Overcoming Bias

Lawrence Watt-Evans's Fiction

One of my pet topics, on which I will post more one of these days, is the Rationalist in Fiction.  Most of the time - it goes almost without saying - the Rationalist is done completely wrong.  In Hollywood, the Rationalist is a villain, or a cold emotionless foil, or a child who has to grow into a real human being, or a fool whose probabilities are all wrong, etcetera.  Even in science fiction, the Rationalist character is rarely done right - bearing the same resemblance to a real rationalist, as the mad scientist genius inventor who designs a new nuclear reactor in a month, bears to real scientists and engineers.

Perhaps this is because most speculative fiction, generally speaking, is interested in someone battling monsters or falling in love or becoming a vampire, or whatever, not in being rational... and it would probably be worse fiction, if the author tried to make that the whole story.  But that can't be the entire problem.  I've read at least one author whose plots are not about rationality, but whose characters are nonetheless, in passing, realistically rational.

That author is Lawrence Watt-Evans.  His work stands out for a number of reasons, the first being that it is genuinely unpredictable.  Not because of a postmodernist contempt for coherence, but because there are events going on outside the hero's story, just like real life.

Most authors, if they set up a fantasy world with a horrible evil villain, and give their main character the one sword that can kill that villain, you could guess that, at the end of the book, the main character is going to kill the evil villain with the sword.

Not Lawrence Watt-Evans.  In a Watt-Evans book, it's entirely possible that the evil villain will die of a heart attack halfway through the book, then the character will decide to sell the sword because they'd rather have the money, and then the character uses the money to set up an investment banking company.

TV is Porn

When choosing what TV show or film to watch, most of us probably think our main consideration is something other than how "hot" are the actors.  Not so, apparently: 

As an acting coach, I'm writing specifically about actors, who today are being cast more and more on their looks and less and less on their talent. ... Where once casting seemed to strive for a combination of looks and talent, the equation now appears to have shifted radically toward the former, particularly with regard to film and television aimed at the youth market. Not long ago, I coached a young woman on a screen test for a television project. Afterward, the casting director told me that she had been "hands down the best actress of the bunch" but they had decided to go "another way." "Why?" I asked. "Because the girl we went with is a Victoria's Secret model," he said, as if that were the most obvious explanation imaginable.

As in most industries, the main expense in giving shows is labor, and the most expensive laborers are actors. 

Class Project

Followup to:  The Failures of Eld Science, Einstein's Superpowers

"Do as well as Einstein?" Jeffreyssai said, incredulously.  "Just as well as Einstein?  Albert Einstein was a great scientist of his era, but that was his era, not this one!  Einstein did not comprehend the Bayesian methods; he lived before the cognitive biases were discovered; he had no scientific grasp of his own thought processes.  Einstein spoke nonsense of an impersonal God - which tells you how well he understood the rhythm of reason, to discard it outside his own field! He was too caught up in the drama of rejecting his era's quantum mechanics to actually fix it.  And while I grant that Einstein reasoned cleanly in the matter of General Relativity - barring that matter of the cosmological constant - he took ten years to do it.  Too slow!"

"Too slow?" repeated Taji incredulously.

"Too slow!  If Einstein were in this classroom now, rather than Earth of the negative first century, I would rap his knuckles!  You will not try to do as well as Einstein!  You will aspire to do BETTER than Einstein or you may as well not bother!"

Jeffreyssai shook his head.  "Well, I've given you enough hints.  It is time to test your skills.  Now, I know that the other beisutsukai don't think much of my class projects..."  Jeffreyssai paused significantly.

Brennan inwardly sighed.  He'd heard this line many times before, in the Bardic Conspiracy, the Competitive Conspiracy:  The other teachers think my assignments are too easy, you should be grateful, followed by some ridiculously difficult task - 

That Alien Message

Followup to:  Einstein's Speed

Imagine a world much like this one, in which, thanks to gene-selection technologies, the average IQ is 140 (on our scale).  Potential Einsteins are one-in-a-thousand, not one-in-a-million; and they grow up in a school system suited, if not to them personally, then at least to bright kids.  Calculus is routinely taught in sixth grade.  Albert Einstein, himself, still lived and still made approximately the same discoveries, but his work no longer seems exceptional.  Several modern top-flight physicists have made equivalent breakthroughs, and are still around to talk.

(No, this is not the world Brennan lives in.)

One day, the stars in the night sky begin to change.

Some grow brighter.  Some grow dimmer.  Most remain the same.  Astronomical telescopes capture it all, moment by moment.  The stars that change, change their luminosity one at a time, distinctly so; the luminosity change occurs over the course of a microsecond, but a whole second separates each change.

It is clear, from the first instant anyone realizes that more than one star is changing, that the process seems to center around Earth particularly. The arrival of the light from the events, at many stars scattered around the galaxy, has been precisely timed to Earth in its orbit.  Soon, confirmation comes in from high-orbiting telescopes (they have those) that the astronomical miracles do not seem as synchronized from outside Earth.  Only Earth's telescopes see one star changing every second (1005 milliseconds, actually).

Almost the entire combined brainpower of Earth turns to analysis.

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.