Overcoming Bias

Changing Your Metaethics

Followup to:  The Moral Void, Joy in the Merely Real, No Universally Compelling Arguments, Where Recursive Justification Hits Bottom, The Gift We Give To Tomorrow, Does Your Morality Care What You Think?, Existential Angst Factory, ...

If you say, "Killing people is wrong," that's morality.  If you say, "You shouldn't kill people because God prohibited it," or "You shouldn't kill people because it goes against the trend of the universe", that's metaethics.

Just as there's far more agreement on Special Relativity than there is on the question "What is science?", people find it much easier to agree "Murder is bad" than to agree what makes it bad, or what it means for something to be bad.

People do get attached to their metaethics.  Indeed they frequently insist that if their metaethic is wrong, all morality necessarily falls apart.  It might be interesting to set up a panel of metaethicists - theists, Objectivists, Platonists, etc. - all of whom agree that killing is wrong; all of whom disagree on what it means for a thing to be "wrong"; and all of whom insist that if their metaethic is untrue, then morality falls apart.

Clearly a good number of people, if they are to make philosophical progress, will need to shift metathics at some point in their lives.  You may have to do it.

At that point, it might be useful to have an open line of retreat - not a retreat from morality, but a retreat from Your-Current-Metaethic.  (You know, the one that, if it is not true, leaves no possible basis for not killing people.)

And so I've been setting up these lines of retreat, in many and various posts, summarized below.  For I have learned that to change metaethical beliefs is nigh-impossible in the presence of an unanswered attachment.

Posting May Slow

Greetings, fearless readers:

Due to the Oxford conference on Global Catastrophic Risk, I may miss some posts - possibly quite a few.

Or possibly not.

Just so you don't think I'm dead.

Sincerely,
Eliezer.

2 of 10, not 3 total

There is no rule against commenting more than 3 times in a thread.  Sorry if anyone has gotten this impression.

However, among the 10 "Recent Comments" visible in the sidebar at right, usually no more than 2, rarely 3, and never 4, should be yours.  This is meant to ensure no one person dominates a thread; it gives others a chance to respond to others' responses.  One-line comments that quickly correct an error may be common-sensically excepted from this rule.

You need not refrain from commenting, just wait a bit.

The Conversation So Far

(I paraphrase.)

After a year of Robin pestering co-blogger Eliezer "Can we talking about singularity on the blog now, can we?" and Eliezer saying "Not yet," Robin speaks up on the occasion of his IEEE Spectrum singularity article:

Robin: Hey Eliezer, I see you've been talking for years about an AI-singularity.  Have a look; I've analyzed the history of previous "singularities" (as Vinge defines the term) and can use that to forecast the timing, speedup, and transition inequalities of the next singularity.  I can also find a tech that looks pretty likely to appear within the predicted time-frame, and an economic analysis suggests it could plausibly deliver the forecasted speedup.  And this tech is a kind of AI! 

Eliezer:  I really don't have time to talk, but you are looking at untrustworthy surface analogies, not reliable deep causes.  My deep insight is that optimization processes are more powerful the smaller and better is their protected meta-level, and history is divided into epochs according to the arrival of new long-term optimization processes, and to a lesser extent their meta-level innovations, after each of which ordinary innovation rates speed up.  The two optimization processes so far were natural selection and cultured brains, and key meta-innovations were cells, sex, writing, and scientific thinking. I'm talking about a future singularity due to a transistor-based machine with no (and therefore the best) protected meta-level.  My deep insight suggests this would have an extremely large speedup and transition inequality. 

Robin:  This history of when innovation rates sped up by how much just doesn't seem to support your claim that the strongest speedups are caused by and coincide with new optimization processes, and to a lesser extent protected meta-level innovations.  There is some correlation, but it seems weak.  And since you don't argue for a timing for your postulated singularity, why can't we think yours will happen after the singularity I outline? 

Eliezer:  Sorry, no time to talk.

To be continued. 

Are Meta Views Outside Views?

An inside view focuses on internals of the case at hand, while an outside view compares this case to other similar cases.  The less you understand about something the harder it is to apply either an inside or an outside view.  So the simplest approach would be to just do the best you could with each view and then combine their results in some simple way. 

Can we do better?  Perhaps, if we know something about when inside views tend to do better or worse, compared to outside views.   For example, we should probably emphasize views that give more confident estimates, and de-emphasize views from those biased by self-interest.   But do we know anything about on what topics to prefer an inside or outside view?

It is not clear to me that we really do know much about this.  But whatever framework we use to make this judgment, it seems to me to count as a meta-view, a view about views.  Furthermore, while it is easy to imagine useful outside meta-views, which compare this view-choice situation to other related view-choice situations, it is much harder to imagine useful inside meta-views, where you go through some detailed calculation to decide which view to prefer. 

This suggests to me that most useful meta views are outside meta views.  If you are going to reject an outside view in favor of an inside view on the basis of some insight on when inside views work better, you will be relying on an outside metaview.   So it seems you can't escape embracing some outside view, though you might embrace a meta outside view instead of a basic outside view.

Heading Toward Morality

Followup to:  Ghosts in the Machine, Fake Fake Utility Functions, Fake Utility Functions

As people were complaining before about not seeing where the quantum physics sequence was going, I shall go ahead and tell you where I'm heading now.

Having dissolved the confusion surrounding the word "could", the trajectory is now heading toward should.

In fact, I've been heading there for a while.  Remember the whole sequence on fake utility functions?  Back in... well... November 2007?

In Bias, Meta is Max

A recent Science review notes our worst bias is meta - being more aware of biases makes us more willing to assume that others' biases, and not ours, are responsible for our disagreement:

Because people often do not recognize when personal biases and idiosyncratic interpretations have shaped their judgments and preferences, they often take for granted that others will share those judgments and preferences. When others do not, people's faith in their own objectivity often prompts them to view those others as biased. Indeed, people show a broad and pervasive tendency to see (and even exaggerate) the impact of bias on others' judgments while denying its influence on their own.

For example, people think that others' policy opinions are biased by self-interest, that others' social judgments are biased by an inclination to rely on dispositional (rather than situational) explanations for behavior, and that others' perceptions of interpersonal conflicts are biased by their personal allegiances. At the same time, people are blind to each of these biases in their own judgments.

Quantum Mechanics and Personal Identity

This is one of several shortened indices into the Quantum Physics Sequence.

Suppose that someone built an exact duplicate of you on Mars, quark by quark - to the maximum level of resolution that quantum physics permits, which is considerably higher resolution than ordinary thermal uncertainty.  Would the duplicate be really you, or just a copy?

It may seem unlikely a priori that quantum physics, or indeed any experimental science, could have something to say about this issue.

It's amazing, the things that science can tell you.

In this case, it turns out, science can rule out a notion of personal identity that depends on your being composed of the same atoms - because modern physics has taken the concept of "same atom" and thrown it out the window.  There are no little billiard balls with individual identities.  It's experimentally ruled out.

"Huh?  What do you mean, physics has gotten rid of the concept of 'same atom'?"

No one can be told this, alas, because it involves replacing the concept of little billiard balls with a different kind of math.  You have to see it.  If you read through the introduction that follows to basic quantum mechanics, you will be able to see that the naive concept of personal identity - the notion that you are made up of persistent tiny pieces that move through time - is physical nonsense.

And no, this does not rely on a woo-woo mysterian interpretation of quantum mechanics; in fact, the other purpose of this sequence of posts was to completely demystify quantum mechanics and reveal it as non-mysterious.  It just happens to be a fact that once you get to the non-mysterious version of quantum mechanics, you find that the reason why physics once looked mysterious, has a great deal to do with reality being made up of different stuff than little billiard balls.

And the Winner is... Many-Worlds!

This is one of several shortened indices into the Quantum Physics Sequence.

Macroscopic quantum superpositions, a.k.a. the "many-worlds interpretation" or MWI, was proposed in 1957 and brought to the general attention of the scientific community in 1970.  Ever since, MWI has steadily gained in popularity.  As of 2008, MWI may or may not be endorsed by a majority of theoretical physicists (attempted opinion polls conflict on this point).  Of course, Science is not supposed to be an opinion poll, but anyone who tells you that MWI is "science fiction" is simply ignorant.

When a theory is slowly persuading scientists despite all academic inertia, and more and more graduate students grow up familiar with it, at what point should one go ahead and declare a temporary winner pending new evidence?

Reading through the referenced posts will give you a very basic introduction to quantum mechanics - algebra is involved, but no calculus - by which you may nonetheless gain an understanding sufficient to see, and not just be told, that the modern case for many-worlds has become overwhelming.  Not just plausible, not just strong, but overwhelming.  Single-world versions of quantum mechanics just don't work, and all the legendary confusingness and mysteriousness of quantum mechanics stems from this essential fact.  But enough telling - let me show you.

Quantum Physics Revealed As Non-Mysterious

This is one of several shortened indices into the Quantum Physics Sequence.

Hello!  You may have been directed to this page because you said something along the lines of "Quantum physics shows that reality doesn't exist apart from our observation of it," or "Science has disproved the idea of an objective reality," or even just "Quantum physics is one of the great mysteries of modern science; no one understands how it works."

There was a time, roughly the first half-century after quantum physics was invented, when this was more or less true.  Certainly, when quantum physics was just being discovered, scientists were very confused indeed!  But time passed, and science moved on.  If you're confused about a phenomenon, that's a fact about your own state of mind, not a fact about the phenomenon itself - there are mysterious questions, but not mysterious answers.  Science eventually figured out what was going on, and why things looked so strange at first.

The series of posts indexed below will show you - not just tell you - what's really going on down there.  To be honest, you're not going to be able to follow this if algebra scares you.  But there won't be any calculus, either.