posted it first... ^_^

[Stuart Armstrong]

One small point: If we truly want to become stronger, then we should always test our abilities against reality - we should go out on a limb and make specific predictions and then see how they pan out, rather than retreating into the "it's complicated, so let's just conclude that we're not qualified to decide". That's an error I've often sliped into, in fact...

[ChrisA]

There seem to be lots of parallels between majoritarianism and the efficient market hypothesis in finance. In the efficient market hypothesis, it is entirely possible that a liquidly traded asset is mispriced, (similar to the possibility that the majority view is very wrong) however on average, according to the efficient market view, I maximise my chances of being right by accepting the current price of the asset as the correct price. Therefore the fact that a stock halved in price over a year is not a valid criticism of the efficient market theory, just as in majoritarianism the fact that the majority has been proven wrong is not a valid criticism of majoritarianism. The problem of free loading is inherent in the efficient market theory, if everyone accepts it then the market no longer is efficient. But there are enough people who have justified reasons not to invest on an efficient market basis to ensure that this does not happen as discussed below.

Some examples of justified reasons in differing from the majority view in the case of efficient markets are; 1) In the efficient market theorem, it is accepted that people with inside information can have successful trading strategies which deliver predictably above average returns. In the case of majoritarianism we would be justified holding a different view to the majority if we had inside information that the majority did not have (for instance we know the colour of someone eyes, when we know the majority do not). 2) A professional money manager of a non-index mutual fund is also justified in differing from the majority view since this is what he is paid to do. The parallel here for majoritarianism would be scientists or academics, who are paid to advance new theories, they receive compensation for differing from the majority, at least in their own area of speciality. 3) The final area where you might differ from the efficient market approach is when you gain some entertainment utility from investing (i.e. as a form of gambling, if I am honest, this is why I invest in single stocks). In the case of majoritarianism, the parallel is that you can chose to hold a view that is different from the majority if it brings you entertainment utility which outweighs the costs of holding a non-efficient view (religious views might be in this category).

[William Newman]

There's no particular reason that constant improvement needs to surpass a fixed point. In theory, see Achilles and the tortoise. In practice, maybe you can't slice things infinitely fine (or at least you can't detect progress when you do), but still you could go on for a very long time incrementally improving military practice in the Americas while, without breakthroughs to bronze and/or cavalry, remaining solidly stuck behind Eurasia. More science fictionally, people living beneath the clouds of Venus could go for a long time incrementally improving their knowledge of the universe before catching up with Babylonian astronomy, and if a prophet from Earth brought them a holy book of astronomy, it could remain a revelation for a very long time. Or if the Bible had included a prophesy referring to "after three cities are destroyed with weapons made of metals of weight 235 and 239," it would've remained utterly opaque through centuries of rapid incremental progress.

I think a related argument would be more convincing: collect incidents when people thought they knew something about the real world from a religious tradition, and it conflicted with what the scientists were coming to believe, and compute a batting average. If the batting average is not remarkably high for the religious side, some skepticism about its reliable truth is called for, or at least some diplomatic dodge like "how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go."

The batting average could suffer from selection bias if the summaries tend to be written by one side. But even if so, it's sorta interesting indirect evidence if all the summaries tend to be written by one side. And I dimly remember that there are pro-Islam writers who go on about the scientific things that their religious tradition got right, so I don't think there's any iron sociological law that keeps the religious side from writing up such summaries.

[ZH]

Eliezer makes a mistake (a major one in fact) with regard to his understanding of Jewish law being passed down over the generations. The mistake he makes is quite a common one among those people who have not studied the history of Orthodox Jewish philosophy in depth. Indeed, I have met many Rabbis with 40 or 50 years of experience with little or no knowledge of this topic, so this is not an attack on Eliezer. While I am only an Orthodox Rabbinical and Talmudic law student (I hope to be ordained within a couple of years), besides for being a college undergrad, my personal interests are in the history of Orthodox Jewish philosophy and reconciling Jewish law and philosophy and modern science and philosophy. The correct understanding (in a simple form) as Orthodox Jews like myself believe, of the concept, is that the Pentateuch was given by God to Moses at Mt. Sinai. As many of the laws in the Pentateuch are vague, God gave Moses the "Torah SheBa'al Peh," the "oral law" of these explanations of what was to be included in these laws. The Rabbis in later generations lost the reasons for many of these oral laws, besides for that according to Jewish legend, many of these laws were never given reasons in the first place. As such, these later Rabbis (of roughly 1500-2200 years ago) often tried to re-formulate the reasons based on their knowledge. This does not mean that the laws are based on incorrect assumptions, but merely that which we think is the reason for a law, is not actually the reason.
Eliezer mixes this up with the concept that later Rabbis do not argue in law on earlier Rabbis. That concept is based on a completely different line of reasoning. This new line of reasoning is based on a Jewish belief that to properly understand Jewish law and apply it requires not just intelligence and the ability to think logically, but also on piety and trust in God. In other words, trust in God and piety also play a role in legal decisions. This combined with another Jewish belief that as the generations go on, there is a general decrease in piety and trust in God across the board, means that those making legal decisions now have less of a key component of the decision making, while we have no way of knowing who has the greater intelligence and reasoning skills. As such, later Rabbis do not argue on earlier Rabbis. Additionally, this concept that later rabbis do not argue on earlier Rabbbis is not set in stone and there are a number of exceptions to this rule.
Of course one can merely argue that my background makes me biased toward an irrational belief, and perhaps that is true.

[Chloe Jones]

So long as you keep moving forward you will reach your destination; but if you stop moving you will never reach it. I like this sectence very much!
Chloe Jones
JRomances.com

[Jed Harris]

Great discussion! Regarding majoritarianism and markets, they are both specific judgment aggregation mechanisms with specific domains of application. We need a general theory of judgment aggregation but I don't know if there are any under development.

In a purely speculative market (i.e. no consumption, just looking to maximize return) prices reflect majoritarian averages, weighted by endowment. Of course endowments change over time based on how good or lucky an investor is, so there is some intrinsic reputation effect. Also, investors can go bankrupt, which is an extreme reputation effect. If investors reproduce you can get a pretty "smart" system, but I'm sure it has systematic limitations -- the need to understand those limitations is a good example of why we need a general theory of judgment aggregation.

I'd like to see an iterated jelly bean guessing game, with the individual guesses weighted by previous accuracy of each individual. I bet the results would quickly get better than just a flat average. Note that (unlike economies) there's no fixed quantity of "weight" here. Conserved exchanges are not a necessary part of this kind of aggregation.

On the other hand if you let individuals see each other's guesses, I bet accuracy would get worse. (This is more similar to markets.) The problem is that there's be herding effects, which are individually rational (for guessers trying to maximize their score) but which on average reduce the overall quality of judgment. This is an intrinsic problem with markets. Maybe we should see this as an example of Eliezer's point in another post about marginal zero-sum competition.

[Jed Harris]

The discussion about the "dissipation" of knowledge from generation to generation (or of piety and trust in God, as ZH says) reminds me of Elizabeth Eisenstein's history of the transition to printing. Manual copying (on average) reduces the accuracy of manuscripts. Printing (on average) increases the accuracy, because printers can keep the type made up into pages, and can fix errors as they are found. Thus a type-set manuscript becomes a (more or less reliable) nexus for the accumulation of increasingly reliable judgments.

Eisenstein's account has been questioned, but as far as I've seen, the issues that have been raised really don't undercut her basic point.

Of course digital reproduction pushes this a lot further. (Cue the usual story about self-correcting web processes.) But I don't know of any really thorough analysis of the dynamics of error in different communication media.