Overcoming Bias

Beliefs Require Reasons, or: Is the Pope Catholic? Should he be?

In the early days of this blog, I would pick fierce arguments with Robin about the no-disagreement hypothesis.  Lately, however, reflection on things like public reason have brought me toward agreement with Robin, or at least moderated my disagreement.  To see why, it's perhaps useful to take a look at the newspapers...

the pope said the book “explained with great clarity” that “an interreligious dialogue in the strict sense of the word is not possible.” In theological terms, added the pope, “a true dialogue is not possible without putting one’s faith in parentheses.”

What are we to make of a statement like this?

Animal experimentation: morally acceptable, or just the way things always have been?

Following the announcement last week that Oxford University’s controversial Biomedical Sciences building is now complete and will be open for business in mid-2009, the ethical issues surrounding the use of animals for scientific experimentation have been revisited in the media—see, for example, here , here, and here.

The number of animals used per year in scientific experiments worldwide has been estimated at 200 million—well in excess of the population of Brazil and over three times that of the United Kingdom. If we take the importance of an ethical issue to depend in part on how many subjects it affects, then, the ethics of animal experimentation at the very least warrants consideration alongside some of the most important issues in this country today, and arguably exceeds them in importance. So, what is being done to address this issue?

In the media, much effort seems to be devoted to discrediting concerns about animal suffering and reassuring people that animals used in science are well cared for, and relatively little effort is spent engaging with the ethical issues. However, it seems likely that no amount of reassurance about primate play areas and germ-controlled environments in Oxford’s new research lab will allay existing concerns about the acceptability of, for example, inducing heart failure in mice or inducing Parkinson’s disease in monkeys—particularly since scientists are not currently required to report exactly how much suffering their experiments cause to animals. Given the suffering involved, are we really sure that experimenting on animals is ethically justifiable?

In attempting to answer this question, it is disturbing to note some inconsistencies in popular views of science. Consider, for example, that by far the most common argument in favour of animal experimentation is that it is an essential part of scientific progress. As Oxford's oft-quoted Professor Alastair Buchan reminds us, ‘You can’t make a head injury in a dish, you can’t create a stroke in a test tube, you can’t create a heart attack on a chip: it just doesn’t work’. Using animals, we are told, is essential if science is to progress. Since many people are apparently convinced by this argument, they must therefore believe that scientific progress is something worthwhile—that, at the very least, its value outweighs the suffering of experimental animals. And yet, at the same time, we are regularly confronted with the conflicting realisation that, far from viewing science as a highly valuable and worthwhile pursuit, the public is often disillusioned and exasperated with science. Recently, for example, people have expressed bafflement that scientists have spent time and money on seemingly trifling projects—such as working out the best way to swat a fly and discovering why knots form—and on telling us things that we already know: that getting rid of credit cards helps us spend less money, and that listening to very loud music can damage hearing. Why, when the public often seems to despair of science, do so many people appear to be convinced that scientific progress is so important that it justifies the suffering of millions of animals?

Wanting To Want

What we actually want often diverges from what we wish we wanted.  One of the places where this conflict is clearest is in the features of others that attract us.  We are attracted to many features, including features of bodies, minds, and social networks.  We clearly put a large weight on body features, but we like to think we place more weight on other features, such as mental ones.  When we see how much we actually care about bodies we are disturbed, and perceive a conflict between what we want and what we want to want.  So why is there a conflict anyway - why are we built not to want to want what we want?

Consider that those with a better ability to distinguish a feature would naturally put more weight on that feature in when choosing.  If there is a pile of fruit and I have a short time to grab some fruit before others take them all, then if I can't see colors well I'll put less emphasize on colors in my choice.  After all, those who can see colors better will better be able to choose the ones with good colors.  Similarly, the better I am at distinguishing smart people, the more emphasize I'd naturally place on smarts when choosing people.

It is pretty easy for most people to tell how pretty someone is, but it is harder to tell how smart they are.  Having a high ability to tell how smart someone is says good things about you - in general it says you are pretty smart too.  And thus the fact that you put a high weight on smarts also says good things about you.  Since you have an interest in being thought well of, you also have an interest in being thought of as someone who puts a high weight on smarts. 

And serving your interests, evolution may well have arranged your mind to fool others into thinking that you put more weight on smarts than you actually do.  And this I suggest is the usual source of the conflict between what we want, and what we want to want.  We want what is useful to us, but we want to want what makes us look good to others.  We often fool ourselves into thinking that what we want to want is what we do want, and thereby also often fool others into thinking well of us.   

Note that in the case considered here, of looks vs. smarts, it is not at all obvious that what we want to want is better morally that what we actually want.  From a conversation with Katja Grace on this her birthday.

Against Modal Logics

Continuation of:  Grasping Slippery Things
Followup to:  Possibility and Could-ness, Three Fallacies of Teleology

When I try to hit a reduction problem, what usually happens is that I "bounce" - that's what I call it.  There's an almost tangible feel to the failure, once you abstract and generalize and recognize it.  Looking back, it seems that I managed to say most of what I had in mind for today's post, in "Grasping Slippery Things".  The "bounce" is when you try to analyze a word like could, or a notion like possibility, and end up saying, "The set of realizable worlds [A'] that follows from an initial starting world A operated on by a set of physical laws f."  Where realizable contains the full mystery of "possible" - but you've made it into a basic symbol, and added some other symbols: the illusion of formality.

There are a number of reasons why I feel that modern philosophy, even analytic philosophy, has gone astray - so far astray that I simply can't make use of their years and years of dedicated work, even when they would seem to be asking questions closely akin to mine.

The proliferation of modal logics in philosophy is a good illustration of one major reason:  Modern philosophy doesn't enforce reductionism, or even strive for it.

Most philosophers, as one would expect from Sturgeon's Law, are not very good.  Which means that they're not even close to the level of competence it takes to analyze mentalistic black boxes into cognitive algorithms.  Reductionism is, in modern times, an unusual talent.  Insights on the order of Pearl et. al.'s reduction of causality or Julian Barbour's reduction of time are rare.

So what these philosophers do instead, is "bounce" off the problem into a new modal logic:  A logic with symbols that embody the mysterious, opaque, unopened black box.  A logic with primitives like "possible" or "necessary", to mark the places where the philosopher's brain makes an internal function call to cognitive algorithms as yet unknown.

And then they publish it and say, "Look at how precisely I have defined my language!"

Self-Indication Solves Time-Asymmetry

This seems a deep insight simple enough to explain in a blog post (and so I'm probably not the first to see it):  the self-indication approach to indexical uncertainty solves the time-asymmetry question in physics!  To explain this, I must first explain time-asymmetry and indexical uncertainty.

A deep question in physics is time asymmetry - why doesn't stuff happen as often "backwards" in time?  We have no idea about the tiny CP-violation in particle physics, but all the other time asymmetries are thought to arise from a very-low early-universe entropy.  The most popular explanation for this is inflation, especially eternal inflation, which says that any small space-time region satisfying certain conditions is connected to infinitely many large time-asymmetric regions much like what we see around us.  Alas, the chance that any small region satisfies these inflation conditions is extremely small.  As a recent paper puts it:

Initial conditions which give the big bang a thermodynamic arrow of time must necessarily be low entropy and therefore "rare." There is no way the initial conditions can be typical, or there would be no arrow of time, and this fact must apply to inflation and prevent it from representing "completely generic" initial conditions.  ... If you can regard the big bang as a fluctuation in a larger system it must be an exceedingly rare one to account for the observed thermodynamic arrow of time.

So the question of time-asymmetry reduces to this: why does the universe have enough independently variable small regions that at least one of them gives eternal inflation?  That is: why is the universe so big?

The Problem at the Heart of Pascal's Wager

It is a most painful position to a conscientious and cultivated mind to be drawn in contrary directions by the two noblest of all objects of pursuit -- truth and the general good.  Such a conflict must inevitably produce a growing indifference to one or other of these objects, most probably to both.

- John Stuart Mill, from Utility of Religion

Much electronic ink has been spilled on this blog about Pascal's wager.  Yet, I don't think that the central issue, and one that relates directly to the mission of this blog, has been covered.  That issue is this: there's a difference between the requirements for good (rational, justified) belief and the requirements for good (rational, prudent -- not necessarily moral) action.

Presented most directly: good belief is supposed to be truth and evidence-tracking.  It is not supposed to be consequence-tracking.  We call a belief rational to the extent it is (appropriately) influenced by the evidence available to the believer, and thus maximizes our shot at getting the truth.  We call a belief less rational to the extent it is influenced by other factors, including the consequences of holding that belief.  Thus, an atheist who changed his beliefs in response to the threat of torture from the Spanish Inquisition cannot be said to have followed a correct belief-formation process. 

On the other hand, good action is supposed (modulo deontological moral theories) to be consequence-tracking.  The atheist who professes changed beliefs in response to the threat of torture from the Spanish Inquisition can be said to be acting prudently by making such a profession.

A modern gloss on Pascal's wager might be understood less as an argument for the belief in God than as a challenge to that separation.  If, Modern-Pascal might say, we're in an epistemic situation such that our evidence is in equipoise (always keeping in mind Daniel Griffin's apt point that this is the situation presumed by Pascal's argument), then we ought to take consequences into account in choosing our beliefs. 

There seem to be arguments for and against that position... 

The Robot's Rebellion

I'm on my second read, and I think that this is quite an underappreciated book.  While it doesn't have a lot of practical advice about methods to overcome bias, its general philosophy is (IMNSHO) both deeply true and quite rare.  It takes the logic of Dawkin's Selfish Gene and unflinchingly explores the logical implications of the genes'-eye view of the world in which humans are lumbering robots constructed by coalitions of immortal genes for the sole purpose of copying those genes.  The idea that humans, the conscious, apparently self-directed actors in our world, are robots - in the sense of having been constructed by something very different for its own ends - is for me profound, unintuitive, and deeply unsettling.

The book uses a metaphor (originally by Daniel Dennett): suppose that you are trying to preserve your body for 400 years.  One option would be to cryopreserve it in a bunker (the "plant" strategy).  But suppose you are worried that no location is safe, or that your capsule may need more resources along the way.  You might build a robot to protect your cryocapsule, scavenging the landscape for energy and materials when necessary.  You'd want the robot to be intelligent enough to react to any survival situation it encounters with creative solutions, not just pre-programmed ones, which requires a certain degree of intellectual freedom (long-leash control).  You also want it to make the preservation of your capsule its highest priority (short-leash control).

Where Does Pascal's Wager Fail?

The topic of Pascal's wager has been mentioned several times before on Overcoming Bias, most notably in Eliezer's post on Pascal's mugging. I'm interested in discussing the question with specific reference to its original context: religion. My assumption is that almost all readers agree that the wager fails in this context -- but where exactly?

The Meaning of Right

Continuation of:  Changing Your Metaethics, Setting Up Metaethics
Followup to:  Does Your Morality Care What You Think?, The Moral Void, Probability is Subjectively Objective, Could Anything Be Right?, The Gift We Give To Tomorrow, Rebelling Within Nature, Where Recursive Justification Hits Bottom, ...

(The culmination of a long series of Overcoming Bias posts; if you start here, I accept no responsibility for any resulting confusion, misunderstanding, or unnecessary angst.)

What is morality?  What does the word "should", mean?  The many pieces are in place:  This question I shall now dissolve.

The key - as it has always been, in my experience so far - is to understand how a certain cognitive algorithm feels from inside.  Standard procedure for righting a wrong question:  If you don't know what right-ness is, then take a step beneath and ask how your brain labels things "right".

It is not the same question - it has no moral aspects to it, being strictly a matter of fact and cognitive science.  But it is an illuminating question.  Once we know how our brain labels things "right", perhaps we shall find it easier, afterward, to ask what is really and truly right.

But with that said - the easiest way to begin investigating that question, will be to jump back up to the level of morality and ask what seems right.  And if that seems like too much recursion, get used to it - the other 90% of the work lies in handling recursion properly.

(Should you find your grasp on meaningfulness wavering, at any time following, check Changing Your Metaethics for the appropriate prophylactic.)

Math is Subjunctively Objective

Followup to:  Probability is Subjectively Objective, Can Counterfactuals Be True?

I am quite confident that the statement 2 + 3 = 5 is true; I am far less confident of what it means for a mathematical statement to be true.

In "The Simple Truth" I defined a pebble-and-bucket system for tracking sheep, and defined a condition for whether a bucket's pebble level is "true" in terms of the sheep.  The bucket is the belief, the sheep are the reality.  I believe 2 + 3 = 5.  Not just that two sheep plus three sheep equal five sheep, but that 2 + 3 = 5.  That is my belief, but where is the reality?

So now the one comes to me and says:  "Yes, two sheep plus three sheep equals five sheep, and two stars plus three stars equals five stars.  I won't deny that.  But this notion that 2 + 3 = 5, exists only in your imagination, and is purely subjective."