Open Thread

In the January Open Thread, I wrote,

…yudkowsky.net doesn’t seem to have a narrative of Eliezer’s Bayesian Enlightenment, which is really what I’m after. Eliezer has said he’ll get there eventually (in the comment thread to Reversed Stupidity). Eliezer’s enlightenment was more than just an understanding of Bayes’ Theorem — in [the comment thread of Reversed Stupidity], Tom McCabe notes that Eliezer was posting about that in 2001. So what was it exactly?

Thanks to the latest series of posts, I think I now understand Eliezer’s Bayesian Enlightenment. I say “I think…” to leave open the possibility that future posts will be even more enlightening. I’m enjoying these posts very much!

More on RT Cox’s theorems please.

Yes, you can get people to do some rather silly things just by asking them, using a bit of distracting/confusing patter, and acting as though it was the most natural thing in the world for them to doing it. “Covert hypnosis” is a little bit strong of a term for it, though. (I probably would have handed over my wallet, too, although I think I would have asked why he wanted it, because I have a habit of asking such questions.)

Reading “Fake Explanations” reminds me of an evaluation strategy employed by a professor in the engineering department. Each test question has two components: the answer and a confidence rating, each chosen by the student. The maximum points can only be achieved with a high-confidence, correct answer. A high-confidence, incorrect answer yields the worst number of points, if any. Thus, the tests discourage guessing and encourage accurate self-assessment of correctness.

Disclaimer: I discuss things about hypnosis that might seem disturbing to some people.

Note: I will not be offended if told I wandered into paranoid conspiracy theory land(but please explain). My goal is to get to the truth, no matter what it is. I am asking this here because this site is frequented by smart and knowledgeable people who have committed themselves to getting to the truth in an unbiased way.

Yes, you can get people to do some rather silly things just by asking them, using a bit of distracting/confusing patter, and acting as though it was the most natural thing in the world for them to doing it.
Are you saying the upper limit of this kind of “persuasion” is doing “silly things”? What if people were asked to do something “non silly”? eg: Handing over a car, sex, killing someone… Personally I think handing over your wallet and house keys to a stranger is already “non silly”.

“Covert hypnosis” is a little bit strong of a term for it, though. (I probably would have handed over my wallet, too, although I think I would have asked why he wanted it, because I have a habit of asking such questions.)
Please explain how is it less than “covert hypnosis”? You are probably talking about the first video where the manipulation is relatively small and short. The second video showed more extreme hypnosis. See this video for something that looks more like “covert hypnosis”, with people closing their eyes and zoning out without a hint of prior consent.

Either there is something trivial I missed or humans have a pretty crappy “firewall” when it comes to mind-control. On the one hand when I read about hypnosis on the internet the literature suggests:
a)A person needs to believe they can be hypnotized to be hypnotized.
b)A person needs to consent to hypnosis to be hypnotized.
c)A person will refuse a suggestion that is against their morals/beliefs.

On the other hand, Youtube videos seem to indicate that:
a)A person doesn’t even need to know what hypnosis is to be hypnotized, never mind believing they can be.
b)A person can be hypnotized without being informed about it in advance as long as they are calm(ie. no fight or flight response triggered) and following the instructions of a hypnotist seems natural(ie. a bit of raport is established. Note this does not mean the person agreed to be hypnotized). Unless the person explicitly rejects the hypnotist they will do as he says by default.
c)The hypnotist can use various tricks to push the person into doing things against their interests. The hypnotist can issue direct commands(eg. give me your wallet). As long as the command doesn’t stick out as too out of place, the subject will not notice it’s against his interests because his critical thinking is diminished. The hypnotist can change a person’s perception of reality such that the person suddenly wants to do the things s/he would not otherwise do(eg. the person believes the hypnotist is a movie star so they serve him free drinks or the person is led to believe their coat belongs to the hypnotist so they give it away). Lastly the hypnotist can simply get away with doing things while the person is in a trance and unaware of their surroundings(eg. take something belonging to the person and flee).

I find the cognitive dissonance unbearable. It’s hard to decide in an unbiased way what to believe; the Youtube videos or the literature on hypnosis. This is compounded by the fact that I secretly wish hypnosis was weak. Frankly I find all this “mind-hacking” disturbing but I can’t just ignore what my eyes see, I must explain it.

If hypnosis is this powerful manipulation tool one would expect frequent media reports of criminals using it. I mean you hear about guns because criminals use guns to gain power over their victims. Wouldn’t it be advantageous for a criminal to learn to surreptitiously hypnotize people and take advantage of them? Yet we don’t see media reports of these incidents very often, or at all unless you specifically look for it on the net.

Maybe “covert hypnosis” is actually much harder to do then it seems. Maybe it only works on a small portion of the population. Maybe the Youtube videos are all fake stuffed with actors. Or maybe the police and media dismiss reports of such crimes because it seems too unbelievable. Maybe the victims under-report the crimes because it seems so embarrassing(like rape). Or maybe the victims don’t realize they are doing something they wouldn’t otherwise want to do or they simply don’t remember being a victim.

What is the rational explanation? There must be a falsehood or bias somewhere in there, either in the literature on hypnosis, the Youtube videos or me.

Maybe what the videos show is real, but not actually “hypnosis” in the sense the literature discusses.

Report from the Bay Area rationalist/OB meetup?

No, it’s not coherent. In what way are you linked to yourself one second ago that your thawed self would not be linked to your pre-frozen self?

As Eliezer likes to say, there’s no real difference between the trillion trillion trillion trillion (or whatever) Planck instants between successive moments of experience in a life and the thousand trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion Planck instants that might elapse between freezing and thawing.

Should we do away with the idea of a “language of thought”?

Is it possible, that one of the most natural-seeming assumptions one might be inclined to hold – the idea of a sort of “language of thought” or “mentalese” – might be quite wrong? Language is sure a kind of necessary evil for communication between individuals. But nobody would really want to suggest that talking with someone was nearly as good a way to communicate with them as being that someone. So if being myself is so obviously far superior to just talking to myself, why should I bother at all? Maybe when it seems like I was thinking to myself, it is really just the language centers freewheeling over my current cognitive processes!
“But wait,” says someone, “the language of thought must not necessarily be the language you speak to others. It need not even be a serial stream of symbols, as ordinary spoken language. It might be something quite different, actually.”.
Yes it might, but then why call it a language at all?

[Having read the other comments]

[Well, if my last comment was a bit off topic here, I hope it was not inconveniently so.]

David Strauss:
Reading “Fake Explanations” reminds me of an evaluation strategy employed by a professor in the engineering department. Each test question has two components: the answer and a confidence rating, each chosen by the student. The maximum points can only be achieved with a high-confidence, correct answer. A high-confidence, incorrect answer yields the worst number of points, if any. Thus, the tests discourage guessing and encourage accurate self-assessment of correctness

Kinda nice. Maybe it would be even nicer if he also rated how well-adjusted the self-assessments where. I have recently read something interesting about the topic on a related site.

Personally, I think all talk about whether your upload would be you is pointless. Am I the person with the same name from 20 years ago? I might not share a single atom with that little brat, and have a completely different psychology. But I say that it’s stll me, because it feels right.

I think the best policy here is to just do what feels right. Don’t ask others for advice, and don’t encourage others to do like you. There isn’t an objectively right answer.

But here’s a question: if you make a copy of yourself, and stay alive, or make two copies – what do you even call that?

Nick, Tiiba: My understanding of cryonics is that there is no plan on “thawing,” but that one will necessarily be cloned. Tiiba’s question – “if you make a copy of yourself, and stay alive, or make two copies – what do you even call that?” – nears the mark I’m trying to hit about what happens to the individual and the fact that there would be no “mystical network” that connects the minds of successive clones.

I reiterate, cryonics can still be the right thing if I value the existence of some entity that is, for the world, equivalent to myself – but still not “me.”

My understanding of cryonics is that there is no plan on “thawing,” but that one will necessarily be cloned.

Where did you get that? Cloning would obviously produce a different person who just happened to share your DNA, but that’s not the intent.

I reiterate, cryonics can still be the right thing if I value the existence of some entity that is, for the world, equivalent to myself – but still not “me.”

What does “me” mean that doesn’t include “equivalent to myself”?

MOVIE SPOILER ALERT

MAJOR PLOT TWIST: In a way, this dilemma was faced by hugh jackman’s character in the prestige.

I believe stage hypnosis is illegal in London, though I’ve been unable to find an internet citation for that. Something I’ve always found particularly frightening about hypnosis is that you can put people who have been hypnotised not to feel pain into a position where they can communicate without feedback – give them a pen, for example, but cover the hand so that they can’t see what they’re writing – and they’ll tell you how much pain they’re in. I suppose it’s this fragmenting of the ego that is at the core of what we find frightening in hypnosis. I think what’s odd is that we don’t talk about it more. It seems to me that along with the placebo effect it’s one of the biggest loci of threat to our ‘commonsense’ conception of the self. When you start looking at those two phenomena, everything about the standard model starts looking untenable.

SG, I used to think like you( up until a few weeks actually!) and this is the argument that changed my mind:
Suppose that this thing happens every time you go to sleep, and when you wake up, you think you are the same person,
and everyone around you think you are the same person, but you’re actually an exact duplicate of someone who died.

Think about this scenario for a few moments…

How do you know that this is’nt what’s happening now? Is there any difference between that scenario and reality?
If I told you that this is what happens, would you never go to sleep again?
No one would know the difference, including you.
It’s the same thing for cryonics. It does’nt matter if the period of nonexistence is one night or a hundred years.

It is good to examine or at least to point out or note important unspoken assumptions. Please allow me to suggest that an unspoken assumption of the “cryonics” thread here is that what matters about you is your subjective experiences. Following an earlier author, I will call that assumption or position “hedonism”. (A “utilitarian” then is a hedonist who believes that everybody’s subjective experience is essential, not just his own.)

It is natural for a hedonist who knows science to be interested in cryonics because it offers a way for him to continue to have subjective experiences. It is also natural for him to view cryonics and related measures like uploading as philosophical dilemmas because they lead to questions such as whether a subjective experience experienced after he has been frozen and revived has the same importance or undeniable impact as an experience he might have yesterday or tomorrow.

If (as I advocate) you believe that what matters about you is not your subjective experiences but rather what effects you have on objective reality, the questions become easy to answer. Details here. Sometimes something is murky or complicated because we are asking the wrong question, and things become clear when we substitute the right question. Perhaps asking about your subjective experiences after your freezing and reviving is the wrong question. Perhaps your subjective experiences are important in the same way that keeping an eye on your income is important or the way that knowing approximately how much cash you can get your hands on quickly if you need to is important, but hedonism is not a satisfactory or worthwhile terminal value (ultimate value) for a bright well-educated rationalist.

No one in today’s thread inquired for example about the effect having oneself copied would have on one’s legal rights or one’s reputation (if the copy does something bad) or about how it would tend to double the need for income for the pair of you, which supports my suggestion at the start of this comment that the hedonistic position is an unspoken assumption in the conversation.

Did you realize it only after it happened or did you snap out of it in the middle? Did you go to the police?

I’m surprised this is not the topic of conversation more often given how potentially powerful(dangerous) this can be. Most people think this is impossible and just laugh it off. Or maybe there is something about it that makes it rarer/weaker then I think it is. Nobody knows for sure? Bah! Cognitive dissonance again.

I also find it strange that there is a debate about waterboarding for interrogation in the US. Seems like such a crude method. They could just drug the prisoner to get him to relax and try hypnosis. So either the CIA is incompetent, or hypnosis doesn’t work in those situation since they can’t induce trust in the subject(even drugged) or hypnosis isn’t nearly as effective as the videos suggest or something else I didn’t think of.

PK: I realized it only after it happened — that everything the guy said was a lie. He went from asking for some kind of rope to asking for $10. He repeatedly offered his driver’s license as a security for anything he wanted to borrow. God[1] only knows what would happen if I had taken him up on that. He even offered to pay interest on money he borrowed, but I turned that down (!).

Go to the police? I figured I couldn’t give any helpful information except that the crime had happened. I had a burning desire to go where he claimed to work and cause him pain, but realized the claim about where he worked was a lie too.

Perhaps it was just a good execution of the “camel’s nose in the tent” trick, ask for something trivial and slowly work your way up so they believe you’re serious the whole time. That’s what the guy did in my scenario and that’s what the guy did in Video 1.

And PK … it’s a surprise to you that the CIA is using ineffective method?

[1] I mean God in the secular sense.

You don’t actually *die* (as far as I know, you can’t reverse death). You are “merely” dying, and the process that leads to death is stopped before you die, until the condition that would kill you can be cured. You may still consider it death, but then you should also regard a person with tuberculosis who doesn’t have access to penicilin as dead. Or do you think a prolonged lack of self-awareness is death? Then you probably don’t sleep much.

(If you’ve already discussed this, just ignore). Suppose you could get everybody to become completely free of bias, as you perceive it. Would people continue to disagree? To disagree as much as they do now? I ask not because I think these questions have answers, but because I suspect that dealing with them might clarify what you (we?) mean by “bias.”

For instance–I like (some) music a lot, painting, not so much. Is this because I’m “biased” against painting for some reason, or something else? If it’s because of something in the way my brain is put together, would that be a kind of “bias,” or just a legitimate reason for different preferences? If I were blind and not deaf, no one would take my preference as a bias; same if it’s just a less extreme (but still biological) tic?

Alan, my preferred solution to this problem is to insist on a very strict fact/value, is/ought distinction: ideal rational agents should come to agree on the facts of the matter about how the world is, but they need not value the same things. You can enjoy music more than paintings without making any falsifiable empirical claims.

This is a common view, but by no means does it command universal agreement.

One million hits!

Does Bayes’ theorem make racial stereotyping okay?