Monthly Archives: January 2009

Seduced by Imagination

By Eliezer Yudkowsky · January 15, 2009 10:10 pm · Comments (11)

Previously in series:  Justified Expectation of Pleasant Surprises

"Vagueness" usually has a bad name in rationality – connoting skipped steps in reasoning and attempts to avoid falsification.  But a rational view of the Future should be vague, because the information we have about the Future is weak.  Yesterday I argued that justified vague hopes might also be better hedonically than specific foreknowledge – the power of pleasant surprises.

But there's also a more severe warning that I must deliver:  It's not a good idea to dwell much on imagined pleasant futures, since you can't actually dwell in them.  It can suck the emotional energy out of your actual, current, ongoing life.

Epistemically, we know the Past much more specifically than the Future.  But also on emotional grounds, it's probably wiser to compare yourself to Earth's past, so you can see how far we've come, and how much better we're doing.  Rather than comparing your life to an imagined future, and thinking about how awful you've got it Now.

Having set out to explain George Orwell's observation that no one can seem to write about a Utopia where anyone would want to live – having laid out the various Laws of Fun that I believe are being violated in these dreary Heavens – I am now explaining why you shouldn't apply this knowledge to invent an extremely seductive Utopia and write stories set there.  That may suck out your soul like an emotional vacuum cleaner.

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Data On Fictional Lies

By Robin Hanson · January 15, 2009 6:00 am · Comments (13)

A spectacular paper analyses a dataset of 519 Victorian literature experts describing 382 characters from 201 canonical British novels of the nineteenth century.  Characters were described by gender, as major or minor, as good or bad, by role (protagonist, antagonist, friend of p, friend of a, or other), by a five factor personality type (from a ten-question instrument), as their (5-point-scale) degree of twelve different motives (converted to five factors: social dominance, constructive effort, romance, nurture, subsistence), and as the degree of ten different emotions they arouse in readers (converted to three factors: dislike, sorrow, interest). Experts agreed 87% of the time.  They found:

Antagonists virtually personify Social Dominance – the self-interested pursuit of wealth, prestige, and power. In these novels, those ambitions are sharply segregated from prosocial and culturally acquisitive dispositions. Antagonists are not only selfish and unfriendly but also undisciplined, emotionally unstable, and intellectually dull. Protagonists, in contrast, display motive dispositions and personality traits that exemplify strong personal development and healthy social adjustment. Protagonists are agreeable, conscientious, emotionally stable, and open to experience. … The male protagonists in this study are relatively moderate, mild characters. They are introverted and agreeable, and they do not seek to dominate others socially. They are pleasant and conscientious, and they are also curious and alert. They are attractive characters, but they are not very assertive or aggressive characters. …

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Justified Expectation of Pleasant Surprises

By Eliezer Yudkowsky · January 15, 2009 2:26 am · Comments (39)

Previously in series:  Eutopia is Scary

I recently tried playing a computer game that made a major fun-theoretic error.  (At least I strongly suspect it's an error, though they are game designers and I am not.)

The game showed me – right from the start of play – what abilities I could purchase as I increased in level.  Worse, there were many different choices; still worse, you had to pay a cost in fungible points to acquire them, making you feel like you were losing a resource…  But today, I'd just like to focus on the problem of telling me, right at the start of the game, about all the nice things that might happen to me later.

I can't think of a good experimental result that backs this up; but I'd expect that a pleasant surprise would have a greater hedonic impact, than being told about the same gift in advance.  Sure, the moment you were first told about the gift would be good news, a moment of pleasure in the moment of being told.  But you wouldn't have the gift in hand at that moment, which limits the pleasure.  And then you have to wait.  And then when you finally get the gift – it's pleasant to go from not having it to having it, if you didn't wait too long; but a surprise would have a larger momentary impact, I would think.

This particular game had a status screen that showed all my future class abilities at the start of the game – inactive and dark but with full information still displayed.  From a hedonic standpoint this seems like miserable fun theory.  All the "good news" is lumped into a gigantic package; the items of news would have much greater impact if encountered separately.  And then I have to wait a long time to actually acquire the abilities, so I get an extended period of comparing my current weak game-self to all the wonderful abilities I could have but don't.

Imagine living in two possible worlds.  Both worlds are otherwise rich in challenge, novelty, and other aspects of Fun.  In both worlds, you get smarter with age and acquire more abilities over time, so that your life is always getting better.

But in one world, the abilities that come with seniority are openly discussed, hence widely known; you know what you have to look forward to.

In the other world, anyone older than you will refuse to talk about certain aspects of growing up; you'll just have to wait and find out.

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Disagreement Is Near-Far Bias

By Robin Hanson · January 14, 2009 10:30 am · Comments (27)

Back in November I read this Science review by Nira Liberman and Yaacov Trope on their awkwardly-named "Construal level theory", and wrote a post I estimated "to be the most dense with useful info on identifying our biases I've ever written":

[NEAR] All of these bring each other more to mind: here, now, me, us; trend-deviating likely real local events; concrete, context-dependent, unstructured, detailed, goal-irrelevant incidental features; feasible safe acts; secondary local concerns; socially close folks with unstable traits. 

[FAR] Conversely, all these bring each other more to mind: there, then, them; trend-following unlikely hypothetical global events; abstract, schematic, context-freer, core, coarse, goal-related features; desirable risk-taking acts, central global symbolic concerns, confident predictions, polarized evaluations, socially distant people with stable traits. 

Since then I've become even more impressed with it, as it explains most biases I know and care about, including muddled thinking about economics and the future.  For example, Ross's famous "fundamental attribution error" is a trivial application. 

The key idea is that when we consider the same thing from near versus far, different features become salient, leading our minds to different conclusions.  This is now my best account of disagreement.  We disagree because we explain our own conclusions via detailed context (e.g., arguments, analysis, and evidence), and others' conclusions via coarse stable traits (e.g., demographics, interests, biases).  While we know abstractly that we also have stable relevant traits, and they have detailed context, we simply assume we have taken that into account, when we have in fact done no such thing. 

For example, imagine I am well-educated and you are not, and I argue for the value of education and you argue against it.  I find it easy to dismiss your view as denigrating something you do not have, but I do not think it plausible I am mainly just celebrating something I do have.  I can see all these detailed reasons for my belief, and I cannot easily see and appreciate your detailed reasons. 

And this is the key error: our minds often assure us that they have taken certain factors into account when they have done no such thing.  I tell myself that of course I realize that I might be biased by my interests; I'm not that stupid.  So I must have already taken that possible bias into account, and so my conclusion must be valid even after correcting for that bias.  But in fact I haven't corrected for it much at all; I've just assumed that I did so.

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She has joined the Conspiracy

By Eliezer Yudkowsky · January 13, 2009 2:48 pm · Comments (17)

Kimiko

I have no idea whether I had anything to do with this.

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Building Weirdtopia

By Eliezer Yudkowsky · January 12, 2009 3:35 pm · Comments (51)

Followup to:  Eutopia is Scary

"Two roads diverged in the woods.  I took the one less traveled, and had to eat bugs until Park rangers rescued me."
        — Jim Rosenberg

Utopia and Dystopia have something in common: they both confirm the moral sensibilities you started with.  Whether the world is a libertarian utopia of the non-initiation of violence and everyone free to start their own business, or a hellish dystopia of government regulation and intrusion – you might like to find yourself in the first, and hate to find yourself in the second; but either way you nod and say, "Guess I was right all along."

So as an exercise in creativity, try writing them down side by side:  Utopia, Dystopia, and Weirdtopia.  The zig, the zag and the zog.

I'll start off with a worked example for public understanding of science:

  • Utopia:  Most people have the equivalent of an undergrad degree in something; everyone reads the popular science books (and they're good books); everyone over the age of nine understands evolutionary theory and Newtonian physics; scientists who make major contributions are publicly adulated like rock stars.
  • Dystopia:  Science is considered boring and possibly treasonous; public discourse elevates religion or crackpot theories; stem cell research is banned.
  • Weirdtopia:  Science is kept secret to avoid spoiling the surprises; no public discussion but intense private pursuit; cooperative ventures surrounded by fearsome initiation rituals because that's what it takes for people to feel like they've actually learned a Secret of the Universe and be satisfied; someone you meet may only know extremely basic science, but they'll have personally done revolutionary-level work in it, just like you.  Too bad you can't compare notes.

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Eutopia is Scary

By Eliezer Yudkowsky · January 12, 2009 12:28 am · Comments (45)

Previously in series:  Continuous Improvement
Followup to:  Why is the Future So Absurd?

    "The big thing to remember about far-future cyberpunk is that it will be truly ultra-tech.  The mind and body changes available to a 23rd-century Solid Citizen would probably amaze, disgust and frighten that 2050 netrunner!"
        — GURPS Cyberpunk

Pick up someone from the 18th century – a smart someone.  Ben Franklin, say.  Drop them into the early 21st century.

We, in our time, think our life has improved in the last two or three hundred years.  Ben Franklin is probably smart and forward-looking enough to agree that life has improved.  But if you don't think Ben Franklin would be amazed, disgusted, and frightened, then I think you far overestimate the "normality" of your own time.  You can think of reasons why Ben should find our world compatible, but Ben himself might not do the same.

Movies that were made in say the 40s or 50s, seem much more alien – to me – than modern movies allegedly set hundreds of years in the future, or in different universes.  Watch a movie from 1950 and you may see a man slapping a woman.  Doesn't happen a lot in Lord of the Rings, does it?  Drop back to the 16th century and one popular entertainment was setting a cat on fire.  Ever see that in any moving picture, no matter how "lowbrow"?

("But," you say, "that's showing how discomforting the Past's culture was, not how scary the Future is."  Of which I wrote, "When we look over history, we see changes away from absurd conditions such as everyone being a peasant farmer and women not having the vote, toward normal conditions like a majority middle class and equal rights…")

Something about the Future will shock we 21st-century folk, if we were dropped in without slow adaptation.  This is not because the Future is cold and gloomy – I am speaking of a positive, successful Future; the negative outcomes are probably just blank.  Nor am I speaking of the idea that every Utopia has some dark hidden flaw.  I am saying that the Future would discomfort us because it is better.

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Bad News Predictor Jailed

By Robin Hanson · January 11, 2009 2:30 pm · Comments (11)

The Economist a month ago:

Back in September a message appeared on an online bulletin board owned by Daum, the most popular web host in a country, South Korea, with a huge internet culture. Written by someone called "Minerva," it predicted the imminent collapse of Lehman Brothers, a now-defunct investment bank.

Wild speculation is normally disregarded, but when it proved to be right just five days later, a prophet was born. Word raced through the "netizen" community, and when Minerva went on to predict that the Korean won would fall against the dollar by around 50 won a day in the first half of the week of October 6th, his followers began to watch the currency markets in anticipation. The won did indeed fall by about that much over the next three days.

Minerva became an internet phenomenon, with 40m-odd hits to date. Web-users combed through previous posts, looking for prognostications, and clues about his identity. Sharp comments on the state of the Korean economy and government policy only increased his standing. … It came as little surprise when the finance minister, Kang Man-soo, admitted that officials had attempted to uncover the blogger's identity.

Today's news:

South Korea set a rare and controversial example over the weekend by arresting a popular blogger who was accused of undermining the financial markets but worshipped by many Koreans as an online guru.

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Continuous Improvement

By Eliezer Yudkowsky · January 10, 2009 9:09 pm · Comments (21)

Previously in series:  Serious Stories

When is it adaptive for an organism to be satisfied with what it has?  When does an organism have enough children and enough food?  The answer to the second question, at least, is obviously "never" from an evolutionary standpoint.  The first proposition might be true if the reproductive risks of all available options exceed their reproductive benefits.  In general, though, it is a rare organism in a rare environment whose reproductively optimal strategy is to rest with a smile on its face, feeling happy.

To a first approximation, we might say something like "The evolutionary purpose of emotion is to direct the cognitive processing of the organism toward achievable, reproductively relevant goals".  Achievable goals are usually located in the Future, since you can't affect the Past.  Memory is a useful trick, but learning the lesson of a success or failure isn't the same goal as the original event – and usually the emotions associated with the memory are less intense than those of the original event.

Then the way organisms and brains are built right now, "true happiness" might be a chimera, a carrot dangled in front of us to make us take the next step, and then yanked out of our reach as soon as we achieve our goals.

This hypothesis is known as the hedonic treadmill.

The famous pilot studies in this domain demonstrated e.g. that past lottery winners' stated subjective well-being was not significantly greater than that of an average person, after a few years or even months.  Conversely, accident victims with severed spinal cords were not as happy as before the accident after six months – around 0.75 sd less than control groups – but they'd still adjusted much more than they had expected to adjust.

This being the transhumanist form of Fun Theory, you might perhaps say:  "Let's get rid of this effect.  Just delete the treadmill, at least for positive events."

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Why We Like Middle Options, Small Menus

By Robin Hanson · January 10, 2009 8:00 pm · Comments (6)

Many say that consumers are biased to prefer the middle of three options, and to buy less when offered more options.  In the latest American Economic Review, Emir Kamenica shows these need not be biases:

Numerous studies demonstrate that seemingly irrelevant factors influence people's decisions. … when three alternatives are available, the middle alternative is chosen more often than when it is paired with only one other option. … In choice overload experiments, customers are less likely to make a purchase if more products are added to the choice set. …

In this paper, I develop a model where uninformed consumers learn payoff-relevant information by observing what goods are available. The tendency to select the middle option thus naturally arises when there are consumers who are unsure which option is best for them, but know their tastes are middlebrow. Choice overload comes as no surprise if excessive product lines reduce consumers' information about which varieties are likely to suit them. …

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