How "magical" do you mean this technology to be? If you could take a magic pill that automatically corrected your attribution biases and did nothing else, it would seem considerable a benefit. The only loss might be that it makes hypocrisy harder, which might really be good as well.
However, if as Robin contends, the fundamental error of attribution is a feature of far-mode cognition, and correcting it meant damaging or eliminating far-mode capacities, the solution would be rather crippling. [I know there are some enemies of far-mode around who'd probably disagree.]
ummm... will your solution stand if agent mugging you is an AI? (i.e not necessarily an agent that is constructed with a implicit goal to gain recources by cheating?)And there is infinitesimal, but not zero probability that agent you identify as a person is actually a computer.With high enough threat infinitesimality of this probability again becomes irrelevant and you *should* pay...
It just looks like I didn't understand your proposition at all, and I have read your topic on LW before.
Tolstoy's intuition about Near and Far modes. From War and Peace:
"In the past he had never been able to find that great inscrutable infinite something. He had only felt that it must exist somewhere and had looked for it. In everything near and comprehensible he had only what was limited, petty, commonplace, and senseless. He had equipped himself with a mental telescope and looked into remote space, where petty worldliness hiding itself in misty distance had seemed to him great and infinite merely because it was not clearly seen."
This might be called the standard (insufficient) response: everyone takes my solution for being just this. The problem would be motivating it without violating the assumptions of salamanoff's induction.
My solution--which is pretty obviously the solution--avoids having to compare rates of decline by the same move as is made in resolving the original Pascal's Wager: invoking contradictory hypotheses. In Pascal's wager, it's that a different god, equally improbable, might have policies contradicting the imagined God. In Pascal's "mugging," when you have sufficiently strong reason to believe that the mugger is deceiving you, then you have less reason to believe his claim than its opposite.
In "solving" the puzzle, folks try to beat the math, which, of course, is impossible. All the chicanery lies (has to lie) in the assumption that claiming that p is evidence for p, all else being equal--an empirical assumption that's undermined by the problem's context.
Pascal's mugger seemed problematic because folks have been insufficiently bayesian in understanding its terms.
Another possibility is that as the magnitude of the threat increases the likelihood of its truthfulness decreases at a faster rate. 1/p(True) < O(magnitude)
Actually, I think folks just enjoy talking about googolplexes and matrix lords. (Or do you care to indicate how specifying the stakes actually changes the problem?)
You say in your bio you studied by yourself at Standord, were you not enrolled and just used the libraries? I'm considering buying the 500 dollar access pass and studying their myself. Is this what you did or were you affiliated?
For clarification, if anyone else was confused: TheBrett is not suggesting that there's a fundamental attribution error specific to technology. Rather, he's suggesting using technology to eradicate the fundamental attribution error.
I wonder what would happen to someone if you somehow suppressed their mental tendencies towards the Fundamental Attribution Error with technology. Would that "break" them as functional people, or would they be healthier for it since they would now have to properly weigh risks?
EDIT: As Anon pointed out, the phrasing in that isn't clear. I mean "if you used technology to suppress people's Fundamental Attribution Error tendencies", not "if you suppressed people's Fundamental Attribution Error tendencies towards technology. "
It would have been better to encourage the poster rather than one-up him.
I had access via my working at NASA Ames nearby.
Yes, the basic concepts are ancient.
How "magical" do you mean this technology to be? If you could take a magic pill that automatically corrected your attribution biases and did nothing else, it would seem considerable a benefit. The only loss might be that it makes hypocrisy harder, which might really be good as well.
However, if as Robin contends, the fundamental error of attribution is a feature of far-mode cognition, and correcting it meant damaging or eliminating far-mode capacities, the solution would be rather crippling. [I know there are some enemies of far-mode around who'd probably disagree.]
The solution doesn't depend on discerning the deeper motives of the entity, only the likelihood that it is being untruthful (by maximizing).
ummm... will your solution stand if agent mugging you is an AI? (i.e not necessarily an agent that is constructed with a implicit goal to gain recources by cheating?)And there is infinitesimal, but not zero probability that agent you identify as a person is actually a computer.With high enough threat infinitesimality of this probability again becomes irrelevant and you *should* pay...
It just looks like I didn't understand your proposition at all, and I have read your topic on LW before.
Tolstoy's intuition about Near and Far modes. From War and Peace:
"In the past he had never been able to find that great inscrutable infinite something. He had only felt that it must exist somewhere and had looked for it. In everything near and comprehensible he had only what was limited, petty, commonplace, and senseless. He had equipped himself with a mental telescope and looked into remote space, where petty worldliness hiding itself in misty distance had seemed to him great and infinite merely because it was not clearly seen."
This might be called the standard (insufficient) response: everyone takes my solution for being just this. The problem would be motivating it without violating the assumptions of salamanoff's induction.
My solution--which is pretty obviously the solution--avoids having to compare rates of decline by the same move as is made in resolving the original Pascal's Wager: invoking contradictory hypotheses. In Pascal's wager, it's that a different god, equally improbable, might have policies contradicting the imagined God. In Pascal's "mugging," when you have sufficiently strong reason to believe that the mugger is deceiving you, then you have less reason to believe his claim than its opposite.
In "solving" the puzzle, folks try to beat the math, which, of course, is impossible. All the chicanery lies (has to lie) in the assumption that claiming that p is evidence for p, all else being equal--an empirical assumption that's undermined by the problem's context.
Pascal's mugger seemed problematic because folks have been insufficiently bayesian in understanding its terms.
Another possibility is that as the magnitude of the threat increases the likelihood of its truthfulness decreases at a faster rate. 1/p(True) < O(magnitude)
Call their bluff: say that you are the secret overlord of The Matrix and will erase him from existence if he doesn't walk away right now.
Actually, I think folks just enjoy talking about googolplexes and matrix lords. (Or do you care to indicate how specifying the stakes actually changes the problem?)
You say in your bio you studied by yourself at Standord, were you not enrolled and just used the libraries? I'm considering buying the 500 dollar access pass and studying their myself. Is this what you did or were you affiliated?
Thanks! I've edited my answer to notify people of that too.
For clarification, if anyone else was confused: TheBrett is not suggesting that there's a fundamental attribution error specific to technology. Rather, he's suggesting using technology to eradicate the fundamental attribution error.
> I think the more important question is why does this puzzle seem more challenging than it is?
One possibility is that the puzzle is more challenging than you think :-)
If the mugger threatens to torture a googolplex people, would any amount of evidence convince you that he's telling the truth?
I wonder what would happen to someone if you somehow suppressed their mental tendencies towards the Fundamental Attribution Error with technology. Would that "break" them as functional people, or would they be healthier for it since they would now have to properly weigh risks?
EDIT: As Anon pointed out, the phrasing in that isn't clear. I mean "if you used technology to suppress people's Fundamental Attribution Error tendencies", not "if you suppressed people's Fundamental Attribution Error tendencies towards technology. "