Overcoming Bias

Awww, a Zebra

This image recently showed up on Flickr (original is nicer):

With the caption:

"Alas for those who turn their eyes from zebras and dream of dragons!  If we cannot learn to take joy in the merely real, our lives shall be empty indeed." -- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky.

"Awww!", I said, and called over my girlfriend over to look.

"Awww!", she said, and then looked at me, and said,  "I think you need to take your own advice!"

Me:  "But I'm looking at the zebra!"
Her:  "On a computer!"
Me:  (Turns away, hides face.)
Her:  "Have you ever even seen a zebra in real life?"
Me:  "Yes!  Yes, I have!  My parents took me to Lincoln Park Zoo!  ...man, I hated that place."

Fake Norms, or "Truth" vs. Truth

Followup to:  Applause Lights

When you say the word "truth", people know that "truth" is a good thing, and that they're supposed to applaud.  So it might seem like there is a social norm in favor of "truth".  But when it comes to some particular truth, like whether God exists, or how likely their startup is to thrive, people will say:  "I just want to believe" or "you've got to be optimistic to succeed".

So Robin and I were talking about this, and Robin asked me how it is that people prevent themselves from noticing the conflict.

I replied that I don't think active prevention is required.  First, as I quoted Michael Vassar:

"It seems to me that much of the frustration in my life prior to a few years ago has been due to thinking that all other human minds necessarily and consistently implement modus ponens."

But more importantly, I don't think there does exist any social norm in favor of truth.  There's a social norm in favor of "truth".  There's a difference.

The Fear of Common Knowledge

Followup to:  Belief in Belief

One of those insights that made me sit upright and say "Aha!"  From The Uncredible Hallq:

Minor acts of dishonesty are integral to human life, ranging from how we deal with casual acquaintances to writing formal agreements between nation states.  Steven Pinker has an excellent chapter on this in The Stuff of Thought, a version of which can be found at TIME magazine’s website. What didn’t make it into the TIME version is Pinker’s proposal that, while there are several reasons we do this, the most important reason is to avoid mutual knowledge:  "She probably knows I just blew a pass at her, but does she know I know she knows? Does she know I know she knows I know she knows?"  Etc.  Mutual knowledge is that nightmare where, for all intents and purposes, the known-knows can be extended out to infinity.  The ultimate example of this has to be the joke "No, it wasn’t awkward until you said, 'well, this is awkward.'"  A situation might be a little awkward, but what’s really awkward is mutual knowledge, created when someone blurts out what’s going on for all to hear...

The story of the Emperor’s New Clothes is another example of the power of mutual knowledge...

Walking On Grass, Others

Amelia Rawls in a Post OpEd:

During four years at Princeton University and nearly a year at Yale Law School, I have been surrounded by students who dazzle. ... But they are not always nice people. ... the kind of "nice" that involves showing compassion not merely because membership in community service groups demands it. The kind of "nice" that involves sharing notes with a student who is sick or lending a textbook to a friend who doesn't have one. The kind of selfless, genuine "nice" that makes this world a better place -- but won't get you accepted to college.

Of course, top universities accept hundreds of individuals who have demonstrated the highest levels of citizenship. These teenagers have volunteered in more food banks, sponsored more fundraisers and lobbied more officials than any previous generation. ... Sometimes some of these students will denounce world hunger but be unfriendly to the homeless. They will debate environmental policy but never offer to take out the trash. They will believe vehemently in many causes but roll their eyes when reminded to be humble, to be generous and to "do what is right."

Doctor Hypocrisy

The fact that your life would be easier if you could trust someone does not make that person trustworthy.  Doctors are a good example.  Wednesday's Post:

The first-of-its-kind survey of more than 1,600 physicians, published today in the Annals of Internal Medicine, found that 45 percent said they did not always report an incompetent or impaired colleague to the appropriate authorities -- even though 96 percent agreed that doctors should turn in such people.

Moreover, 46 percent said they had failed to report at least one serious medical error that they knew about, despite the fact that 93 percent of doctors said physicians should report all significant medical errors that they observe. ...

A majority said they would refer patients to an imaging facility in which they had a financial interest, but only 24 percent would inform patients of that financial tie.  Yet 96 percent told researchers that doctors should put their patients' welfare above their own financial interests.

Also, more than a third of physicians, 36 percent, said they would order an unneeded MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) test if it were requested by a patient with low back pain, though most doctors say they do not want to waste scarce resources.

And while 93 percent said doctors should provide necessary medical care regardless of a patient's ability to pay, only 69 percent currently accept uninsured patients who are unable to pay.

I doubt doctors are much different from other professionals in succumbing to such temptations.  The problem is that people want to believe that doctors are somehow different, and can be trusted just because they are doctors.  Which lets them get away with ...

Fake Optimization Criteria

Followup to:  Fake Justification, The Tragedy of Group Selectionism

I've previously dwelt in considerable length upon forms of rationalization whereby our beliefs appear to match the evidence much more strongly than they actually do.  And I'm not overemphasizing the point, either.  If we could beat this fundamental metabias and see what every hypothesis really predicted, we would be able to recover from almost any other error of fact.

The mirror challenge for decision theory is seeing which option a choice criterion really endorses.  If your stated moral principles call for you to provide laptops to everyone, does that really endorse buying a $1 million gem-studded laptop for yourself, or spending the same money on shipping 5000 OLPCs?

We seem to have evolved a knack for arguing that practically any goal implies practically any action.  A phlogiston theorist explaining why magnesium gains weight when burned has nothing on an Inquisitor explaining why God's infinite love for all His children requires burning some of them at the stake.

There's no mystery about this.  Politics was a feature of the ancestral environment.  We are descended from those who argued most persuasively that the good of the tribe meant executing their hated rival Uglak.  (We sure ain't descended from Uglak.) 

Beware of Stephen J. Gould

Followup to:  Natural Selection's Speed Limit and Complexity Bound

If you've read anything Stephen J. Gould has ever said about evolutionary biology, I have some bad news for you.  In the field of evolutionary biology at large, Gould's reputation is mud.  Not because he was wrong.  Many honest scientists have made honest mistakes.  What Gould did was much worse, involving deliberate misrepresentation of science.

In his 1996 book Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin, Stephen J. Gould explains how modern evolutionary biology is very naive about evolutionary progress.  Foolish evolutionary biologists, says Gould, believe that evolution has a preferred tendency toward progress and the accumulation of complexity.  But of course - Gould kindly explains - this is simply a statistical illusion, bolstered by the tendency to cite hand-picked sequences like bacteria, fern, dinosaurs, dog, man.  You could equally well explain this apparent progress by supposing that evolution is undergoing a random walk, sometimes losing complexity and sometimes gaining it.  If so, Gould says, there will be a left bound, a minimum at zero complexity, but no right bound, and the most complex organisms will seem to grow more complex over time.  Even though it's really just a random walk with no preference in either direction, the distribution widens and the tail gets longer.

What romantics, ha ha, those silly evolutionary biologists, believing in progress!  It's a good thing we had a statistically sophisticated thinker like Stephen J. Gould to keep their misconceptions from infecting the general public.  Indeed, Stephen J. Gould was a hero - a martyr - because evolutionary biologists don't like it when you challenge their romantic preconceptions, and they persecuted him.  Or so Gould represented himself to the public.

There's just one problem, as you've already realized if you read Overcoming Bias on a daily basis.  It's extremely unlikely that any modern evolutionary theorist, however much a romantic, would believe that evolution was accumulating complexity.  For those of you who don't read Overcoming Bias on a daily basis, I'll summarize why not:

The "Outside the Box" Box

Whenever someone exhorts you to "think outside the box", they usually, for your convenience, point out exactly where "outside the box" is located.  Isn't it funny how nonconformists all dress the same...

In Artificial Intelligence, everyone outside the field has a cached result for brilliant new revolutionary AI idea - neural networks, which work just like the human brain!  New AI Idea: complete the pattern:  "Logical AIs, despite all the big promises, have failed to provide real intelligence for decades - what we need are neural networks!"

This cached thought has been around for three decades.  Still no general intelligence.  But, somehow, everyone outside the field knows that neural networks are the Dominant-Paradigm-Overthrowing New Idea, ever since backpropagation was invented in the 1970s.  Talk about your aging hippies.

Nonconformist images, by their nature, permit no departure from the norm.  If you don't wear black, how will people know you're a tortured artist?  How will people recognize uniqueness if you don't fit the standard pattern for what uniqueness is supposed to look like?  How will anyone recognize you've got a revolutionary AI concept, if it's not about neural networks?

Meta Honesty

"Yes your butt looks fat in that. Hey, I'm just being honest."

In this quote, the first sentence may be honest, but the second seems not.   We do not just randomly choose when to be "honest," and to call attention to this honesty.   A quick survey of the practice of "radical honesty" suggests that we are more likely to be honest with criticism of others, and with praise of ourselves.   

Yes, you may think you honestly believe what you say, and you may see you have resisted social pressures to not say it.  But before you call yourself "honest", take a moment to ponder under what sorts of situations people tend to say what you said, and what that tendency says about their likely motives.  Don't call yourself "honest" until you can also acknowledge those motives. 

A Rational Argument

Followup to:  The Bottom Line, Rationalization

You are, by occupation, a campaign manager, and you've just been hired by Mortimer Q. Snodgrass, the Green candidate for Mayor of Hadleyburg.  As a campaign manager reading a blog on rationality, one question lies foremost on your mind:  "How can I construct an impeccable rational argument that Mortimer Q. Snodgrass is the best candidate for Mayor of Hadleyburg?"

Sorry.  It can't be done.

"What?" you cry.  "But what if I use only valid support to construct my structure of reason?  What if every fact I cite is true to the best of my knowledge, and relevant evidence under Bayes's Rule?"

Sorry.  It still can't be done.  You defeated yourself the instant you specified your argument's conclusion in advance.