Overcoming Bias

Whither OB?

Robin plans to cut back posting shortly, after he and I have our long-awaited Disagreement about AI self-improvement.  As for myself - I'm not finished, but I'm way over schedule and need to move on soon.  I'm not going to stop posting entirely (I doubt I could if I tried) but I'm not going to be posting daily.

There are three directions that Overcoming Bias could go from here:

First, we could find enough good authors to keep going at a post per day.  Say, seven people who can and will write one post per week.  We can't compromise on quality, though.

Second, we could try to shift to a more community-based format.  Our most popular post ever, still getting hits to this day, was not written by Robin or myself or any of the recurring editors.  It's "My Favorite Liar" by Kai Chang, about the professor who inserted one false statement into each lecture.  If one-tenth of our readers contributed a single story as good as this... but neither Robin nor myself have time to vet them all.  So one approach would be to have a community forum where anyone could post, readers voted the posts up and down, and a front page to which the editors promoted posts deemed worthy.  I understand that Scoop has software like this, but I would like to know if our readers can recommend better community software (see below).

Third, we could close OB to new submissions and keep the archives online eternally, saying, "It had a good run."  As Nick put it, we shouldn't keep going if it means a slow degeneration.

Boston-area Meetup: 11/18/08 9pm MIT/Cambridge

There will be an OB meetup this Tuesday in Cambridge MA, hosted by Michael Vassar, Owain Evans (grad student at MIT), and Dario Amodei (grad student at Princeton). The event will take place on the MIT campus, in a spacious seminar room in MIT's Stata Center.  Refreshments will be provided.  Details and directions below the fold.

Please let us know in the comments if you plan to attend.

(Posted on behalf of Owain Evans.)

Bay Area Meetup: 11/17 8PM Menlo Park

Robin Gane-McCalla plans to organize regular OB meetups in the Bay Area.  The next one is 8PM, November 17th, 2008 (Monday night) in Menlo Park at TechShop.  (Note that this is a room with seating, not a restaurant, so we hopefully get a chance to actually talk to each other - though I'll try to stay in the background myself.)

RSVP at Meetup.com.

San Jose Meetup, Sat 10/25 @ 7:30pm

It's on Saturday 7.30pm at Il Fornaio, 302 S Market St (in the Sainte Claire Hotel), San Jose. All aspiring rationalists welcome. The reservation is currently for 21 but can be changed if needed.  Please RSVP if you haven't already.

Last Post Requests?

I'm strongly tempted to quit blogging for a while, to free up time for more ambitious projects. My two year anniversary is coming up in a few weeks.  If I quit then it would be nice to have some sense of completion.  Toward that end, are there any post topics you'd like to request?  Perhaps posts I once promised or at least suggested I might someday make?

Crisis of Faith

Followup to:  Make an Extraordinary Effort, The Meditation on Curiosity, Avoiding Your Belief's Real Weak Points

"It ain't a true crisis of faith unless things could just as easily go either way."
        - Thor Shenkel

Many in this world retain beliefs whose flaws a ten-year-old could point out, if that ten-year-old were hearing the beliefs for the first time.  These are not subtle errors we are talking about.  They would be child's play for an unattached mind to relinquish, if the skepticism of a ten-year-old were applied without evasion. As Premise Checker put it, "Had the idea of god not come along until the scientific age, only an exceptionally weird person would invent such an idea and pretend that it explained anything."

And yet skillful scientific specialists, even the major innovators of a field, even in this very day and age, do not apply that skepticism successfully.  Nobel laureate Robert Aumann, of Aumann's Agreement Theorem, is an Orthodox Jew:  I feel reasonably confident in venturing that Aumann must, at one point or another, have questioned his faith.  And yet he did not doubt successfully.  We change our minds less often than we think.

This should scare you down to the marrow of your bones.  It means you can be a world-class scientist and conversant with Bayesian mathematics and still fail to reject a belief whose absurdity a fresh-eyed ten-year-old could see.  It shows the invincible defensive position which a belief can create for itself, if it has long festered in your mind.

What does it take to defeat an error which has built itself a fortress?

But by the time you know it is an error, it is already defeated.  The dilemma is not "How can I reject long-held false belief X?" but "How do I know if long-held belief X is false?"  Self-honesty is at its most fragile when we're not sure which path is the righteous one.  And so the question becomes:

How can we create in ourselves a true crisis of faith, that could just as easily go either way?

Bay Area Meetup for Singularity Summit

Posted on behalf of Mike Howard:

This is a call for preferences on the proposed Bay Area meetup to coincide with the Singularity Summit on 24-25 October. Not just for Singularitarians, all aspiring rationalists are welcome. From the replies so far it's likely to be in San Jose.

Eliezer, myself and probably most Summit attendees would really rather avoid the night between the Friday Workshop and Saturday Summit, so maybe either Saturday evening or sometime Thursday or Sunday?

Please comment below or email me (cursor_loop 4t yahoo p0int com) if you might want to come, and if you have any preferences such as when and where you can come, when and where you'd prefer to come, and any recommendations for a particular place to go.  (Comments preferred to emails.) We need to pick a date ASAP before everyone books travel.

Singularity Summit 2008

FYI all:  The Singularity Summit 2008 is coming up, 9am-5pm October 25th, 2008 in San Jose, CA.  This is run by my host organization, the Singularity Institute.  Speakers this year include Vernor Vinge, Marvin Minsky, the CTO of Intel, and the chair of the X Prize Foundation.

Before anyone posts any angry comments: yes, the registration costs actual money this year.  The Singularity Institute has run free events before, and will run free events in the future.  But while past Singularity Summits have been media successes, they haven't been fundraising successes up to this point.  So Tyler Emerson et. al. are trying it a little differently.  TANSTAAFL.

Lots of speakers talking for short periods this year.  I'm intrigued by that format.  We'll see how it goes.

Brief Break

I've been feeling burned on Overcoming Bias lately, meaning that I take too long to write my posts, which decreases the amount of recovery time, making me feel more burned, etc.

So I'm taking at most a one-week break.  I'll post small units of rationality quotes each day, so as to not quite abandon you.  I may even post some actual writing, if I feel spontaneous, but definitely not for the next two days; I have to enforce this break upon myself.

When I get back, my schedule calls for me to finish up the Anthropomorphism sequence, and then talk about Marcus Hutter's AIXI, which I think is the last brain-malfunction-causing subject I need to discuss.  My posts should then hopefully go back to being shorter and easier.

Hey, at least I got through over a solid year of posts without taking a vacation.

Setting Up Metaethics

Followup to:  Is Morality Given?, Is Morality Preference?, Moral Complexities, Could Anything Be Right?, The Bedrock of Fairness, ...

Intuitions about morality seem to split up into two broad camps: morality-as-given and morality-as-preference.

Some perceive morality as a fixed given, independent of our whims, about which we form changeable beliefs.  This view's great advantage is that it seems more normal up at the level of everyday moral conversations: it is the intuition underlying our everyday notions of "moral error", "moral progress", "moral argument", or "just because you want to murder someone doesn't make it right".

Others choose to describe morality as a preference - as a desire in some particular person; nowhere else is it written.  This view's great advantage is that it has an easier time living with reductionism - fitting the notion of "morality" into a universe of mere physics.  It has an easier time at the meta level, answering questions like "What is morality?" and "Where does morality come from?"

Both intuitions must contend with seemingly impossible questions.  For example, Moore's Open Question:  Even if you come up with some simple answer that fits on T-Shirt, like "Happiness is the sum total of goodness!", you would need to argue the identity.  It isn't instantly obvious to everyone that goodness is happiness, which seems to indicate that happiness and rightness were different concepts to start with.  What was that second concept, then, originally?

Or if "Morality is mere preference!" then why care about human preferences?  How is it possible to establish any "ought" at all, in a universe seemingly of mere "is"?

So what we should want, ideally, is a metaethic that:

1. Adds up to moral normality, including moral errors, moral progress, and things you should do whether you want to or not;
2. Fits naturally into a non-mysterious universe, postulating no exception to reductionism;
3. Does not oversimplify humanity's complicated moral arguments and many terminal values;
4. Answers all the impossible questions.