Monthly Archives: February 2008

Categorizing Has Consequences

By Eliezer Yudkowsky · February 18, 2008 8:40 pm · Comments (7)

Followup to:  Fallacies of Compression

Among the many genetic variations and mutations you carry in your genome, there are a very few alleles you probably know – including those determining your blood type: the presence or absence of the A, B, and + antigens.  If you receive a blood transfusion containing an antigen you don’t have, it will trigger an allergic reaction.  It was Karl Landsteiner’s discovery of this fact, and how to test for compatible blood types, that made it possible to transfuse blood without killing the patient.  (1930 Nobel Prize in Medicine.)  Also, if a mother with blood type A (for example) bears a child with blood type A+, the mother may acquire an allergic reaction to the + antigen; if she has another child with blood type A+, the child will be in danger, unless the mother takes an allergic suppressant during pregnancy.  Thus people learn their blood types before they marry.

Oh, and also: people with blood type A are earnest and creative, while people with blood type B are wild and cheerful.  People with type O are agreeable and sociable, while people with type AB are cool and controlled. (You would think that O would be the absence of A and B, while AB would just be A plus B, but no…)  All this, according to the Japanese blood type theory of personality.  It would seem that blood type plays the role in Japan that astrological signs play in the West, right down to blood type horoscopes in the daily newspaper.

This fad is especially odd because blood types have never been mysterious, not in Japan and not anywhere.  We only know blood types even exist thanks to Karl Landsteiner.  No mystic witch doctor, no venerable sorcerer, ever said a word about blood types; there are no ancient, dusty scrolls to shroud the error in the aura of antiquity.  If the medical profession claimed tomorrow that it had all been a colossal hoax, we layfolk would not have one scrap of evidence from our unaided senses to contradict them.

There’s never been a war between blood types.  There’s never even been a political conflict between blood types.  The stereotypes must have arisen strictly from the mere existence of the labels.

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The Public Intellectual Plunge

By Robin Hanson · February 18, 2008 6:00 am · Comments (8)

A vicious review from a recent Chronicle of Higher Education:

Having written a number of competent academic books in his area of expertise – English political philosophy – he took the true public-intellectual plunge with Straw Dogs … unleashing a farrago of broadsides about utopianism, religion, free will, and more.  The rest is a case study of how a tenured intellectual, lured by the footlights, can toss away all academic rigor as he spouts off on radio, contributes one-sided tirades to newspapers, and becomes a pointy-headed hack for hire.

Today, at 60, Gray writes as an antipragmatist and nihilist critical of all sorts of politics to make a better world – in short, a crank. He touts a slightly green, Gaia-conscious passivism and favors an Eastern form of contemplation shorn of mysticism. Politically – that is, the kind of politics in which moving one’s mouth counts as activism – he’s a dyed-in-the-wool hater of Bush and the allegedly "utopian" project of bringing democracy to the Middle East. Gray makes Michael Moore sound like a polite assistant professor. … 

Most of the time, Gray simply ignores counterevidence. But it’s the quantity of nonsense, not just its quality, that makes Gray’s work distinctive. Ponder these persuasive declarations … They say he’s about to retire. Until then, some advice to LSE students: If you’re waiting with Professor Gray to cross Portsmouth Street and he announces that the light has turned green, get a second opinion.

Academics often have similar critiques of public intellectuals, who defend themselves as simplifying in order to communicate to a wider audience and become relevant to current policy debates.   Which side on average is right?   

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Fallacies of Compression

By Eliezer Yudkowsky · February 17, 2008 1:51 pm · Comments (14)

Followup to:  Replace the Symbol with the Substance

"The map is not the territory," as the saying goes.  The only life-size, atomically detailed, 100% accurate map of California is California.  But California has important regularities, such as the shape of its highways, that can be described using vastly less information – not to mention vastly less physical material – than it would take to describe every atom within the state borders.  Hence the other saying:  "The map is not the territory, but you can’t fold up the territory and put it in your glove compartment."

A paper map of California, at a scale of 10 kilometers to 1 centimeter (a million to one), doesn’t have room to show the distinct position of two fallen leaves lying a centimeter apart on the sidewalk.  Even if the map tried to show the leaves, the leaves would appear as the same point on the map; or rather the map would need a feature size of 10 nanometers, which is a finer resolution than most book printers handle, not to mention human eyes.

Reality is very large – just the part we can see is billions of lightyears across.  But your map of reality is written on a few pounds of neurons, folded up to fit inside your skull.  I don’t mean to be insulting, but your skull is tiny, comparatively speaking.

Inevitably, then, certain things that are distinct in reality, will be compressed into the same point on your map.

But what this feels like from inside is not that you say, "Oh, look, I’m compressing two things into one point on my map."  What it feels like from inside is that there is just one thing, and you are seeing it.

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With blame comes hope

By Patri Friedman · February 17, 2008 9:00 am · Comments (12)

After the smoke clears, we begin to apportion blame.  We have a natural tendency to try to shift the blame onto others, avoiding guilt and responsibility for errors.  But there are some obvious problems with this strategy.

Errors are valuable training instances, and our bias against accepting blame reduces the number available.  If we could externally shift blame while internally maintaining a rational apportionment, we would not be reducing our training data, but people don’t work like that.  To be believable, our efforts to shift blame must be sincere, and so our brain engages in self-deception rather than partitioning.  The result will then be to tend to underestimate the dangers of our action (and inaction) and underestimate the degree to which we can prevent bad outcomes by acting differently.

It is this latter point which gives the connection between blame and hope.  For to avoid blame is to avoid responsibility, and to avoid responsibility is to disempower oneself.  To say "I was not to blame for what happened" is to say "I could not have prevented it", which is to say "In future situations like that, I will be helpless".

So let us instead be honest about how we could have acted differently, even when things turn out craptacularly.  We can trick our minds into doing this by focusing on the positive, forward-looking nature of responsibility: thinking about how we might do better in the future, rather than the negative-sum fight to divide the anti-spoils of the past.  And reminding ourselves that some bitter blame is a small price to pay to hold onto hope.

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Relative vs. Absolute Rationality

By Patri Friedman · February 17, 2008 6:00 am · Comments (9)

I’m reading Tim Harford’s "The Logic of Life" – it’s the first book I bought on my Kindle.  He uses a definition of rationality which I hadn’t seen before, which is simply that people respond to incentives.  I think this model of people as relatively rational has much more support than the idea that they are absolutely rational – that they choose optimal strategies to reach their goals, that they behave in an unbiased fashion.

And I think this is a good way of squaring the ideas that there is lots of evidence for human rationality and lots of evidence for human irrationality.  Before, I’d been thinking of the resolution as just that sometimes people are rational and sometimes they are irrational, depending on how complex the decisions and which heuristic modules are invoked.  But it feels much more correct to say that people rarely get the answer exactly right, but that they generally respond in the right direction when things change.

This definition rescues the implications of rationality-assuming economic analysis from the "But people aren’t rational!" attack.  Sure, people aren’t (absolutely) rational, but since they are (relatively) rational, policy makers[1] can influence behavior by assuming that people will respond in the correct direction to changes in incentives.  And they had better be wary of creating incentives without considering the consequences on behavior.

[1] Or anyone else engaged in mechanism design for humans.

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Replace the Symbol with the Substance

By Eliezer Yudkowsky · February 16, 2008 1:12 pm · Comments (6)

Continuation of:  Taboo Your Words
Followup to:  Original Seeing, Lost Purposes

What does it take to – as in yesterday’s example – see a "baseball game" as "An artificial group conflict in which you use a long wooden cylinder to whack a thrown spheroid, and then run between four safe positions"?  What does it take to play the rationalist version of Taboo, in which the goal is not to find a synonym that isn’t on the card, but to find a way of describing without the standard concept-handle?

You have to visualize.  You have to make your mind’s eye see the details, as though looking for the first time.  You have to perform an Original Seeing.

Is that a "bat"?  No, it’s a long, round, tapering, wooden rod, narrowing at one end so that a human can grasp and swing it.

Is that a "ball"?  No, it’s a leather-covered spheroid with a symmetrical stitching pattern, hard but not metal-hard, which someone can grasp and throw, or strike with the wooden rod, or catch.

Are those "bases"?  No, they’re fixed positions on a game field, that players try to run to as quickly as possible because of their safety within the game’s artificial rules.

The chief obstacle to performing an original seeing is that your mind already has a nice neat summary, a nice little easy-to-use concept handle.  Like the word "baseball", or "bat", or "base".  It takes an effort to stop your mind from sliding down the familiar path, the easy path, the path of least resistance, where the small featureless word rushes in and obliterates the details you’re trying to see.  A word itself can have the destructive force of cliche; a word itself can carry the poison of a cached thought.

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Talking Versus Trading

By Robin Hanson · February 16, 2008 6:00 am · Comments (5)

The latest Journal of Prediction Markets describes lab experiments comparing prediction markets to deliberation.  They collected 24 groups of four people to forecast a survey on the popularity of five cell phone designs.  Half the groups talked among themselves and then made a group forecast, with prizes going to the best groups.  In the other half of the groups the individuals rotated trading with an automated market maker, with prizes going to the best individual forecasters.  They found:

The direct comparison of the two group mechanisms shows that the variation across the twelve estimates is much lower for the Traders with an average standard deviation of 3.2 percent compared to 7.9 percent for the Talkers. 

I expect talking groups to do even worse when members have differing interests to manipulate the group conclusion.  Since prediction market accuracy seems to not be hindered by such manipulation, the difference between the two mechanisms should be even larger in that case.   

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Taboo Your Words

By Eliezer Yudkowsky · February 15, 2008 5:53 pm · Comments (38)

Followup to:  Empty Labels

In the game Taboo (by Hasbro), the objective is for a player to have their partner guess a word written on a card, without using that word or five additional words listed on the card.  For example, you might have to get your partner to say "baseball" without using the words "sport", "bat", "hit", "pitch", "base" or of course "baseball".

The existence of this game surprised me, when I discovered it.  Why wouldn’t you just say "An artificial group conflict in which you use a long wooden cylinder to whack a thrown spheroid, and then run between four safe positions"?

But then, by the time I discovered the game, I’d already been practicing it for years – albeit with a different purpose.

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Why “Just Believe”?

By Robin Hanson · February 15, 2008 6:00 am · Comments (28)

Tom Bell:

Children’s fiction often promotes credulity as a virtue. Consider, for instance, the admonitions in Disney’s Peter Pan, in Elf, or in The Neverending Story. These and many other works teach our children, "Just believe!"  Children’s fiction employs this trope so often that it fits a formula. A wise character tries to convince the protagonist that something wonderful will happen if only he or she will earnestly believe an improbability. … Why does this theme occur so often in children’s fiction? … Perhaps religious and political leaders, among others, would like to see youth raised to believe without question. … I propose a different, less conspiratorial cause. I suspect that children’s fiction so often promotes gullibility as a virtue because those who author such works know, at some level, that they rely on children’s gullibility.

David Friedman suggests: 

An alternative explanation is that adults believe, with some justice, that they know more than children. In their interaction with children, they find themselves in the situation of telling children things the adults are sure are true but either cannot persuade the children of or are not willing to take the trouble to persuade the children of. … Hence the attraction–to adult authors and adult purchasers of children’s books–of scenarios where the wise person representing the adult is telling the younger and less wise person representing the child to "just believe."

These explanations don’t ring true to me.  Instead, I suspect we know our children better gain allies by seeming innocent and trusting.

P.S.  My mother writes Christian tween girl fiction, and today is my parents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary. 

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Classic Sichuan in Millbrae, Thu Feb 21, 7pm

By Eliezer Yudkowsky · February 14, 2008 7:21 pm · Comments (9)

Followup to:  Bay Area Bayesians Unite, OB Meetup

The Bay Area Overcoming Bias meetup will take place in the Classic Sichuan restaurant, 148 El Camino Real, Millbrae, CA 94031.  15 people said they would "Definitely" attend and an additional 27 said "Maybe".  Oh, and Robin Hanson will be there too.

Dinner is scheduled for 7:00pm, on Thursday, February 21st, 2008.  I’ll show up at 6:30pm, though, just to cut people some antislack if it’s easier for them to arrive earlier.

If you’re arriving via the BART/Caltrain station, just walk up from the Southbound Caltrain side and turn right onto El Camino, walk a few meters, and you’re there.

If driving, I’d suggest taking the exit from 101 onto Millbrae Ave – the exit from 280 onto Millbrae surprisingly goes down a winding mountain road before arriving at downtown.  Doesn’t mean you have to take 101 the whole way there, but I definitely recommend the 101 exit.

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