Tag Archives: NearFar

Robot ethics returns

By Katja Grace · July 12, 2012 1:06 am · Comments (24)

People are often interested in robot ethics. I have argued before that this is strange. I offered two potential explanations:

  1. Ethics seems deep and human, so it’s engagingly eerie to combine it with heartless AI
  2. People vastly misjudge how much ethics contributes to the total value society creates

A more obvious explanation now: people are just more interested in ethics when the subject is far away, for instance in the future. This is the prediction of construal level theory. It says thinking about something far away makes you think more abstractly, and in terms of goals and ideals rather than low level constraints. Ethics is all this.

So a further prediction would be that when we come to use robots a lot, expertise from robot ethicists will be in as little demand as expertise from washing machine ethicists is now.

Some other predictions, to help check this theory:

  • Emerging or imagined technologies should arouse ethical feelings more than present technologies do in general
  • International trade should prompt more ethical feelings than local trade
  • Stories of old should be more moralizing than stories of now
  • Historical figures should be seen in a more moral light than present-day celebrities
  • Space travel should be discussed in terms of more moral goals than Earth travel.
  • Ethical features of obscure cultures should be relatively salient compared to familiar cultures

More? Which of these are actually true?

There is definitely some conflicting evidence, for instance people feel more compelled to help people in front of them than those in Africa (there was an old OB post on this, but I can’t find it). There are also many other reasons the predictions above may be true. Emerging technologies might prompt more ethical concerns because they are potentially more dangerous for instance. The ethical dimension to killing everyone is naturally prominent. Overall construal level theory still seems to me a promising model for variations in ethical concern.

Added: I’m not confident that there is disproportionate interest compared to other topic areas. I seem to have heard about it too much, but this could be a sampling bias.

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Responsibility and Clicking

By Katja Grace · July 5, 2012 3:37 pm · Comments (33)

Sometimes when people hear obvious arguments regarding emotive topics, they just tentatively accept the conclusion instead of defending against it until they find some half satisfactory reason to dismiss it. Eliezer Yudkowsky calls this ‘clicking’, and wants to know what causes it:

My best guess is that clickiness has something to do with failure to compartmentalize – missing, or failing to use, the mental gear that lets human beings believe two contradictory things at the same time. Clicky people would tend to be people who take all of their beliefs at face value.

The Hansonian explanation (not necessarily endorsed by Robin Hanson) would say something about clicky people tending to operate in Near mode.  (Why?)

pjeby remarks (with 96 upvotes),

One of the things that I’ve noticed about this is that most people do not expect to understand things. For most people, the universe is a mysterious place filled with random events beyond their ability to comprehend or control. Think “guessing the teacher’s password”, but not just in school or knowledge, but about everything.

Such people have no problem with the idea of magic, because everything is magic to them, even science….

Hypothesis: people expect reality to make sense roughly in proportion to how personally responsible for manipulating it they feel. If you think of yourself as in charge of strategically doing something, you are eager to understand how doing that thing works, and automatically expect understanding to be possible. If you are driving a car, you insist the streets fit intuitive geometry. If you are engaging in office politics, you feel there must be some reason Gina said that thing.

If you feel like some vague ‘they’ is responsible for most things, and is meant to give you stuff that you have a right to, and that you are meant to be a good person in the mean time, you won’t automatically try to understand things or think of them as understandable. Modeling how things work isn’t something you are ‘meant’ to do, unless you are some kind of scientist. If you do dabble in that kind of thing, you enjoy the pretty ideas rather than feel any desperate urge for them to be sound or complete. Other people are meant to look after those things.

A usual observation is that understanding things properly allows you to manipulate them. I posit that thinking of them as something you might manipulate automatically makes you understand them better. This isn’t particularly new either. It’s related to ‘learned blankness‘, and searching vs. chasing, and near mode vs. far mode. The followup point is that chasing the one correct model of reality, which has to make sense, straight-forwardly leads to ‘clicking’ when you hear a sensible argument.

According to this hypothesis, the people who feel most personally responsible for everything a la Methods Harry Potter would also be the people who are most notice whether things make sense. The people who less trust doctors and churches to look after them on the way to their afterlives are the ones who notice that cryonics makes sense.

To see something as manipulable is to see it in the same light that science does, rather than as wallpaper. This is expensive, not just because a detailed model is costly to entertain, but because it interferes with saying socially advantageous things about the wallpaper. So you quite sensibly only do it when you actually want to manipulate a thing and feel potentially empowered to do so, i.e. when you hold yourself responsible for it.

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Eventual Futures

By Robin Hanson · May 15, 2012 11:20 pm · Comments (42)

I’ve noticed that recommendations for action based on a vision of the future are based on an idea that something must “eventually” occur. For example, eventually:

  • We will run out of coal, so we’d better find replacements soon.
  • Earth will run out of stored energy of fossil fuels and radioactivity, so we’d better get ready to run only on sunlight.
  • Earth will run out of place for trash, so we must stop making trash.
  • The sun will die out, so we’d better get ready to move to another sun.
  • There will be a race to colonize other planets and stars, so our group should get out there first so we don’t get lose this race.
  • Chips will use X instead of silicon, so our chip firms must use X now, to not be left behind.
  • There will be no privacy of any sort, so we might as well get used to it now.
  • Some races will win, so we’d best fight for ours before its too late.
  • Firms will be stronger than nations, unless we break their power soon.
  • There will be a stronger world government, so let’s start one now.
  • There will be conflict between China and West, or Islam and West, so we best strike first now.
  • Artificial intelligences will rule the world, so let’s figure out now how to make a good one.
  • We’ll invent all that is worth inventing, so let’s find a way now to live without innovation.
  • We’ll know all the physics there is, so lets find something else interesting now.
  • There will be a huge deadly world war, so let’s stock some bunkers to hide in.
  • Nanobots will give everyone anything they want, so why work now?
  • The first nano-assembler’s owner will rule the world, so we best study nanotech now.
  • More fertile immigrants will out number us, so we best not let them in.
  • The more fertile stupid will make the world dumb, unless we stop them now.

The common pattern: project forward a current trend to an extreme, while assuming other things don’t change much, and then recommend an action which might make sense if this extreme change were to happen all at once soon.

This is usually a mistake. The trend may not continue indefinitely. Or, by the time a projected extreme is reached, other changes may have changed the appropriate response. Or, the best response may be to do nothing for a long time, until closer to big consequences. Or, the best response may be to do nothing, ever – not all negative changes can be profitably resisted.

It is just not enough to suspect that an extreme will be reached eventually – you usually need a good reason to think it will happen soon, and and that you know a robust way to address it. In far mode it often feels like the far future is clearly visible, and that few obstacles stand in the way of planning paths to achieve far ends. But in fact, the world is much messier than far mode is willing to admit.

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Far Truth Is For Extremes

By Robin Hanson · May 5, 2012 3:30 pm · Comments (18)

To answer the question posed in my last post, here are some situations where it makes sense to forgo the large benefits of things like religion, to care about far truth:

  1. You are stuck in your ways, like a smoking addict. You admit it would have been better for you had you become more religious early on, but alas you fell in with the wrong crowd, and now the costs of change for you outweigh religion’s gains. If you are nice, you’ll warn young folks to avoid your downfall.
  2. Contrarian far claims with big personal consequences are true. If choosing cryonics would gain you five or more expected years of life (over its costs), and you are one of the rare people who would actually do something so contrarian after being intellectually convinced of its advantages, and if you can reliably discern when a majority is wrong, then you’ll need to think accurately about far topics to find such opportunities. For non-contrarian far claims with personal consequences, you could just follow the crowd without thinking.
  3. You have a good chance of being respected as a far topic expert, by a community that evaluates claims in truth-correlated ways. If you could be a famous cosmologist, you might try to create cosmology claims that will look good when evaluated by the tests cosmologists will apply. The gains from becoming a famous cosmologist could outweigh the risk that by becoming more truth oriented you will forgo religion’s gains. Beware, however, that truth-correlated is not the same as true – most communities say their far claim tests are more truth-correlated than they actually are.

So assuming you actually have a viable choice, the situations where it makes sense to reject religion in favor of far truth are extreme – either there are big personally-useful far contrarian claims to learn, or you have a good shot at being a rare far expert, respected by a community with truth-correlated standards. So if such extremes seem unlikely to you, far truth probably isn’t worth its costs to you. Go away, and sin no more.

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What Use Far Truth?

By Robin Hanson · May 4, 2012 10:20 pm · Comments (88)

Consider two facts:

  1. People with religious beliefs, and associated behavior, consistently tend to have better lives. It seems that religious folks tend to be happier, live longer, smoke less, exercise more, earn more, get and stay married more, commit less crime, use less illegal drugs, have more social connections, donate and volunteer more, and have more kids. Yes, the correlation between religion and these good things is in part because good people tend to become more religious, but it is probably also in part because religions people tend to become better. So if you want to become good in these ways, an obvious strategy is to become more religious, which is helped by having more religious beliefs.
  2. Your far beliefs, such as on religion and politics, can’t effect your life much except via how they effect your behavior, and your associates’ opinions of you. When you think about cosmology, ancient Rome, the nature of world government, or starving folks in Africa, it might feel like those things matter to you. But in terms of the kinds of things that evolution could plausibly have built you to actually care about (vs. pretend to care about), those far things just can’t directly matter much to your life. While your beliefs about far things might influence how you act, and what other people think of you, their effects on your quality of life, via such channels of influence, don’t depend much on whether these beliefs are true.

Perhaps, like me, you find religious beliefs about Gods, spirits, etc. to be insufficiently supported by evidence, coherence, or simplicity to be a likely approximation to the truth. Even so, ask yourself: why care so much about truth? Yes, you probably think you care about believing truth – but isn’t it more plausible that you mainly care about thinking you like truth? Doesn’t that have a more plausible evolutionary origin than actually caring about far truth?

Yes, there are near practical areas of your life where truth can matter a lot. But most religious people manage to partition their beliefs, so their religious beliefs don’t much pollute their practical beliefs. And this doesn’t even seem to require much effort on their part. Why not expect that you could do similarly?

Yes, it might seem hard to get yourself to believe things that seem implausible to you at the moment, but we humans have lots of well-used ways to get ourselves to believe things we want to believe. Are you willing to start trying those techniques on this topic?

Now, a few unusual people might have an unusually large influence on far topics, and to those people truth about far topics might plausibly matter more to their personal lives, and to things that evolution might plausibly have wanted them to directly care about. For example, if you were king of the world, maybe you’d reasonably care more about what happens to the world as a whole.

But really, what are the chances that you are actually such a person? And if not, why not try to be more religious?

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Votes Are Nearer Than Vote Talk

By Robin Hanson · April 29, 2012 9:15 am · Comments (1)

Bob Sutton on an ’09 near-far paper:

A traveler preparing to leave for a vacation to Cancun the following morning is more likely to process information about speedy check-in for international flights – a low-level, concrete piece of information that is related to the feasibility of the vacation, as opposed to information about the quality of sunsets on the East Coast of Mexico – a high-level, abstract piece of information that is related to the desirability of the vacation. …

They used this kind of logic to design a series of laboratory experiments where subjects were exposed to vague versus concrete messages from hypothetical U.S. Senate candidates and asked them to evaluate how positively or negatively they viewed the candidate. The key manipulation was whether the election was far off (six months away) or looming soon (one week). As predicted, abstract messages were more persuasive (and promoted more liking) when the election was six months away and concrete message were more persuasive when it was one week away.

This study has some fun implications for the upcoming elections. Let’s watch Obama and Romney to see if they keep things vague and abstract until the final weeks of the campaign, but then turn specific in the final weeks. But I think it also has some interesting implications for how leaders can persuade people in their organizations to join organizational change efforts. The implication is that when the change is far off, it is not a good idea to talk about he nuts and bolts very much — a focus on abstract “why” questions is in order. But as the change looms, specific details that help people predict and control what happens to them are crucial to keeping attitudes toward the change and leaders positive. (more; HT Hendrick lee)

Another implication: even those most political rhetorical is about abstract far principles, actual votes tend more to be based on concrete near considerations. This is a reason democracies aren’t as bad as you’d think looking at typical voter opinions and election rhetoric. The paper also says:

[This] effect was observed primarily among inexpert respondents, who are more likely to correspond to swing voters.

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Analysis Is Far Skeptical

By Robin Hanson · April 27, 2012 12:45 pm · Comments (11)

People famously tend to disagree more about politics, religion, and romance, Which makes sense – I’ve argued that disagreement is due to by a near-far bias, and that politics, religion, and love are far topics. It should be especially clear that religion is a far topic, dealing with fundamental values and big grand things like Gods over vast space and time scales.

Since creative metaphor is far, and analysis is near, it shouldn’t be surprising to hear that inducing an analytical frame of mind tends to induce “religious disbelief”, i.e., disbelief in gods, devils, and angels:

Individual differences in the tendency to analytically override initially flawed intuitions in reasoning were associated with increased religious disbelief. Four additional experiments provided evidence of causation, as subtle manipulations known to trigger analytic processing also encouraged religious disbelief. (more)

You could point to this as evidence against religious beliefs, but the same analysis primes probably also induce more skepticism on common political and romantic beliefs. They might even induce more skepticism on the mulitverse, string theory, or the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, all of which have big grand aspects.

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Sleep Is Far

By Robin Hanson · April 23, 2012 11:00 am · Comments (2)

Dark is far, far is more creative, and night owls tend more far (and creative) than morning larks. Fitting with this, and the confused but wide ranging nature of the sleeping mind, it seems to me the mind is likely in a more far state while asleep. If so, sleep should be more creative, which it is:

Both scientists and artists have suggested that sleep facilitates creativity, and this idea has received substantial empirical support. … In the evening prior to sleep, all participants were presented with a problem that required a creative solution. In the two-odor conditions, a hidden scent diffuser spread an odor while the problem was presented. In the sleep-with-conditioned-odor condition, task reactivation during sleep was induced by means of the odor that was also presented while participants were informed about the problem. In the sleep-with-control-odor condition, participants were exposed to a different odor. … After a night of sleep with the conditioned odor, participants were found to be (i) more creative and (ii) better able to select their most creative idea [on the presented problem]. (more; HT Barker)

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Is Peripheral Vision Far?

By Robin Hanson · April 17, 2012 2:22 pm · Comments (2)

When we look at a picture, we see the far away landscape more in far mode, and the central nearby objects more in near mode. This suggests that our peripheral vision tends more to see things in far mode:

It seems that we get information on what type of scene we are looking at from our peripheral vision. We process the “gist” of what we are looking at from our peripheral vision. The researchers at Kansas State showed people photographs of common scenes, for example a photograph of a kitchen or a living room. In some of the photographs the outside of the image was obscured, and in others the central part of the images were obscured. The images were shown for very short amounts of time. Then they asked the research participants what they were looking at. Peripheral vision was more important – What they found is that if the central part of the photo was missing people could still identify what they were looking at. But when the peripheral part of the image was missing then they couldn’t say whether it was a living room or a kitchen. (more)

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Mail Order Is Far

By Robin Hanson · April 16, 2012 8:45 am · Comments (5)

Remember the Netflix Prize? Turns out, Netflix didn’t make must use of the winning method, because the prize was based on dvd rental data, and their customers now stream movies more; dvds tend to be chosen more in far mode, while streaming movies are chosen more in near mode:

Netflix launched an instant streaming service in 2007, one year after the Netflix Prize began. Streaming has not only changed the way our members interact with the service, but also the type of data available to use in our algorithms. For DVDs our goal is to help people fill their queue with titles to receive in the mail over the coming days and weeks; selection is distant in time from viewing, people select carefully because exchanging a DVD for another takes more than a day, and we get no feedback during viewing. For streaming members are looking for something great to watch right now; they can sample a few videos before settling on one, they can consume several in one session, and we can observe viewing statistics such as whether a video was watched fully or only partially. …

when people rent a movie that won’t arrive for a few days, they’re making a bet on what they want at some future point. And, people tend to have a more… optimistic viewpoint of their future selves. That is, they may be willing to rent, say, an “artsy” movie that won’t show up for a few days, feeling that they’ll be in the mood to watch it a few days (weeks?) in the future, knowing they’re not in the mood immediately. But when the choice is immediate, they deal with their present selves, and that choice can be quite different. (more; HT Carl Shulman)

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