Posts Tagged ‘Overcoming Bias’

True Endings

Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009

I pointed, in an offhand, and somewhat off target, way a couple of posts ago to Eliezer Yudkowsky’s story Three Worlds Collide at Overcoming Bias.

If you have any interest in actually thinking about ethics, this story is one of the most important things you will read. It’s not just amusing, not just instructive, it’s actually important.

I will frankly confess I am intellectually so out of shape I’m having trouble just following the story, much less working through the implications myself. You should see if you fare better.

Even if you cannot predict the outcome, or come up with what you believe to be a better solution than what Yudkowsky (and his readers) proposes, it’s worth the exercise.

Go. Read. Make your brain sweat.

In comments, Yudkowsky says he “I keep wondering myself about the ethics of writing illustrative fiction. So far I’m coming out on the net positive side, especially after Robin’s post on Near versus Far thinking. But it does seem to put more of a strain on how much you trust the author – both their honesty and their intelligence.”

Fair warning. What he’s saying here, I think, is that the act of story telling itself imposes a bias — exactly what his website is dedicated to overcoming.

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Posted in Cool Stuff, Philosophy, Politics & Politicians, Religion and Superstition, SF (Science Fiction and Fantasy), Science | Comments Off

QotD: Great Literature

Saturday, January 31st, 2009

From Eliezer Yudkowsky’s work-in-progress, Three Worlds Collide, a tale of the Prisoner’s Dilemma and other moral/logical conundrums:

I suspect the aliens will consider this one of their great historical works of literature, like Hamlet or Fate/stay night —

Well, I’d've said Haibane Renmei, but OK.

[Update: In comments, Yudkowsky chides that he meant the visual novel (i.e. comic, known in Japan as manga), not the anime. Regrettably, I did not know which one he meant, because not being a member of the culture of which he writes, I don't keep up with manga. I'm hard-pressed to believe it's as good as HR, but maybe I need to give it a look.]

[Update 2: *sigh* No, not the manga, the interactive version that allows you to make plot decisions. English versions for at least some of the main narrative pathways seem to be available; I guess I'm going to have to give them a try.

[I just read chapter 3/8 of Three Worlds; strongly recommended. One of the more inventive, entertaining, and provocative how-aliens-might-think stories I've seen.]

[update 3: Added the "culturally well-rounded" link.]

For those unfortunates who don’t know: Haibane Renmei is the single best work of the Japanese animation form known as anime, head and shoulders above everything else out there. This ought to be on everyone’s must-see list, even if you don’t know about, or actively dislike, anime in general. Fate/Stay Night is another anime; I’ve watched it, but honestly remember nothing about it; I suspect Yudkowsky is making a bit of joke here. I rate most anime on a scale that expands the 0-5 range of my normal ten-point movie/TV rating scale. HR easily rates eight, possibly as high as nine, on my normal scale. It is one of my favorite stories in any medium, and only loses a point or two because its low-budget creation limited its visual implementation. No, don’t read any summaries or reviews; one of the great pleasures of this story is the way it reveals itself to the watcher; the less you know going into it, the better. That said, commit yourself to watching it twice, at least — a great deal that passes unnoticed on first viewing will glow and hum with meaning the second. Watch it the first time with the English dub, so the subtitles don’t distract you; it has one of the better English dubs out there. Second time, savor the wonderful Japanese performances.

Dead serious here: Anybody who considers themselves culturally well-rounded should see Haibane Renmei. It’s as important as, say, The Seven Samurai.

In spoilers, the image that originally drew me in to the world of the Haibene:Show ▼

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Posted in Anime, Cool Stuff, Quote of the Day, Religion and Superstition, SF (Science Fiction and Fantasy), Science | 2 Comments »

QotD: Humanity’s To Do List

Sunday, January 25th, 2009

Via Overcoming Bias:

Goals of Man:
X Don’t get eaten by a lion
X Get out of Africa
_ Get out of Earth
_ Get out of Solar System
_ Get out of Galaxy
_ Get out of Local Group
_ Get out of Earth-Visible Universe
_ Get out of Universe

– Knome

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Posted in Cool Stuff, Evolution, History, Quote of the Day, Religion and Superstition, Science, Technology, Throwing Out the Trash, Tools | 1 Comment »

More Cream at the Top

Saturday, September 27th, 2008

Eliezer Yudkowsky at Overcoming Bias says the unsayable:

One of the major surprises I received when I moved out of childhood into the real world, was the degree to which the world is stratified by genuine competence.

Now, yes, Steve Jurvetson is not just a randomly selected big-name venture capitalist.  He is a big-name VC who often shows up at transhumanist conferences.  But I am not drawing a line through just one data point.

I was invited once to a gathering of the mid-level power elite, where around half the attendees were “CEO of something” – mostly technology companies, but occasionally “something” was a public company or a sizable hedge fund.  I was expecting to be the youngest person there, but it turned out that my age wasn’t unusual – there were several accomplished individuals who were younger.  This was the point at which I realized that my child prodigy license had officially completely expired.

Now, admittedly, this was a closed conference run by people clueful enough to think “Let’s invite Eliezer Yudkowsky” even though I’m not a CEO.  So this was an incredibly cherry-picked sample.  Even so…

Even so, these people of the Power Elite were visibly much smarter than average mortals. In conversation they spoke quickly, sensibly, and by and large intelligently. When talk turned to deep and difficult topics, they understood faster, made fewer mistakes, were readier to adopt others’ suggestions.

No, even worse than that, much worse than that: these CEOs and CTOs and hedge-fund traders, these folk of the mid-level power elite, seemed happier and more alive.

This, I suspect, is one of those truths so horrible that you can’t talk about it in public.  This is something that reporters must not write about, when they visit gatherings of the power elite.

Because the last news your readers want to hear, is that this person who is wealthier than you, is also smarter, happier, and not a bad person morally.  Your reader would much rather read about how these folks are overworked to the bone or suffering from existential ennui.  Failing that, your readers want to hear how the upper echelons got there by cheating, or at least smarming their way to the top.  If you said anything as hideous as, “They seem more alive,” you’d get lynched.

I shouldn’t have to quote this, because Overcoming Bias should be one of your daily reads. Everyone should have to start the day with muscle burn from exercising your body, and headache from exercising your brain. But it’s a good headache, honestly it is.

Note that Yudkowsky is talking about the power elite, the movers and shakers, not just rich people generally. The Hollywood Elite, chameleons who have become fabulously wealthy by pretending to be real people, speaking words written for them by others, often strike me as more than a little dim in person, say on talk shows, or on their own blogs.

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Posted in Cool Stuff, Political Correctness, Science, Throwing Out the Trash | 1 Comment »

The Detached Lever Fallacy

Sunday, August 3rd, 2008

From Eliezer Yudkowsky at the very challenging and stimulating Overcoming Bias:

This fallacy gets its name from an ancient sci-fi TV show, which I never saw myself, but was reported to me by a reputable source (some guy at an SF convention).  Anyone knows the exact reference, do leave a comment.

So the good guys are battling the evil aliens.  Occasionally, the good guys have to fly through an asteroid belt.  As we all know, asteroid belts are as crowded as a New York parking lot, so their ship has to carefully dodge the asteroids.  The evil aliens, though, can fly right through the asteroid belt because they have amazing technology that dematerializes their ships, and lets them pass through the asteroids.

Eventually, the good guys capture an evil alien ship, and go exploring inside it.  The captain of the good guys finds the alien bridge, and on the bridge is a lever.  “Ah,” says the captain, “this must be the lever that makes the ship dematerialize!”  So he pries up the control lever and carries it back to his ship, after which his ship can also dematerialize.

And from there, Yudkowsky goes on to discuss the quicksand foundations of psychology and Artificial Intelligence. Well worth the time and skull sweat.

One mild demurrer: If you look over at my Categories, you’ll see that I deride psychology as “Witch Doctoring”. This is in response to claims that psychology is in any way a science; it is not, because it lacks underlying mechanisms and testable hypotheses.

However, it’s easy to ridicule the field in hindsight, without viewing it in its historical context.

Imagine, to use the opening metaphor, that you live on a ship, have been raised on a ship, where nobody has ever been in the bridge; indeed, no one even knows the bridge exists. The ship simply flies around the universe, completely out of control. The origins of the ship, and the technology and science underlying its operation, have been forgotten so long ago, no one even remembers the ideas of technology and science. It is not unreasonable that all sorts of bizarre superstitions should arise as to how to direct the flight of the ship.

Then one day an ignorant, superstitious, but curious savage, fellow by the name of Freud, finds this rusted-shut hatch….

Sounds like a great idea for a science fiction story, eh? The idea of a colonial ship carrying crew and passengers who have forgotten their origins is indeed a popular one, although I don’t recall this particular issue being explored.

A couple of the best examples are Alfred Bester’s novel The Stars My Destination, and Gene Wolf’s tetralogy Book of the Long Sun (Actually, a long cycle of novels). There’s another novel (which I read in high school, so pre-1972) about a militaristic religion, with enforcers based on the Spanish Inquisition, deliberately set up to control the population of a colony ship; damned if I can remember its title or author, though. Then there’s The Starlost, a disasterous TV series disowned by its creator, Harlan Ellison.

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Posted in Philosophy, Religion and Superstition, Throwing Out the Trash, Witch Doctoring (Psychology) | 6 Comments »

Bumpersticker of the Day: Question

Friday, July 4th, 2008


Via Overcoming Bias.

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Posted in Laugh Dammit!, Philosophy, Quote of the Day | Comments Off

Quote of the Day: Wearing The Clown Suit

Thursday, June 12th, 2008

“Everybody in this room is wearing a uniform, don’t kid yourself.”
– Frank Zappa, Burnt Weenie Sandwich

Now read this, over at Overcoming The Bias:

Lonely dissent doesn’t feel like going to school dressed in black.  It feels like going to school wearing a clown suit.

Damn straight, Skippy.

I know people who simply refuse to like anything they hear on Top 40 radio, simply because it’s popular, and they can’t tolerate along with the crowd.

Shakespeare’s bad, because, you know, he’s a cultural icon.

Most of them are against the war in Iraq, because, you know, they’re questioning authority. They’re speaking truth to power. They’re out on the edge.

‘Scuse, please, but they’re credulous starry-eyed sheep. Avowed skeptics and inclusive multi-culturists, they’re bowing down before the most racist, sexist, close-minded, anti-progressive religious cult to come along in the past thousand years, a cult that openly promises to enslave or kill them. They’re trying to elect a presidential candidate from the Chicago Machine they’re treating like the Messiah. Meanwhile, if I can keep from vomiting on the voting machine, I’ll vote for this guy.

I know, vaguely, what wearing the clown suit feels like, because I’ve come out to “liberal” friends and family as a gun owner. My advocacy of possessing a tool that would allow me to actually resist tyranny made me a pariah to folks who are very strident in their rebelliousness. (I probably also wore the clown suit a lot in school, but wasn’t aware of it. I don’t think that counts. Hm, I did almost start a fad for carrying Slinkies around, but the teachers put a stop to that, because they’re so damn noisy. Does that count?)

And mind, by the standards of the linked article, I’m still not a true rebel, because I didn’t figure out, on my own, how crucial the right to keep and bear arms really is; I picked it up from a chance conversation back in ‘76, and had it reinforced by Gharlane of Eddore, a nut job science fiction fan posting in the Babylon Five usenet forums.

I’m giving up on trying to be a rebel. I swear, from here on out, not to care how popular or unpopular my positions are, but only whether or not I feel they’re right. If I conform, too damn bad.

Now me, you know, I really am an iconoclast.  Everyone thinks they are, but with me it’s true, you see.  I would totally have worn a clown suit to school.  My serious conversations were with books, not with other children.

But if you think you would totally wear that clown suit, then don’t be too proud of that either!  It just means that you need to make an effort in the opposite direction to avoid dissenting too easily.  That’s what I have to do, to correct for my own nature.  Other people do have reasons for thinking what they do, and ignoring that completely is as bad as being afraid to contradict them.  You wouldn’t want to end up as a free thinker.  It’s not a virtue, you see – just a bias either way.

So I liked Madonna’s “Material Girl” video. So sue me.

[update]

Holy. Crap.

Overcoming Bias is a serious trip, particularly if you’ve let yourself get intellectually lazy. It’s a bigger, and far more productive, time sink than Wikipedia or even TV Tropes. Very, very strongly recommended.

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Posted in B. Hussein Obama, Cool Stuff, Culture War, Dhimmis, Fashion. No, Seriously, Jihad, McCain, Me, Philosophy, Political Correctness, Politics & Politicians, Quote of the Day, Throwing Out the Trash | 1 Comment »