Overcoming Bias

The Level Above Mine

Followup to:  The Proper Use of Humility, Tsuyoku Naritai

(At this point, I fear that I must recurse into a subsequence; but if all goes as planned, it really will be short.)

I once lent Xiaoguang "Mike" Li my copy of "Probability Theory: The Logic of Science".  Mike Li read some of it, and then came back and said:

"Wow... it's like Jaynes is a thousand-year-old vampire."

Then Mike said, "No, wait, let me explain that -" and I said, "No, I know exactly what you mean."  It's a convention in fantasy literature that the older a vampire gets, the more powerful they become.

I'd enjoyed math proofs before I encountered Jaynes.  But E.T. Jaynes was the first time I picked up a sense of formidability from mathematical arguments.  Maybe because Jaynes was lining up "paradoxes" that had been used to object to Bayesianism, and then blasting them to pieces with overwhelming firepower - power being used to overcome others.  Or maybe the sense of formidability came from Jaynes not treating his math as a game of aesthetics; Jaynes cared about probability theory, it was bound up with other considerations that mattered, to him and to me too.

For whatever reason, the sense I get of Jaynes is one of terrifying swift perfection - something that would arrive at the correct answer by the shortest possible route, tearing all surrounding mistakes to shreds in the same motion.  Of course, when you write a book, you get a chance to show only your best side.  But still.

A Prodigy of Refutation

Followup to:  My Childhood Death Spiral, Raised in Technophilia

My Childhood Death Spiral described the core momentum carrying me into my mistake, an affective death spiral around something that Eliezer₁₉₉₆ called "intelligence".  I was also a technophile, pre-allergized against fearing the future.  And I'd read a lot of science fiction built around personhood ethics - in which fear of the Alien puts humanity-at-large in the position of the bad guys, mistreating aliens or sentient AIs because they "aren't human".

That's part of the ethos you acquire from science fiction - to define your in-group, your tribe, appropriately broadly.  Hence my email address, sentience@pobox.com.

So Eliezer₁₉₉₆ is out to build superintelligence, for the good of humanity and all sentient life.

At first, I think, the question of whether a superintelligence will/could be good/evil didn't really occur to me as a separate topic of discussion.  Just the standard intuition of, "Surely no supermind would be stupid enough to turn the galaxy into paperclips; surely, being so intelligent, it will also know what's right far better than a human being could."

Until I introduced myself and my quest to a transhumanist mailing list, and got back responses along the general lines of (from memory):

Raised in Technophilia

Followup to:  My Best and Worst Mistake

My father used to say that if the present system had been in place a hundred years ago, automobiles would have been outlawed to protect the saddle industry.

One of my major childhood influences was reading Jerry Pournelle's A Step Farther Out, at the age of nine.  It was Pournelle's reply to Paul Ehrlich and the Club of Rome, who were saying, in the 1960s and 1970s, that the Earth was running out of resources and massive famines were only years away.  It was a reply to Jeremy Rifkin's so-called fourth law of thermodynamics; it was a reply to all the people scared of nuclear power and trying to regulate it into oblivion.

I grew up in a world where the lines of demarcation between the Good Guys and the Bad Guys were pretty clear; not an apocalyptic final battle, but a battle that had to be fought over and over again, a battle where you could see the historical echoes going back to the Industrial Revolution, and where you could assemble the historical evidence about the actual outcomes.

On one side were the scientists and engineers who'd driven all the standard-of-living increases since the Dark Ages, whose work supported luxuries like democracy, an educated populace, a middle class, the outlawing of slavery.

On the other side, those who had once opposed smallpox vaccinations, anesthetics during childbirth, steam engines, and heliocentrism:  The theologians calling for a return to a perfect age that never existed, the elderly white male politicians set in their ways, the special interest groups who stood to lose, and the many to whom science was a closed book, fearing what they couldn't understand.

And trying to play the middle, the pretenders to Deep Wisdom, uttering cached thoughts about how technology benefits humanity but only when it was properly regulated - claiming in defiance of brute historical fact that science of itself was neither good nor evil - setting up solemn-looking bureaucratic committees to make an ostentatious display of their caution - and waiting for their applause.  As if the truth were always a compromise.  And as if anyone could really see that far ahead.  Would humanity have done better if there'd been a sincere, concerned, public debate on the adoption of fire, and commitees set up to oversee its use?

My Best and Worst Mistake

Followup to:  My Childhood Death Spiral

Yesterday I covered the young Eliezer's affective death spiral around something that he called "intelligence".  Eliezer₁₉₉₆, or even Eliezer₁₉₉₉ for that matter, would have refused to try and put a mathematical definition - consciously, deliberately refused.  Indeed, he would have been loath to put any definition on "intelligence" at all.

Why?  Because there's a standard bait-and-switch problem in AI, wherein you define "intelligence" to mean something like "logical reasoning" or "the ability to withdraw conclusions when they are no longer appropriate", and then you build a cheap theorem-prover or an ad-hoc nonmonotonic reasoner, and then say, "Lo, I have implemented intelligence!"  People came up with poor definitions of intelligence - focusing on correlates rather than cores - and then they chased the surface definition they had written down, forgetting about, you know, actual intelligence.  It's not like Eliezer₁₉₉₆ was out to build a career in Artificial Intelligence.  He just wanted a mind that would actually be able to build nanotechnology.  So he wasn't tempted to redefine intelligence for the sake of puffing up a paper.

Looking back, it seems to me that quite a lot of my mistakes can be defined in terms of being pushed too far in the other direction by seeing someone else stupidity:  Having seen attempts to define "intelligence" abused so often, I refused to define it at all.  What if I said that intelligence was X, and it wasn't really X?  I knew in an intuitive sense what I was looking for - something powerful enough to take stars apart for raw material - and I didn't want to fall into the trap of being distracted from that by definitions.

Similarly, having seen so many AI projects brought down by physics envy - trying to stick with simple and elegant math, and being constrained to toy systems as a result - I generalized that any math simple enough to be formalized in a neat equation was probably not going to work for, you know, real intelligence.  "Except for Bayes's Theorem," Eliezer₂₀₀₀ added; which, depending on your viewpoint, either mitigates the totality of his offense, or shows that he should have suspected the entire generalization instead of trying to add a single exception.

My Childhood Death Spiral

Followup to:  Affective Death Spirals, My Wild and Reckless Youth

My parents always used to downplay the value of intelligence.  And play up the value of - effort, as recommended by the latest research?  No, not effort.  Experience.  A nicely unattainable hammer with which to smack down a bright young child, to be sure.  That was what my parents told me when I questioned the Jewish religion, for example.  I tried laying out an argument, and I was told something along the lines of:  "Logic has limits, you'll understand when you're older that experience is the important thing, and then you'll see the truth of Judaism."  I didn't try again.  I made one attempt to question Judaism in school, got slapped down, didn't try again.  I've never been a slow learner.

Whenever my parents were doing something ill-advised, it was always, "We know better because we have more experience.  You'll understand when you're older: maturity and wisdom is more important than intelligence."

If this was an attempt to focus the young Eliezer on intelligence uber alles, it was the most wildly successful example of reverse psychology I've ever heard of.

But my parents aren't that cunning, and the results weren't exactly positive.

To What Expose Kids?

State courts recently rebuked Texas Child Protective Services and told them to return 440 kids to their polygamous Mormon parents.  The main complaint I've heard is that these teen girls can not really consent to polygamous marriage because they were not exposed enough to the rest of the world.   For example, Will Wilkinson:

About kids raised on isolated compounds by religious fanatics ... It is tyrannical for parents to attempt to reproduce their ideologies and prejudices in their children, especially when this requires social isolation and emotional coercion. ... They just have a political right to not be stopped, within bounds.  Many parents, though they intend the opposite, are in fact guilty of wrongful disregard for the development of their children's psychological freedom.

Of course responsible parents know they should expose kids to more than just the local neighborhood.  But parents' judgments on optimal exposure surely depend on their judgments about that outside world.  Someone who sees outsiders as mostly immoral heathens will choose less exposure than we as outsiders would choose for those same kids. 

So is the principle here that parents should go beyond their simple judgment when choosing to what to expose our kids?  For example, should we let polygamists argue for their way of life directly to our kids?  Should we let pedophiles argue their case directly to our kids?  Or is the principle here that we know we are right and those other parents are wrong, obligating us to make those parents give their kids what we judge best?

I wonder, could different cultures make a deal where they each give the other cultures X hours to make their case to their kids?   Of course with many cultures of differing sizes there'd be the issue of what fraction of that time each culture gets to use.  And of course unreasonable cultures might be excluded from the deal. (But what criteria could characterize "reasonable"?)  And if such a deal is not possible, even among some reasonable cultures, what exactly would that say about what we think about who should be exposed to what? 

Added 29June:  Will responds here.

Joe Epstein on Youth

More on our overconfident kids from a thoughful essay by Joseph Epstein:

So often in my literature classes students told me what they "felt" about a novel, or a particular character in a novel. I tried, ever so gently, to tell them that no one cared what they felt; the trick was to discover not one's feelings but what the author had put into the book, its moral weight and its resultant power. In essay courses, many of these same students turned in papers upon which I wished to--but did not--write: "D-, Too much love in the home." I knew where they came by their sense of their own deep significance and that this sense was utterly false to any conceivable reality. Despite what their parents had been telling them from the very outset of their lives, they were not significant. Significance has to be earned, and it is earned only through achievement. Besides, one of the first things that people who really are significant seem to know is that, in the grander scheme, they are themselves really quite insignificant.

How Honest With Kids?

A Mother's day article a few weeks back posed an interesting question: 

Some months back, I was invited to a party with 20 or so other mothers. ... a few of the women began reminiscing about their own youths, comparing the transgressions they'd committed in their teens and 20s and debating whose were the most egregious. ... As we pursue the goal of protecting our children from some of our more boneheaded and/or high-risk antics, we face one of the essential dilemmas of parenting: What do children need to know about their parents' pasts, and when do they need to know it? ...

So, should you admit to your child what you've done? ... If you cop to something, anything, will this give your children tacit permission to try it all? Remarkably few -- if any -- researchers have explored this topic. ... So it's odd, really, that there is no consensus on what to do when one of the million little interchanges involves the question of whether the parent is -- oh, say -- familiar with the taste of strawberry-flavored rolling paper. Experts, exploring their own gut instincts, differ. ...

And let's face it: Parents lie to their children all the time, offering up many comfortable fictions. When we read them fairy tales, we are, in a sense, lying. When we lead them to believe every story has a happy ending, we are lying. Our culture puts so much emphasis on frankness and sharing that it's easy to forget the real uses of evasion and stalling and deftly changing the subject, which are social skills on which civilizations -- and, sometimes, families -- rely.  Because the truth can be harsh and destructive, and why force it upon them?

So how honest should parents be with their kids about their younger "indiscretions"?

Overconfidence & Paternalism

Paul Graham tries to explain paternalism: 

Parents know they've concealed the facts about sex, and many at some point sit their kids down and explain more. But few tell their kids about the differences between the real world and the cocoon they grew up in. Combine this with the confidence parents try to instill in their kids, and every year you get a new crop of 18 year olds who think they know how to run the world.

Don't all 18 year olds think they know how to run the world? Actually this seems to be a recent innovation, no more than about 100 years old. In preindustrial times teenage kids were junior members of the adult world and comparatively well aware of their shortcomings. They could see they weren't as strong or skillful as the village smith. In past times people lied to kids about some things more than we do now, but the lies implicit in an artificial, protected environment are a recent invention. Like a lot of new inventions, the rich got this first. Children of kings and great magnates were the first to grow up out of touch with the world. Suburbia means half the population can live like kings in that respect.  ...

Lying to Kids

The insightful Paul Graham:

One of the most remarkable things about the way we lie to kids is how broad the conspiracy is.  All adults know what their culture lies to kids about: they're the questions you answer "Ask your parents." If a kid asked you who won the World Series in 1982 or what the atomic weight of carbon was, you could just tell him. But if a kid asks you "Is there a God?" or "What's a prostitute?" you'll probably say "Ask your parents."

Since we all agree, kids see few cracks in the view of the world presented to them. The biggest disagreements are between parents and schools, but even those are small. Schools are careful what they say about controversial topics, and if they do contradict what parents want their kids to believe, parents either pressure the school into keeping quiet or move their kids to a new school.

The conspiracy is so thorough that most kids who discover it do so only by discovering internal contradictions in what they're told. It can be traumatic for the ones who wake up during the operation. Here's what happened to Einstein:

Through the reading of popular scientific books I soon reached the conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could not be true. The consequence was a positively fanatic freethinking coupled with the impression that youth is intentionally being deceived by the state through lies: it was a crushing impression. 

I remember that feeling. By 15 I was convinced the world was corrupt from end to end. That's why movies like The Matrix have such resonance.

What if one wrote a clear simple web page explaining to young kids the important lies they are told?  How popular would it be with kids?  Yes, even if kids like the page it might take a while for word to get around about it, but I suspect it would face a much bigger problem: very few kids really want to see through the lies.  Hat tip to Kat.