trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Hand vs. Fingers
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2008-03-30T00:36:05.000Z

Back to our original topic: Reductionism, which (in case you've forgotten) is part of a sequence on the Mind Projection Fallacy. There can be emotional problems in accepting reductionism, if you think that things have to be fundamental to be fun. But this position commits us to never taking joy in anything more complicated than a quark, and so I prefer to reject it.

To review, the reductionist thesis is that we use multi-level models for computational reasons, but physical reality has only a single level. If this doesn't sound familiar, please reread "Reductionism".

Today I'd like to pose the following conundrum: When you pick up a cup of water, is it your hand that picks it up?

Most people, of course, go with the naive popular answer: "Yes."

Recently, however, scientists have made a stunning discovery: It's not your hand that holds the cup, it's actually your fingers, thumb, and palm.

Yes, I know! I was shocked too. But it seems that after scientists measured the forces exerted on the cup by each of your fingers, your thumb, and your palm, they found there was no force left over—so the force exerted by your hand must be zero.

The theme here is that, if you can see how (not just know that) a higher level reduces to a lower one, they will not seem like separate things within your map; you will be able to see how silly it is to think that your fingers could be in one place, and your hand somewhere else; you will be able to see how silly it is to argue about whether it is your hand picks up the cup, or your fingers.

The operative word is "see", as in concrete visualization. Imagining your hand causes you to imagine the fingers and thumb and palm; conversely, imagining fingers and thumb and palm causes you to identify a hand in the mental picture. Thus the high level of your map and the low level of your map will be tightly bound together in your mind.

In reality, of course, the levels are bound together even tighter than that—bound together by the tightest possible binding: physical identity. You can see this: You can see that saying (1) "hand" or (2) "fingers and thumb and palm", does not refer to different things, but different points of view.

But suppose you lack the knowledge to so tightly bind together the levels of your map. For example, you could have a "hand scanner...
Initiation Ceremony
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2008-03-28T20:40:03.000Z

The torches that lit the narrow stairwell burned intensely and in the wrong color, flame like melting gold or shattered suns.

192... 193...

Brennan's sandals clicked softly on the stone steps, snicking in sequence, like dominos very slowly falling.

227... 228...

Half a circle ahead of him, a trailing fringe of dark cloth whispered down the stairs, the robed figure itself staying just out of sight.

239... 240...

Not much longer, Brennan predicted to himself, and his guess was accurate:

Sixteen times sixteen steps was the number, and they stood before the portal of glass.

The great curved gate had been wrought with cunning, humor, and close attention to indices of refraction: it warped light, bent it, folded it, and generally abused it, so that there were hints of what was on the other side (stronger light sources, dark walls) but no possible way of seeing through—unless, of course, you had the key: the counter-door, thick for thin and thin for thick, in which case the two would cancel out.

From the robed figure beside Brennan, two hands emerged, gloved in reflective cloth to conceal skin's color. Fingers like slim mirrors grasped the handles of the warped gate—handles that Brennan had not guessed; in all that distortion, shapes could only be anticipated, not seen.

"Do you want to know?" whispered the guide; a whisper nearly as loud as an ordinary voice, but not revealing the slightest hint of gender.

Brennan paused. The answer to the question seemed suspiciously, indeed extraordinarily obvious, even for ritual.

"Yes," Brennan said finally.

The guide only regarded him silently.

"Yes, I want to know," said Brennan.

"Know what, exactly?" whispered the figure.

Brennan's face scrunched up in concentration, trying to visualize the game to its end, and hoping he hadn't blown it already; until finally he fell back on the first and last resort, which is the truth:

"It doesn't matter," said Brennan, "the answer is still yes."

The glass gate parted down the middle, and slid, with only the tiniest scraping sound, into the surrounding stone.

The revealed room was lined, wall-to-wall, with figures robed and hooded in light-absorbing cloth. The straight walls were not themselves black stone, but mirrored, tiling a square grid of dark robes out to infinity in all directions; so that it seemed as if the people of some much vaster city, or perhaps the whole human kind, wa...
To Spread Science, Keep It Secret
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2008-03-28T05:47:20.000Z

Sometimes I wonder if the Pythagoreans had the right idea.

Yes, I've written about how "science" is inherently public. I've written that "science" is distinguished from merely rational knowledge by the in-principle ability to reproduce scientific experiments for yourself, to know without relying on authority. I've said that "science" should be defined as the publicly accessible knowledge of humankind. I've even suggested that future generations will regard all papers not published in an open-access journal as non-science, i.e., it can't be part of the public knowledge of humankind if you make people pay to read it.

But that's only one vision of the future. In another vision, the knowledge we now call "science" is taken out of the public domain—the books and journals hidden away, guarded by mystic cults of gurus wearing robes, requiring fearsome initiation rituals for access—so that more people will actually study it.

I mean, right now, people can study science but they don't.

"Scarcity", it's called in social psychology. What appears to be in limited supply, is more highly valued. And this effect is especially strong with information—we're much more likely to try to obtain information that we believe is secret, and to value it more when we do obtain it.

With science, I think, people assume that if the information is freely available, it must not be important. So instead people join cults that have the sense to keep their Great Truths secret. The Great Truth may actually be gibberish, but it's more satisfying than coherent science, because it's secret.

Science is the great Purloined Letter of our times, left out in the open and ignored.

Sure, scientific openness helps the scientific elite. They've already been through the initiation rituals. But for the rest of the planet, science is kept secret a hundred times more effectively by making it freely available, than if its books were guarded in vaults and you had to walk over hot coals to get access. (This being a fearsome trial indeed, since the great secrets of insulation are only available to Physicist-Initiates of the Third Level.)

If scientific knowledge were hidden in ancient vaults (rather than hidden in inconvenient pay-for-access journals), at least then people would try to get into the vaults. They'd be desperate to learn...
Scarcity
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2008-03-27T08:07:29.000Z

What follows is taken primarily from Robert Cialdini's Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. I own three copies of this book, one for myself, and two for loaning to friends.

Scarcity, as that term is used in social psychology, is when things become more desirable as they appear less obtainable.

If you put a two-year-old boy in a room with two toys, one toy in the open and the other behind a Plexiglas wall, the two-year-old will ignore the easily accessible toy and go after the apparently forbidden one. If the wall is low enough to be easily climbable, the toddler is no more likely to go after one toy than the other. (Brehm and Weintraub 1977.)

When Dade County forbade use or possession of phosphate detergents, many Dade residents drove to nearby counties and bought huge amounts of phosphate laundry detergents. Compared to Tampa residents not affected by the regulation, Dade residents rated phosphate detergents as gentler, more effective, more powerful on stains, and even believed that phosphate detergents poured more easily. (Mazis 1975, Mazis et. al. 1973.)

Similarly, information that appears forbidden or secret, seems more important and trustworthy:

When University of North Carolina students learned that a speech opposing coed dorms had been banned, they became more opposed to coed dorms (without even hearing the speech). (Probably in Ashmore et. al. 1971.)

When a driver said he had liability insurance, experimental jurors awarded his victim an average of four thousand dollars more than if the driver said he had no insurance. If the judge afterward informed the jurors that information about insurance was inadmissible and must be ignored, jurors awarded an average of thirteen thousand dollars more than if the driver had no insurance. (Broeder 1959.)

Buyers for supermarkets, told by a supplier that beef was in scarce supply, gave orders for twice as much beef as buyers told it was readily available. Buyers told that beef was in scarce supply, and furthermore, that the information about scarcity was itself scarce—that the shortage was not general knowledge—ordered six times as much beef. (Since the study was conducted in a real-world context, the information provided was in fact correct.) (Knishinsky 1982.)

The conventional theory for explaining this i...
Why are religious societies more cohesive?
by KatjaGrace — 2008-03-26T15:33:00.000Z

Reported by the Economist (and discussed on Overcoming Bias), religion brings social cooperation. Attempts to synthesise secular solidarity out of god-free rituals tend to fail. So why is this?

A hypothesis:

Social cohesion is a result of citizens sharing a desire to believe something they all have a tiny private inkling might seem less true if they thought about it too much. They subconsciously know belief is easier when ubiquitously reinforced in social surroundings, and also that their beliefs are more enjoyable than the alternative. Thus they have a strong interest in religious behaviour in others and in their own feeling of unshakable commitment to those who practice it. So they encourage it with enthusiastic participation and try to ensconce themselves as much as necessary to feel safe from reality. If we found conclusive evidence of a god, everyone would be safe, and could get back to non-cohesion; it’s the possibility that the sky is chockers with nothingness that gives everyone the incentive for solidarity.

To test hypothesis, compare cohesion across other groups with beliefs (religious or otherwise) of varying tenuousness and of varying importance to their believers.
Is Humanism A Religion-Substitute?
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2008-03-26T04:18:10.000Z

For many years before the Wright Brothers, people dreamed of flying with magic potions. There was nothing irrational about the raw desire to fly. There was nothing tainted about the wish to look down on a cloud from above. Only the "magic potions" part was irrational.

Suppose you were to put me into an fMRI scanner, and take a movie of my brain's activity levels, while I watched a space shuttle launch. (Wanting to visit space is not "realistic", but it is an essentially lawful dream—one that can be fulfilled in a lawful universe.) The fMRI might—maybe, maybe not—resemble the fMRI of a devout Christian watching a nativity scene.

Should an experimenter obtain this result, there's a lot of people out there, both Christians and some atheists, who would gloat: "Ha, ha, space travel is your religion!"

But that's drawing the wrong category boundary. It's like saying that, because some people once tried to fly by irrational means, no one should ever enjoy looking out of an airplane window on the clouds below.

If a rocket launch is what it takes to give me a feeling of aesthetic transcendence, I do not see this as a substitute for religion. That is theomorphism—the viewpoint from gloating religionists who assume that everyone who isn't religious has a hole in their mind that wants filling.

Now, to be fair to the religionists, this is not just a gloating assumption. There are atheists who have religion-shaped holes in their minds. I have seen attempts to substitute atheism or even transhumanism for religion. And the result is invariably awful. Utterly awful. Absolutely abjectly awful.

I call such efforts, "hymns to the nonexistence of God".

When someone sets out to write an atheistic hymn—"Hail, oh unintelligent universe," blah, blah, blah—the result will, without exception, suck.

Why? Because they're being imitative. Because they have no motivation for writing the hymn except a vague feeling that since churches have hymns, they ought to have one too. And, on a purely artistic level, that puts them far beneath genuine religious art that is not an imitation of anything, but an original expression of emotion.

Religious hymns were (often) written by people who felt strongly and wrote honestly and put serious effort into the prosody and imagery of the...
Amazing Breakthrough Day: April 1st
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2008-03-25T05:45:09.000Z

So you're thinking, "April 1st... isn't that already supposed to be April Fool's Day?"

Yes—and that will provide the ideal cover for celebrating Amazing Breakthrough Day.

As I argued in "The Beauty of Settled Science", it is a major problem that media coverage of science focuses only on breaking news. Breaking news, in science, occurs at the furthest fringes of the scientific frontier, which means that the new discovery is often:

Controversial

Supported by only one experiment

Way the heck more complicated than an ordinary mortal can handle, and requiring lots of prerequisite science to understand, which is why it wasn't solved three centuries ago

Later shown to be wrong

People never get to see the solid stuff, let alone the understandable stuff, because it isn't breaking news.

On Amazing Breakthrough Day, I propose, journalists who really care about science can report—under the protective cover of April 1st—such important but neglected science stories as:

BOATS EXPLAINED: Centuries-Old Problem Solved By Bathtub Nudist

YOU SHALL NOT CROSS! Königsberg Tourists' Hopes Dashed

ARE YOUR LUNGS ON FIRE? Link Between Respiration And Combustion Gains Acceptance Among Scientists

Note that every one of these headlines are true—they describe events that did, in fact, happen. They just didn't happen yesterday.

There have been many humanly understandable amazing breakthroughs in the history of science, which can be understood without a PhD or even BSc. The operative word here is history. Think of Archimedes's "Eureka!" when he understood the relation between the water a ship displaces, and the reason the ship floats. This is far enough back in scientific history that you don't need to know 50 other discoveries to understand the theory; it can be explained in a couple of graphs; anyone can see how it's useful; and the confirming experiments can be duplicated in your own bathtub.

Modern science is built on discoveries built on discoveries built on discoveries and so on all the way back to Archimedes. Reporting science only as breaking news is like wandering into a movie 3/4ths of the way through, writing a story about "Bloody-handed man kisses girl holding gun!" and wandering back out again.

And if your editor says, "Oh, but our readers won't be interested in that—"

Then point out that Red...
The Beauty of Settled Science
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2008-03-24T05:30:54.000Z

Facts do not need to be unexplainable, to be beautiful; truths do not become less worth learning, if someone else knows them; beliefs do not become less worthwhile, if many others share them…

…and if you only care about scientific issues that are controversial, you will end up with a head stuffed full of garbage.

The media thinks that only the cutting edge of science is worth reporting on. How often do you see headlines like “General Relativity still governing planetary orbits” or “Phlogiston theory remains false”? So, by the time anything is solid science, it is no longer a breaking headline. “Newsworthy” science is often based on the thinnest of evidence and wrong half the time—if it were not on the uttermost fringes of the scientific frontier, it would not be breaking news.

Scientific controversies are problems so difficult that even people who’ve spent years mastering the field can still fool themselves. That’s what makes for the heated arguments that attract all the media attention.

Worse, if you aren’t in the field and part of the game, controversies aren’t even fun.

Oh, sure, you can have the fun of picking a side in an argument. But you can get that in any football game. That’s not what the fun of science is about.

Reading a well-written textbook, you get: Carefully phrased explanations for incoming students, math derived step by step (where applicable), plenty of experiments cited as illustration (where applicable), test problems on which to display your new mastery, and a reasonably good guarantee that what you’re learning is actually true.

Reading press releases, you usually get: Fake explanations that convey nothing except the delusion of understanding of a result that the press release author didn’t understand and that probably has a better-than-even chance of failing to replicate.

Modern science is built on discoveries, built on discoveries, built on discoveries, and so on, all the way back to people like Archimedes, who discovered facts like why boats float, that can make sense even if you don’t know about other discoveries. A good place to start traveling that road is at the beginning.

Don’t be embarrassed to read elementary science textbooks, either. If you want to pretend to be sophisticated, go find a play to sneer at. If you just want to h...
New York OB Meetup (ad-hoc) on Monday, Mar 24, @6pm
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2008-03-22T21:07:29.000Z

Correction: The giant Starbucks is at 13 Astor Place #25, not 51 Astor which is a smaller Starbucks. (Yes, there are two Starbucks a block apart, here.) The smaller Starbucks has metal steps and a ramp leading up; don't go here. The giant Starbucks, which is where we want to go, is next to Lafayette and Astor.

I (Eliezer) am in New York at the moment, and will have some time free on Monday night, March 24th, to meet any interested New York Overcoming Bias readers.

Where: The giant Starbucks at 13 Astor Place #25, New York, NY 10003
When: 6pm, this Monday (March 24th, 2008)
Who: Eliezer Yudkowsky (866-983-597), Carl Shulman

If you plan on attending, please leave a comment, so we know to expect you. If you're going to arrive later than 6pm, please note this as well.

I'll also be at Princeton on Sunday. My time is already mostly spoken for, but if you're at Princeton and desperately want to meet up, comment or email before 7am tomorrow.
If You Demand Magic, Magic Won't Help
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2008-03-22T18:10:47.000Z

Most witches don't believe in gods. They know that the gods exist, of course. They even deal with them occasionally. But they don't believe in them. They know them too well. It would be like believing in the postman.
—Terry Pratchett, Witches Abroad

Once upon a time, I was pondering the philosophy of fantasy stories—

And before anyone chides me for my "failure to understand what fantasy is about", let me say this: I was raised in an SF&F household. I have been reading fantasy stories since I was five years old. I occasionally try to write fantasy stories. And I am not the sort of person who tries to write for a genre without pondering its philosophy. Where do you think story ideas come from?

Anyway:

I was pondering the philosophy of fantasy stories, and it occurred to me that if there were actually dragons in our world—if you could go down to the zoo, or even to a distant mountain, and meet a fire-breathing dragon—while nobody had ever actually seen a zebra, then our fantasy stories would contain zebras aplenty, while dragons would be unexciting.

Now that's what I call painting yourself into a corner, wot? The grass is always greener on the other side of unreality.

In one of the standard fantasy plots, a protagonist from our Earth, a sympathetic character with lousy grades or a crushing mortgage but still a good heart, suddenly finds themselves in a world where magic operates in place of science. The protagonist often goes on to practice magic, and become in due course a (superpowerful) sorcerer.

Now here's the question—and yes, it is a little unkind, but I think it needs to be asked: Presumably most readers of these novels see themselves in the protagonist's shoes, fantasizing about their own acquisition of sorcery. Wishing for magic. And, barring improbable demographics, most readers of these novels are not scientists.

Born into a world of science, they did not become scientists. What makes them think that, in a world of magic, they would act any differently?

If they don't have the scientific attitude, that nothing is "mere"—the capacity to be interested in merely real things—how will magic help them? If they actually had magic, it would be merely real, and lose the charm of unattainab...
Bind Yourself to Reality
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2008-03-22T05:09:10.000Z

So perhaps you're reading all this, and asking: "Yes, but what does this have to do with reductionism?"

Partially, it's a matter of leaving a line of retreat. It's not easy to take something important apart into components, when you're convinced that this removes magic from the world, unweaves the rainbow. I do plan to take certain things apart, on this blog; and I prefer not to create pointless existential anguish.

Partially, it's the crusade against Hollywood Rationality, the concept that understanding the rainbow subtracts its beauty. The rainbow is still beautiful plus you get the beauty of physics.

But even more deeply, it's one of these subtle hidden-core-of-rationality things. You know, the sort of thing where I start talking about 'the Way'. It's about binding yourself to reality.

In one of Frank Herbert's Dune books, IIRC, it is said that a Truthsayer gains their ability to detect lies in others by always speaking truth themselves, so that they form a relationship with the truth whose violation they can feel. It wouldn't work, but I still think it's one of the more beautiful thoughts in fiction. At the very least, to get close to the truth, you have to be willing to press yourself up against reality as tightly as possible, without flinching away, or sneering down.

You can see the bind-yourself-to-reality theme in "Lotteries: A Waste of Hope." Understanding that lottery tickets have negative expected utility, does not mean that you give up the hope of being rich. It means that you stop wasting that hope on lottery tickets. You put the hope into your job, your school, your startup, your eBay sideline; and if you truly have nothing worth hoping for, then maybe it's time to start looking.

It's not dreams I object to, only impossible dreams. The lottery isn't impossible, but it is an un-actionable near-impossibility. It's not that winning the lottery is extremely difficult—requires a desperate effort—but that work isn't the issue.

I say all this, to exemplify the idea of taking emotional energy that is flowing off to nowhere, and binding it into the realms of reality.

This doesn't mean setting goals that are low enough to be "realistic", i.e., easy and safe and parentally approved. Maybe this is good advice in your personal case, I don't know, but I'm not the on...