Overcoming Bias

Rationality Quotes 14

"As for the little green men... they don't want us to know about them, so they refrain from making contact... then they do silly aerobatics displays within radar range of military bases... with their exterior lights on... if that's extraterrestrial intelligence, I'm not sure I want to know what extraterrestrial stupidity looks like."
        -- Russell Wallace

"Characterizing male status-seeking as egotistical is like characterizing bonobo promiscuity as unchaste."
        -- Liza May

"Introducing a technology is not a neutral act--it is profoundly revolutionary. If you present a new technology to the world you are effectively legislating a change in the way we all live. You are changing society, not some vague democratic process. The individuals who are driven to use that technology by the disparities of wealth and power it creates do not have a real choice in the matter. So the idea that we are giving people more freedom by developing technologies and then simply making them available is a dangerous illusion."
        -- Karl Schroeder

"Hans Riesel held a Mersenne record for 14 days in the 50's, calculated using the first Swedish computer. My old highschool computing teacher had worked as a student on the system and had managed to crush his foot when a byte fell out of its rack and onto him."
        -- Anders Sandberg

"Gentlemen, I do not mind being contradicted, and I am unperturbed when I am attacked, but I confess I have slight misgivings when I hear myself being explained."
        -- Lord Balfour, to the English Parliament

Rationality Quotes 13

"You can only compromise your principles once.  After then you don't have any."
        -- Smug Lisp Weeny

"If you want to do good, work on the technology, not on getting power."
        -- John McCarthy

"If you’re interested in being on the right side of disputes, you will refute your opponents’ arguments.  But if you’re interested in producing truth, you will fix your opponents’ arguments for them.  To win, you must fight not only the creature you encounter; you must fight the most horrible thing that can be constructed from its corpse."
        -- Black Belt Bayesian

"I normally thought of "God!" as a disclaimer, or like the MPAA rating you see just before a movie starts: it told me before I continued into conversation with that person, that that person had limitations to their intellectual capacity or intellectual honesty."
        -- Mike Barskey

"It is the soldier, not the reporter, who has given us freedom of the press. It is the soldier, not the poet, who has given us freedom of speech. It is the soldier, not the campus organizer, who has given us the freedom to demonstrate. It is the soldier, not the lawyer, who has given us the right to a fair trial. It is the soldier, who salutes the flag, who serves under the flag, and whose coffin is draped by the flag, who allows the protester to burn the flag."
        -- Father Dennis Edward O'Brien, USMC

Rationality Quotes 12

"Even if I had an objective proof that you don't find it unpleasant when you stick your hand in a fire, I still think you’d pull your hand out at the first opportunity."
        -- John K Clark

"So often when one level of delusion goes away, another one more subtle comes in its place."
        -- Rational Buddhist

"Your denial of the importance of objectivity amounts to announcing your intention to lie to us. No-one should believe anything you say."
        -- John McCarthy

"How exactly does one 'alter reality'?  If I eat an apple have I altered reality?  Or maybe you mean to just give the appearance of altering reality."
        -- JoeDad

"Promoting less than maximally accurate beliefs is an act of sabotage.   Don't do it to anyone unless you'd also slash their tires."
        -- Black Belt Bayesian

Harder Choices Matter Less

...or they should, logically speaking.

Suppose you're torn in an agonizing conflict between two choices.

Well... if you can't decide between them, they must be around equally appealing, right?  Equally balanced pros and cons?  So the choice must matter very little - you may as well flip a coin.  The alternative is that the pros and cons aren't equally balanced, in which case the decision should be simple.

This is a bit of a tongue-in-cheek suggestion, obviously - more appropriate for choosing from a restaurant menu than choosing a major in college.

But consider the case of choosing from a restaurant menu.  The obvious choices, like Pepsi over Coke, will take very little time.  Conversely, the choices that take the most time probably make the least difference.  If you can't decide between the hamburger and the hot dog, you're either close to indifferent between them, or in your current state of ignorance you're close to indifferent between their expected utilities.

I'd take it

Out-of-context quote of the day:

"...although even $10 trillion isn't a huge amount of money..."

From Simon Johnson, Director of the IMF's Research Department, on "The Rise of Sovereign Wealth Funds".

So if you had $10 trillion, what would you do with it?

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 - 

A Broken Koan

At Baycon today and tomorrow.  Physics series resumes tomorrow.

Meanwhile, here's a link to a page of Broken Koans and other Zen debris I ran across, which should amuse fans of ancient Eastern wisdom; and a koan of my own:

Two monks were arguing about a flag. One said, "The flag is moving."

The other said, "The wind is moving."

Julian Barbour happened to be passing by.  He told them, "Not the wind, not the flag."

The first monk said, "Is the mind moving?"

Barbour replied, "Not even mind is moving."

The second monk said, "Is time moving?"

Barbour said, "There is no time.  You could say that it is mu-ving."

"Then why do we think that flags flap, and wind blows, and minds change, and time moves?" inquired the first monk.

Barbour thought, and said, "Because you remember."

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.

If Many-Worlds Had Come First

This post is part of the Quantum Physics Sequence.
Followup to: Collapse Postulates, Decoherence is Simple, Falsifiable and Testable

Not that I'm claiming I could have done better, if I'd been born into that time, instead of this one...

Macroscopic decoherence - the idea that the known quantum laws that govern microscopic events, might simply govern at all levels without alteration - also known as "many-worlds" - was first proposed in a 1957 paper by Hugh Everett III.  The paper was ignored.  John Wheeler told Everett to see Niels Bohr.  Bohr didn't take him seriously.

Crushed, Everett left academic physics, invented the general use of Lagrange multipliers in optimization problems, and became a multimillionaire.

It wasn't until 1970, when Bryce DeWitt (who coined the term "many-worlds") wrote an article for Physics Today, that the general field was first informed of Everett's ideas.  Macroscopic decoherence has been gaining advocates ever since, and may now be the majority viewpoint (or not).

But suppose that decoherence and macroscopic decoherence had been realized immediately following the discovery of entanglement, in the 1920s.  And suppose that no one had proposed collapse theories until 1957.  Would decoherence now be steadily declining in popularity, while collapse theories were slowly gaining steam?

Imagine an alternate Earth, where the very first physicist to discover entanglement and superposition, said, "Holy flaming monkeys, there's a zillion other Earths out there!"

In the years since, many hypotheses have been proposed to explain the mysterious Born probabilities.  But no one has yet suggested a collapse postulate.  That possibility simply has not occurred to anyone.

One day, Huve Erett walks into the office of Biels Nohr...

Zombies: The Movie

FADE IN around a serious-looking group of uniformed military officers.  At the head of the table, a senior, heavy-set man, GENERAL FRED, speaks.

GENERAL FRED:  The reports are confirmed.  New York has been overrun... by zombies.

COLONEL TODD:  Again?  But we just had a zombie invasion 28 days ago!

GENERAL FRED:  These zombies... are different.  They're... philosophical zombies.

CAPTAIN MUDD:  Are they filled with rage, causing them to bite people?

COLONEL TODD:  Do they lose all capacity for reason?

GENERAL FRED:  No.  They behave... exactly like we do... except that they're not conscious.

(Silence grips the table.)

COLONEL TODD:  Dear God.