Monthly Archives: January 2009

Rationality Quotes 23

By Eliezer Yudkowsky · January 9, 2009 7:12 pm · Comments (2)

"This year I resolve to lose weight… to be nicer to dogs… and to sprout wings and fly."
         – Garfield

"People understand instinctively that the best way for computer programs to communicate with each other is for each of them to be strict in what they emit, and liberal in what they accept. The odd thing is that people themselves are not willing to be strict in how they speak and liberal in how they listen. You'd think that would also be obvious."
        — Larry Wall

"One never needs enemies, but they are so much fun to acquire."
        — Eluki bes Shahar, Archangel Blues

"I'm accusing you of violating the laws of nature!"
"Nature's virtue is intact.  I just know some different laws."
        — Orson Scott Card, A Planet Called Treason

"The goal of most religions is to preserve and elaborate on that concept of the stars as a big painted backdrop.  They make Infinity a 'prop' so you don't have to think about the scary part."
        — The Book of the SubGenius

<silverpower> Is humanity even worth saving?
<starglider> As opposed to what?
<silverpower> …hmm.
        — #sl4

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Serious Stories

By Eliezer Yudkowsky · January 8, 2009 6:49 pm · Comments (44)

Previously in series:  Emotional Involvement

Every Utopia ever constructed – in philosophy, fiction, or religion – has been, to one degree or another, a place where you wouldn't actually want to live.  I am not alone in this important observation:  George Orwell said much the same thing in "Why Socialists Don't Believe In Fun", and I expect that many others said it earlier.

If you read books on How To Write – and there are a lot of books out there on How To Write, because amazingly a lot of book-writers think they know something about writing – these books will tell you that stories must contain "conflict".

That is, the more lukewarm sort of instructional book will tell you that stories contain "conflict".  But some authors speak more plainly.

"Stories are about people's pain."  Orson Scott Card.

"Every scene must end in disaster."  Jack Bickham.

In the age of my youthful folly, I took for granted that authors were excused from the search for true Eutopia, because if you constructed a Utopia that wasn't flawed… what stories could you write, set there?  "Once upon a time they lived happily ever after."  What use would it be for a science-fiction author to try to depict a positive Singularity, when a positive Singularity would be…

…the end of all stories?

It seemed like a reasonable framework with which to examine the literary problem of Utopia, but something about that final conclusion produced a quiet, nagging doubt.

Continue reading "Serious Stories" »

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Why Love Is Vague

By Robin Hanson · January 7, 2009 10:30 pm · Comments (36)

Concepts can vary from specific to abstract, and it makes sense to have more concepts, at varying levels of abstraction, on topics we care more about.  Hence the myth that Eskimos have more words for snow. 

Our relations with each other are very important to us, and they vary in a great many important ways.  Why then do we use the word "love" so often to describe our relations, as in the famous three words "I love you."  Why not instead use a variety of more precise words that convey more detailed meaning?  Why not say "I wistfully-romantically-heart you" or "I hopefully-lustfully-want you" or "I wearily-unwillingly-stick-to you"? 

The answer comes, I think from realizing that if we described our relations in more detail, we would have to acknowledge finer changes in our relations.  Our current "I love you" approach lets us use the same descriptor at all stages in our relation, and at all points in our mood cycles.  We don't have to announce when our relation moves from hopeful lust to wild passion to tender comfort to favorite-old-shirt familiarity.  Such announcements could be quite awkward, especially if our perceptions are not exactly in sync.

I suspect we are also purposely vague with many of the other words we use, but I haven't spend much time trying to think of other examples.  Can readers think of more examples?

Added: Tyler once listed many different reasons to say "I love you."

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Rationality Quotes 22

By Eliezer Yudkowsky · January 7, 2009 7:00 am · Comments (4)

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

"Lying to yourself about specific actions is easier than re-defining the bounds of your imagined identity…  When I see once-ethical men devolve into moral grey, they still identify as upstanding."
       — Ben Casnocha

"Every year buy a clean bed sheet, date it, and lay it over the previous layer of junk on your desk."
        — Vernor Vinge, The Blabber

"Like first we tossed out the bath water, then the baby, and like finally the whole tub."
        — John R. Andrews

"I have no wisdom.  Yet I heard a wise man – soon to be a relative of marriage – say not long ago that all is for the best.  We are but dreams, and dreams possess no life by their own right.  See, I am wounded.  (Holds out his hand.)  When my wound heals, it will be gone.  Should it with its bloody lips say it is sorry to heal?  I am only trying to explain what another said, but that is what I think he meant."
        — Gene Wolfe, The Claw of the Conciliator

"On a grand scale we simply want to save the world, so obviously we're just letting ourselves in for a lot of disappointment and we're doomed to failure since we didn't pick some cheap-ass two-bit goal like collecting all the Garbage Pail Kids cards."
        — Nenslo

"He promised them nothing but blood, iron, and fire, and offered them only the choice of going to find it or of waiting for it to find them at home."
        — John Barnes, One For the Morning Glory

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Free Docs Not Help Poor Kids

By Robin Hanson · January 6, 2009 11:00 pm · Comments (24)

I don't find it surprising when studies of American/European health care consumption show little relationship between consumption and health outcomes. … But I confess I am shocked that studies show the same thing in the developing world:

That is Megan McArdle, on this Gates-funded randomized test of free medicine:

2,194 households containing 2,592 Ghanaian children under 5 y old were randomised into a prepayment scheme allowing free primary care including drugs, or to a control group whose families paid user fees for health care (normal practice) … The primary outcome was moderate anaemia (haemoglobin [Hb] < 8 g/dl); major secondary outcomes were health care utilisation, severe anaemia, and mortality. At baseline the randomised groups were similar. Introducing free primary health care altered the health care seeking behaviour of households; those randomised to the intervention arm used formal health care [12%] more and nonformal care [10%] less than the control group. Introducing free primary health care did not lead to any measurable difference in any health outcome. … Anaemia was chosen as the primary outcome because it is the most commonly used objective outcome of community interventions on malaria morbidity, with malaria the most common life-threatening disease of children under 5 y of age in West Africa.

I am, alas, not surprised.

Added:  PLOS Medicine couldn't publish the above study without also publishing a criticism:

Several biases have led the authors to judge its success on a very limited basis: (1) although the scheme benefits all members of participating households, the study only took into account a sub-population of beneficiaries (children); (2) in this sub-population, only health-related impacts were considered, and among all possible health benefits, only the potential gains in malaria-related outcomes were considered; and (3) among malaria-related outcomes, the analysis was restricted solely to one indicator: the prevalence of severe and moderate anaemia. … The study's authors conclude: "This lack of any effect, including on secondary outcomes such as Hb for which the study had good power, challenges the assumption that where introducing free health care leads to changes in utilisation, it can safely be assumed to translate into health benefits. Given the potential size of resources involved in providing free health care that could be diverted from other priorities on the basis of that assumption, this finding is potentially important for policymakers." But given the methodological limitations of the study, we believe that the trial provides no scientific evidence on the effectiveness of the pre-payment scheme.

Geez.  Translated: as long as any possible studies have not yet been done, there can be no evidence that med $ doesn't help.

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Emotional Involvement

By Eliezer Yudkowsky · January 6, 2009 5:23 pm · Comments (41)

Previously in series:  Changing Emotions
Followup to:  Evolutionary Psychology, Thou Art Godshatter, Existential Angst Factory

Can your emotions get involved in a video game?  Yes, but not much.  Whatever sympathetic echo of triumph you experience on destroying the Evil Empire in a video game, it's probably not remotely close to the feeling of triumph you'd get from saving the world in real life.  I've played video games powerful enough to bring tears to my eyes, but they still aren't as powerful as the feeling of significantly helping just one single real human being.

Because when the video game is finished, and you put it away, the events within the game have no long-term consequences.

Maybe if you had a major epiphany while playing…  But even then, only your thoughts would matter; the mere fact that you saved the world, inside the game, wouldn't count toward anything in the continuing story of your life.

Thus fails the Utopia of playing lots of really cool video games forever.  Even if the games are difficult, novel, and sensual, this is still the idiom of life chopped up into a series of disconnected episodes with no lasting consequences.  A life in which equality of consequences is forcefully ensured, or in which little is at stake because all desires are instantly fulfilled without individual work – these likewise will appear as flawed Utopias of dispassion and angst.  "Rich people with nothing to do" syndrome.  A life of disconnected episodes and unimportant consequences is a life of weak passions, of emotional uninvolvement.

Our emotions, for all the obvious evolutionary reasons, tend to associate to events that had major reproductive consequences in the ancestral environment, and to invoke the strongest passions for events with the biggest consequences:

Falling in love… birthing a child… finding food when you're starving… getting wounded… being chased by a tiger… your child being chased by a tiger… finally killing a hated enemy…

Continue reading "Emotional Involvement" »

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Why Fiction Lies

By Robin Hanson · January 5, 2009 11:00 pm · Comments (31)

Most religious activities make a lot of sense, especially in terms of group bonding.  It is religious beliefs that seem the most puzzling.  Many suggest supernatural beliefs are just a side effect of our having a theory of mind, and applying it liberally.  Back in 2001 I read and reviewed Pascal Boyer's book Religion Explained.  Boyer noted 1) supernatural concepts tend to violate one ontological assumption each, making them maximally memorable, and 2) supernatural entities tend to know and care about human-socially-relevant info, and to punish humans who are not nice (i.e., cooperative).  I was puzzled that Boyer didn't explicitly make what seemed to me the obvious suggestion:  we evolved a tendency to accept strange memorable group beliefs to create a high cost of leaving our group, and to show that we expect to be punished if we are not nice. 

Our obsession with gossiping about each other makes a lot of sense, but more puzzling is our obsession with stories we know are not true, about unrelated people in strange worlds.  I recently finished literary-expert William Flesch's Comeuppance, a literary expert's evo psych account of why we like fiction (reviewed here and here).  Flesch says humans cooperate via a norm of celebrating cooperators and punishing defectors and those who violate this norm:

In narratives we … [are] disposed to want to see the cooperators triumph over the obstacles set up by defectors of various sorts.  …. [We] root for characters with a propensity for strong reciprocity, not because the judge them as like us or identify with them, but because  a disposition to reward cooperators and to punish defectors is itself a central aspect of cooperation. (p.126)

Social life is all about signaling our abilities and cooperativeness, and discerning such signals from others:

Continue reading "Why Fiction Lies" »

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Rationality Quotes 21

By Eliezer Yudkowsky · January 5, 2009 9:45 pm · Comments (6)

"The most dangerous thing in the world is finding someone you agree with.  If a TV station news is saying exactly what you think is right, BEWARE!  You are very likely only reinforcing your beliefs, and not being supplied with new information."
        — SmallFurryCreature

"Companies deciding which kind of toothpaste to market have much more rigorous, established decision-making processes to refer to than the most senior officials of the U.S. government deciding whether or not to go to war."
        — Michael Mazarr

"Everything I ever thought about myself – who I was, what I am – was a lie.  You have no idea how astonishingly liberating that feels."
        — Neil Gaiman, Stardust

"Saul speaks of the 'intense desire for survival on the part of virtually everyone on earth,' and our 'failure' in spite of this.  I have often pointed out that the so-called 'survival instinct' is reliable only in clear and present danger – and even then only if the individual is still relatively healthy and vigorous.  If the danger is indirect, or remote in time, or if the person is weak or depressed – or even if required action would violate established habits – forget the 'survival instinct.' It isn't that simple."
        — Robert Ettinger on cryonics

"We are running out of excuses.  We just have to admit that real AI is one of the lowest research priorities, ever.  Even space is considered more important.  Nevermind baseball, tribology, or TV evangelism."
        — Eugen Leitl

"That's something that's always struck me as odd about humanity.  Our first response to someone's bad news is "I'm sorry", as though we feel that someone should take responsibility for all the $&#ed up randomness that goes on in this universe."
        — Angels 2200

"We were supremely lucky to be born into this precise moment in history.  It is with an ever-cresting crescendo of wonder and enthusiasm that I commend you to the great adventure and the great adventure to you."
        — Jeff Davis

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Changing Emotions

By Eliezer Yudkowsky · January 4, 2009 7:05 pm · Comments (30)

Previously in series:  Growing Up is Hard

    Lest anyone reading this journal of a primitive man should think we spend our time mired in abstractions, let me also say that I am discovering the richness available to those who are willing to alter their major characteristics.  The variety of emotions available to a reconfigured human mind, thinking thoughts impossible to its ancestors…
    The emotion of -*-, describable only as something between sexual love and the joy of intellection – making love to a thought?  Or &&, the true reverse of pain, not "pleasure" but a "warning" of healing, growth and change. Or (^+^), the most complex emotion yet discovered, felt by those who consciously endure the change between mind configurations, and experience the broad spectrum of possibilities inherent in thinking and being.
        — Greg Bear, Eon

So… I'm basically on board with that sort of thing as a fine and desirable future.  But I think that the difficulty and danger of fiddling with emotions is oft-underestimated.  Not necessarily underestimated by Greg Bear, per se; the above journal entry is from a character who was receiving superintelligent help.

But I still remember one time on the Extropians mailing list when someone talked about creating a female yet "otherwise identical" copy of himself.  Something about that just fell on my camel's back as the last straw.  I'm sorry, but there are some things that are much more complicated to actually do than to rattle off as short English phrases, and "changing sex" has to rank very high on that list.  Even if you're omnipotent so far as raw ability goes, it's not like people have a binary attribute reading "M" or "F" that can be flipped as a primitive action.

Changing sex makes a good, vivid example of the sort of difficulties you might run into when messing with emotional architecture, so I'll use it as my archetype:

Continue reading "Changing Emotions" »

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Growing Up is Hard

By Eliezer Yudkowsky · January 3, 2009 10:55 pm · Comments (34)

Previously in series:  Free to Optimize

Terrence Deacon's The Symbolic Species is the best book I've ever read on the evolution of intelligence.  Deacon somewhat overreaches when he tries to theorize about what our X-factor is; but his exposition of its evolution is first-class.

Deacon makes an excellent case – he has quite persuaded me – that the increased relative size of our frontal cortex, compared to other hominids, is of overwhelming importance in understanding the evolutionary development of humanity.  It's not just a question of increased computing capacity, like adding extra processors onto a cluster; it's a question of what kind of signals dominate, in the brain.

People with Williams Syndrome (caused by deletion of a certain region on chromosome 7) are hypersocial, ultra-gregarious; as children they fail to show a normal fear of adult strangers.  WSers are cognitively impaired on most dimensions, but their verbal abilities are spared or even exaggerated; they often speak early, with complex sentences and large vocabulary, and excellent verbal recall, even if they can never learn to do basic arithmetic.

Deacon makes a case for some Williams Syndrome symptoms coming from a frontal cortex that is relatively too large for a human, with the result that prefrontal signals – including certain social emotions – dominate more than they should.

Continue reading "Growing Up is Hard" »

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