We've heard a lot of hyperbole about how Bush was the "Worst. President. Ever." and Obama's inauguration is the most exciting in a half century. So to avoid future bias, this is a good time to ask yourself: where do you set Obama's bar? That is, what does Obama have to do for you to consider him a "good" president, or even better than Bush? It is enough for you that he is (part) black and a Democrat? Or does he actually have to do something? Or are those already insurmountable barriers to you?
For most any president today, odds are that we'd:
So will Obama be great (or terrible) if he just follows this least-resistence path and adds a few cheap symbolic moves on stem cell research funding, gay marriage, torture definitions, wiretap limitations, or foreign abortion funding? And would that be enough for a non-black or non-Democrat?
Previously in series: Sympathetic Minds
Today I shall criticize yet another Utopia. This Utopia isn't famous in the literature. But it's considerably superior to many better-known Utopias – more fun than the Christian Heaven, or Greg Egan's upload societies, for example. And so the main flaw is well worth pointing out.
This Utopia consists of a one-line remark on an IRC channel:
I've come to think of this as Reedspacer's Lower Bound.
Sure, it sounds silly. But if your grand vision of the future isn't at least as much fun as a volcano lair with catpersons of the appropriate gender, you should just go with that instead. This rules out a surprising number of proposals.
But today I am here to criticize Reedspacer's Lower Bound – the problem being the catgirls.
I've joked about the subject, now and then – "Donate now, and get a free catgirl or catboy after the Singularity!" – but I think it would actually be a terrible idea. In fact, today's post could have been entitled "Why Fun Theorists Don't Believe In Catgirls."
Continue reading "Interpersonal Entanglement" »
A Post review of Maliszewski's book Fakers:
Continue reading "Predictible Fakers" »
Previously in series: In Praise of Boredom
Followup to: Humans in Funny Suits
"Mirror neurons" are neurons that are active both when performing an action and observing the same action – for example, a neuron that fires when you hold up a finger or see someone else holding up a finger. Such neurons have been directly recorded in primates, and consistent neuroimaging evidence has been found for humans.
You may recall from my previous writing on "empathic inference" the idea that brains are so complex that the only way to simulate them is by forcing a similar brain to behave similarly. A brain is so complex that if a human tried to understand brains the way that we understand e.g. gravity or a car – observing the whole, observing the parts, building up a theory from scratch – then we would be unable to invent good hypotheses in our mere mortal lifetimes. The only possible way you can hit on an "Aha!" that describes a system as incredibly complex as an Other Mind, is if you happen to run across something amazingly similar to the Other Mind – namely your own brain – which you can actually force to behave similarly and use as a hypothesis, yielding predictions.
So that is what I would call "empathy".
And then "sympathy" is something else on top of this – to smile when you see someone else smile, to hurt when you see someone else hurt. It goes beyond the realm of prediction into the realm of reinforcement.
And you ask, "Why would callous natural selection do anything that nice?"
Continue reading "Sympathetic Minds" »
Even if you're familiar with the ideas that are presented on this blog, it can be surprising just how strong the forces of habit and rote cognition and behavior can be.
One of the schools of cognitive psychology that addresses biases describes "system 1" and "system 2" thinking, where "system 1" is everyday automatic processing, deciding by intuition, relying on heuristics, and totally filled with biases, and "system 2" is thoughtful and careful consideration, logical and methodical. But this seems inadequate, because we can slip into automatic cognitive patterns even when we are consciously trying to be careful.
A few examples from personal experience below the fold…
Continue reading "The surprising power of rote cognition" »
Previously in series: Seduced by Imagination
If I were to make a short list of the most important human qualities -
- and yes, this is a fool's errand, because human nature is immensely complicated, and we don't even notice all the tiny tweaks that fine-tune our moral categories, and who knows how our attractors would change shape if we eliminated a single human emotion -
- but even so, if I had to point to just a few things and say, "If you lose just one of these things, you lose most of the expected value of the Future; but conversely if an alien species independently evolved just these few things, we might even want to be friends" -
- then the top three items on the list would be sympathy, boredom and consciousness.
Boredom is a subtle-splendored thing. You wouldn't want to get bored with breathing, for example – even though it's the same motions over and over and over and over again for minutes and hours and years and decades.
Now I know some of you out there are thinking, "Actually, I'm quite bored with breathing and I wish I didn't have to," but then you wouldn't want to get bored with switching transistors.
According to the human value of boredom, some things are allowed to be highly repetitive without being boring – like obeying the same laws of physics every day.
Conversely, other repetitions are supposed to be boring, like playing the same level of Super Mario Brothers over and over and over again until the end of time. And let us note that if the pixels in the game level have a slightly different color each time, that is not sufficient to prevent it from being "the same damn thing, over and over and over again".
Once you take a closer look, it turns out that boredom is quite interesting.
Continue reading "In Praise of Boredom" »
Yesterday I talked about how "social minds must both make good decisions, and present good images to others" and suggested "the near-far brain division can be handy when facing this problem; let the far system focus more on image, and the near system focus more on decisions." But I didn't follow this thought very far down the game tree. To an economist going down the game tree is like going down the rabbit hole; it shows us just how deep and strange are the underlying drivers of top behavior.
If our far thoughts are more distorted to present good images, then the next step down the rabbit hole is this: to judge how we will typically act, others should prefer to see our near thoughts, at least if they can distinguish near versus far thoughts. After all, near thoughts drive most day to day actions. And we should each look more to our own near thoughts to judge our own sincerity.
Once we evolved to weigh near others' thoughts more heavily, the next step would be to look for cheap ways to have good-looking near-thoughts, without paying the full price of distorting important actions. That is, our mind designer would look for ways to show "detached" near thoughts, consistent with good-image far-thoughts, but not actually impacting much on important near decisions. This could be accomplished by vivid engaging detail that can clearly occupy our near thought systems, but which isn't much connected to substantial personal decisions.
Continue reading "Beware Detached Detail" »
Reply to: A Tale Of Two Tradeoffs
I'm not comfortable with compliments of the direct, personal sort, the "Oh, you're such a nice person!" type stuff that nice people are able to say with a straight face. Even if it would make people like me more – even if it's socially expected – I have trouble bringing myself to do it. So, when I say that I read Robin Hanson's "Tale of Two Tradeoffs", and then realized I would spend the rest of my mortal existence typing thought processes as "Near" or "Far", I hope this statement is received as a due substitute for any gushing compliments that a normal person would give at this point.
Among other things, this clears up a major puzzle that's been lingering in the back of my mind for a while now. Growing up as a rationalist, I was always telling myself to "Visualize!" or "Reason by simulation, not by analogy!" or "Use causal models, not similarity groups!" And those who ignored this principle seemed easy prey to blind enthusiasms, wherein one says that A is good because it is like B which is also good, and the like.
But later, I learned about the Outside View versus the Inside View, and that people asking "What rough class does this project fit into, and when did projects like this finish last time?" were much more accurate and much less optimistic than people who tried to visualize the when, where, and how of their projects. And this didn't seem to fit very well with my injunction to "Visualize!"
So now I think I understand what this principle was actually doing – it was keeping me in Near-side mode and away from Far-side thinking. And it's not that Near-side mode works so well in any absolute sense, but that Far-side mode is so much more pushed-on by ideology and wishful thinking, and so casual in accepting its conclusions (devoting less computing power before halting).
Continue reading "Getting Nearer" »
The design of social minds involves two key tradeoffs, which interact in an important way.
The first tradeoff is that social minds must both make good decisions, and present good images to others. Our thoughts influence both our actions and what others think of us. It would be expensive to maintain two separate minds for these two purposes, and even then we would have to maintain enough consistency to convince outsiders a good-image mind was in control. It is cheaper and simpler to just have one integrated mind whose thoughts are a compromise between these two ends.
When possible, mind designers should want to adjust this decision-image tradeoff by context, depending on the relative importance of decisions versus images in each context. But it might be hard to find cheap effective heuristics saying when images or decisions matter more.
The second key tradeoff is that minds must often think about the same sorts of things using different amounts of detail. Detailed representations tend to give more insight, but require more mental resources. In contrast, sparse representations require fewer resources, and make it easier to abstractly compare things to each other. For example, when reasoning about a room a photo takes more work to study but allows more attention to detail; a word description contains less info but can be processed more quickly, and allows more comparisons to similar rooms.
Continue reading "A Tale Of Two Tradeoffs" »
