Overcoming Bias

The Failures of Eld Science

Followup to:  Initiation Ceremony, If Many-Worlds Had Come First

This time there were no robes, no hoods, no masks.  Students were expected to become friends, and allies.  And everyone knew why you were in the classroom.  It would have been pointless to pretend you weren't in the Conspiracy.

Their sensei was Jeffreyssai, who might have been the best of his era, in his era.  His students were either the most promising learners, or those whom the beisutsukai saw political advantage in molding.

Brennan fell into the latter category, and knew it.  Nor had he hesitated to use his Mistress's name to open doors.  You used every avenue available to you, in seeking knowledge; that was respected here.

"- for over thirty years," Jeffreyssai said.  "Not one of them saw it; not Einstein, not Schrödinger, not even von Neumann."  He turned away from his sketcher, and toward the classroom.  "I pose to you to the question:  How did they fail?"

The students exchanged quick glances, a calculus of mutual risk between the wary and the merely baffled.  Jeffreyssai was known to play games.

Expelled Beats Sicko

Metacritic (a review aggregator) gives Michael Moore's latest movie Sicko a 74 out of 100, while the new Expelled gets only a 20.  Expelled, however, is a better movie.

In Sicko, Moore shows US folks facing high prices for docs, drugs, and surgery.  Sad anxious people find that if they can't pay, they may not be treated.  But then we see happy glad folks in England, France, and Canada getting all the medicine they want for free.  Free good, expensive bad -- that is the depth of Moore's celebrated case for universal care.

Sicko makes Expelled seem like a graduate seminar.  In Expelled, experts on many sides speak at length in their own words.  The movie makes a good case for its main claim, that intelligent design advocates are shunned by academia.  And they get opponent Richard Dawkins to admit a 1% chance of God, and a higher chance Earth life may have been designed by distant ancient higher powers.  Both these estimates justify devoting higher-than-now fractions of origin-of-life research to such possibilities.  (And I estimate betting markets would endorse >1% chances for these.)

For my taste, the movie overdid threats to a mythical "academic freedom" that supposedly made the US great, but probably never existed.  It also overdid how understanding Darwin leads people to reject God, and emboldened Nazis to brutality.  These claims are not relevant to the truth of intelligent design, but they are admittedly true and relevant to most viewers' desire to avoid beliefs with such consequences. 

Sadly, it seems reviewers praised Sicko because they agreed with universal care, and panned Expelled because they disagreed with intelligent design.  The tug-o-war continues.

Should-be-unneeded disclaimers: There are good arguments possible for universal care, and in a betting market I'd probably be short both God and universal design.

Endearing Sincerity

Honestly demands I admit that soon after penning that sincerity is overrated, and that fiction typically distracts from reality, I fell in love with a fictional movie celebrating sincerity:  Once, depicting people who really love music, more than money or sex or anything.  It resonated with my cherished memories of being a teen religious cultist (~'74), and a young adult in an idealistic tech community exploring the web, nanotech, and more ('84-93).  People feel tied especially tied to others with whom they share a deep love of an unpopular or unrewarded hobby.  When other rewards loom larger, such as money, fame, sex, etc., we are less sure of our associates' motives.

I'm lucky to be a professor, but alas since this job pays money and prestige, most of the people I deal with seem to primarily seek such rewards.  Gordon Tullock (office next to mine) in 1966:

An investigator wholly motivated by induced curiosity is different in many ways from one motivated by either curiosity or a desire to make practical application of new knowledge.  ... If he could establish and maintain his reputation, and hence his job, by reporting completely fictional discoveries, this would accomplish his end.  ... Those administering a system of induced research ...  must make certain that [such] investigators are induced to pay attention to the real world.  As we have seen, the actual system used by administrators in our present setup is simply to count the number of papers published by a man in journals of various degrees of reputation.  The reputation of the journals, again as we have seen, is determined by their readers.  ... A self-perpetuating process might be set in motion in which a journal read only by people motivated by induced curiosity gradually slipped away from reality in the direction of superficially impressive but actually easy research projects.  In most sciences this does not happen. ... One symptom of the existence of this condition is the development of very complex methods of treating subject which can be readily handled by simple methods (pp56-57).

It is worse that Tullock thought.  Few academic topics are dominated by topic lovers; intellectual progress is largely a side effect of prestige seeking.  And even "sincere" topic love is directed by our ancient evolved coding designed to gain us more basic rewards.  But even so, I miss being part of a community primarily tied by a common love of a topic or activity, vs. wider prestige or money.  Not sure how consistent this is with anything else I've written.

Initiation Ceremony

    The torches that lit the narrow stairwell burned intensely and in the wrong color, flame like melting gold or shattered suns.
    192... 193...
    Brennan's sandals clicked softly on the stone steps, snicking in sequence, like dominos very slowly falling.
    227... 228...
    Half a circle ahead of him, a trailing fringe of dark cloth whispered down the stairs, the robed figure itself staying just out of sight.
    239... 240...
    Not much longer, Brennan predicted to himself, and his guess was accurate:
    Sixteen times sixteen steps was the number, and they stood before the portal of glass.
    The great curved gate had been wrought with cunning, humor, and close attention to indices of refraction: it warped light, bent it, folded it, and generally abused it, so that there were hints of what was on the other side (stronger light sources, dark walls) but no possible way of seeing through - unless, of course, you had the key: the counter-door, thick for thin and thin for thick, in which case the two would cancel out.
    From the robed figure beside Brennan, two hands emerged, gloved in reflective cloth to conceal skin's color.  Fingers like slim mirrors grasped the handles of the warped gate - handles that Brennan had not guessed; in all that distortion, shapes could only be anticipated, not seen.
    "Do you want to know?" whispered the guide; a whisper nearly as loud as an ordinary voice, but not revealing the slightest hint of gender.
    Brennan paused.  The answer to the question seemed suspiciously, indeed extraordinarily obvious, even for ritual.

Fantasy and Reality: Substitutes or Complements?

Eliezer's post Saturday on if we would really like fantasy worlds raises in my mind this key question: are reality and fantasy complements or substitutes?  That is, does exposure to fiction tend to increase or decrease our ability to see reality as it is? 

The main substitutes argument is simple and obvious but still compelling:  the more we practice thinking about reality the better we see it, but attention to fiction diverts attention from reality, reducing our reality practice. 

The complement arguments are many and subtle:

• The real alternative to thinking about fun fiction isn't thinking about reality, it is unthinking fun. 
• Fiction can frame the familiar in grand terms, making us care and think more about the familiar.
• Fiction can teach us about rare but important events few actually see in reality.
• Fiction can describe how familiar situations appear to many different parties. 
• Fiction can suppress irrelevant detail and emphasize important essences, like a math model.
• Fiction is a part of reality, so exposure to fiction teaches about that part.
• (I'll add more here as I hear more good suggestions.)
• Identifying with characters important in their world lets us admit we are unimportant in ours.

Has anyone ever tried to test whether people who read more fiction see reality more clearly, controlling for other features?  I find it suspicious that many say, "yes, fiction substitutes for reality on average, but `good' fiction is different" but offer no independent description of "good" we could use to test this claim. 

On the last argument above, that fiction lets us admit to being unimportant, I'll admit that it fits with Eliezer and I being both relatively anti-fantasy and thinking ourselves unusually important.

Added: Many seem eager to point out that fiction need not always be a substitute for reality, but will anyone defend the view that it is on the whole a complement? 

(This last part seems less relevant than I originally thought:)

If You Demand Magic, Magic Won't Help

Followup to:  Explaining vs. Explaining Away, Joy in the Merely Real

Most witches don't believe in gods.  They know that the gods exist, of course.  They even deal with them occasionally.  But they don't believe in them.  They know them too well.  It would be like believing in the postman.
        -- Terry Pratchett, Witches Abroad

Once upon a time, I was pondering the philosophy of fantasy stories -

And before anyone chides me for my "failure to understand what fantasy is about", let me say this:  I was raised in an SF&F household.  I have been reading fantasy stories since I was five years old.  I occasionally try to write fantasy stories (no, you can't see them).  And I am not the sort of person who tries to write for a genre without pondering its philosophy.  Where do you think story ideas come from?

Anyway:

I was pondering the philosophy of fantasy stories, and it occurred to me that if there were actually dragons in our world - if you could go down to the zoo, or even to a distant mountain, and meet a fire-breathing dragon - while nobody had ever actually seen a zebra, then our fantasy stories would contain zebras aplenty, while dragons would be unexciting.

Now that's what I call painting yourself into a corner, wot?  The grass is always greener on the other side of unreality.

Savanna Poets

Followup to:  Explaining vs. Explaining Away

    "Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars - mere globs of gas atoms.  Nothing is "mere".  I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them.  But do I see less or more?
    "The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination - stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light.  A vast pattern - of which I am a part - perhaps my stuff was belched from some forgotten star, as one is belching there.  Or see them with the greater eye of Palomar, rushing all apart from some common starting point when they were perhaps all together.  What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why?  It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it.
    "For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined!  Why do the poets of the present not speak of it?
    "What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were like a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?"
            -- Richard Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Vol I, p. 3-6 (line breaks added)

That's a real question, there on the last line - what kind of poet can write about Jupiter the god, but not Jupiter the immense sphere?  Whether or not Feynman meant the question rhetorically, it has a real answer:

If Jupiter is like us, he can fall in love, and lose love, and regain love.
If Jupiter is like us, he can strive, and rise, and be cast down.
If Jupiter is like us, he can laugh or weep or dance.

If Jupiter is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia, it is more difficult for the poet to make us feel.

Gary Gygax Annihilated at 69

Yesterday I heard that Gary Gygax, inventor of Dungeons and Dragons, had died at 69.  And I don't understand, I truly don't, why that of all deaths should affect me the way it does.

Every day, people die; 150,000 of them, in fact.  Every now and then I read the obituary of a scientist whose work I admired, and I don't feel like this.  I should, of course, but I don't.  I remember hearing about the death of Isaac Asimov, and more distantly, the death of Robert Heinlein (though I was 8 at the time) and that didn't affect me like this.

I never knew one single thing about Gary Gygax.  I don't know if he had a wife or children.  I couldn't guess his political opinions, or what he thought about the future of humanity.  He was just a name on the cover of books I read until they disintegrated.

I searched on the Net and just found comments from other people feeling the same way.  Stopped in their tracks by this one death, and not understanding why, and trying to come up with an explanation for their own feelings.  Why him?

I never even really played D&D all that much.  I played a little with David Levitt, my best friend in elementary school - I think it was how we initially met, in fact, though the memory fades into oblivion.  I remember my father teaching me to play very simple D&D games, around the same time I was entering kindergarten; I remember being upset that I couldn't cast a Shield spell more than once.  But mostly, I just read the rulebooks.

There are people who played D&D with their friends, every week or every day, until late at night, in modules that Gary Gygax designed.  I understand why they feel sad.  But all I did, mostly, was read the rulebooks to myself.  Why do I feel the same way?

Why "Just Believe"?

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. 

Art, Trust, and Betrayal

Say a band puts out a debut album which is deemed by critics to have a great deal of artistic merit, and which a small number of hard-core fans love.  For their second album, the band puts out some crap that appeals to the lowest common denominator and makes a ton of money, but which retains its artistic pretensions (the latter point is important; the argument below doesn't work if the band isn't pretending that the second album is art too).  Fans of the first album accuse the band of "going commercial" or "selling out."  In effect, they claim (and at least affect to believe) that they are not merely disappointed that they didn't get their preferred album, but rather that the band has done something that is in some meaningful sense a betrayal.  Does this position have any merit, or is it just sour grapes from a bunch of snobs whose preferences lost out in the marketplace fair and square?

I want to offer an argument that the original fans are (or at least can be) right to feel betrayed.  Most people regard art to be an important part of their lives.  But artistic products are, by their nature, things that you can't fully appreciate until you consume them.  Moreover, they aren't even "experience goods" in the traditional sense that once you've experienced them you know everything there is to know about them.  Rather, art exercises its influence over you subtly and gradually, and in ways that you cannot fully predict or control.  This means that you are, to some extent, at the mercy of artistic gatekeepers: it is inevitable that the people who feed you art, who tell you what is and what is not "good," have real power over an important part of your life, and that power is partially unaccountable in the sense that you will not necessarily ever know whether your gatekeepers have been acting as a faithful agent in your interest (i.e., acting to help you achieve the richest possible artistic experience), or whether they are taking advantage of you for personal gain.  This means that you must trust other people to look after this aspect of your well-being, with the knowledge that they may have interests that diverge from yours.  And where there is trust, there can be a betrayal of trust.  And as a practical matter, it makes sense to direct your opprobrium at anyone you actually catch violating that trust, in the hopes that this will serve to deter some of those would-be betrayers whom you would not have caught.  And by the way, pretty much the same argument goes for teachers.