trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Good Idealistic Books are Rare
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2009-02-17T18:41:21.000Z

Saith Robin in "Seeking a Cynic's Library":

Cynicism and Idealism are a classic yin and yang, a contradictory pair
where we all seem to need both sides...

Books on education, medicine, government, charity, religion,
technology, travel, relationships, etc. mostly present relatively
idealistic views, though of course no view is entirely one way or the
other. So one reason the young tend to be idealistic is that most reading material they can easily find and understand is idealistic.

My impression of this differs somewhat from Robin's (what a surprise).

I think that what we see in most books of the class Robin describes, are official views. These official views may leave out many unpleasant elements of the story. But because officialism also tries to signal authority and maturity, it's hardly likely to permit itself any real hope or enthusiasm. Perhaps an obligatory if formal nod in the direction of some popular good cause, because this is expected of officialdom. But this is hardly an idealistic voice.

What does a full-blown nonfictional idealism look like? Some examples that I remember from my own youth:

Jerry Pournelle's A Step Farther Out, an idealistic view of
space travel and more general technological advancement, and the
possibility of rising standards of living as opposed to Ehrlichian
gloomsaying.

Brown, Keating, Mellinger, Post, Smith, and Tudor's The Incredible Bread Machine, my childhood introduction to traditional capitalist values.

Eric Drexler's Engines of Creation (and to a lesser extent Ed Regis's Great Mambo Chicken), my introduction to transhumanism.

Richard Feynman's Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman (for traditional rationalist values).

Supposing you wanted your child to grow up an idealist - what
nonfiction books like these could you find to give them? I don't find
it easy to think of many - most nonfiction books are not like this.

On the other hand, I suspect that idealistic fiction aimed specifically at children is a far greater cultural force than anything they pick up from their school textbooks. Textbooks are marketed to adult textbook-selectors; juvenile fiction and children's television are actually aimed at children.

Of course this just implies a chicken-and-egg problem; why do children
enjoy idealism more than cynicism...
Cynical About Cynicism
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2009-02-17T00:49:26.000Z

I'm cynical about cynicism. I don't believe that most cynicism is really about knowing better. When I see someone being cynical, my first thought is that they're trying to show off their sophistication and assert superiority over the naive. As opposed to, say, sharing their uncommon insight about not-widely-understood flaws in human nature.

There are two obvious exceptions to this rule. One is if the speaker has something serious and realistic to say about how to improve matters. Claiming that problems can be fixed will instantly lose you all your world-weary street cred and mark you as another starry-eyed idealistic fool. (Conversely, any "solution" that manages not to disrupt the general atmosphere of doom, does not make me less skeptical: "Humans are evil creatures who slaughter and destroy, but eventually we'll die out from poisoning the environment, so it's all to the good, really.")

No, not every problem is solvable. But by and large, if someone
achieves uncommon insight into darkness - if they know more than I do
about human nature and its flaws - then it's not unreasonable to expect
that they might have a suggestion or two to make about remedy,
patching, or minor deflection. If, you know, the problem is
one that they really would prefer solved, rather than gloom being milked for a feeling of superiority to the naive herd.

The other obvious exception is for science that has something to say about human nature. A testable hypothesis is a testable hypothesis and the thing to do with it is test it. Though here one must be very careful not to go beyond the letter of the experiment for the sake of signaling hard-headed realism:

Consider the hash that some people make of evolutionary psychology in trying to be cynical - assuming that humans have a subconscious motive to promote their inclusive genetic fitness. Consider the hash that some neuroscientists make of the results of their brain scans, supposing that if a brain potential is visible before the moment of reported decision, this proves the nonexistence of free will. It's not you who chooses, it's your brain!

The facts are one thing, but feeling cynical about those facts is another matter entirely. In some cases it can lead people to overrun the facts - to c...
An African Folktale
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2009-02-16T01:00:51.000Z

This is a folktale of the Hausa, a farming culture of around 30 million people, located primarily in Nigeria and Niger but with other communities scattered around Africa. I find the different cultural assumptions revealed to be... attention-catching; you wouldn't find a tale like this in Aesop. From Hausa Tales and Traditions by Frank Edgar and Neil Skinner; HT Robert Greene.

The Farmer, the Snake and the Heron

There was once a man hoeing away on his farm, when along came some people chasing a snake, meaning to kill it. And the snake came up to the farmer.
Says the snake "Farmer, please hide me." "Where shall I hide you?" said the farmer, and the snake said "All I ask is that you save my life." The farmer couldn't think where to put the snake, and at last bent down and opened his anus, and the snake entered.
Presently the snake's pursuers arrived and said to the farmer "Hey, there! Where's the snake we were chasing and intend to kill? As we followed him, he came in your direction." Says the farmer "I haven't seen him." And the people went back again.
Then the farmer said to the snake "Righto - come out now. They've gone." "Oh no" said the snake, "I've got me a home." And there was the farmer, with his stomach all swollen, for all the world like a pregnant woman!

And the farmer set off, and presently, as he passed, he saw a heron. They put their heads together and whispered, and the heron said to the farmer "Go and excrete. Then, when you have finished, move forward a little, but don't get up. Stay squatting, with your head down and your buttocks up, until I come."
So the man went off and did just exactly as the heron had told him, everything. And the snake put out his head and began to catch flies. Then the heron struck and seized the snake's head. Then he pulled and he pulled until he had got him out, and the man tumbled over. And the heron finished off the snake with his beak.
The man rose and went over to the heron. "Heron" says he, "You've got the snake out for me, now please give me some medicine to drink, for the poison where he was lying."
Says the heron "Go and find yourself some white fow...
Rationality Quotes 26
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2009-02-14T16:14:57.000Z

"Poets, philosophers, acidheads, salesmen: everybody wants to know, 'What is Reality?' Some say it's a vast Unknowable so astounding and raw and naked that it grips the human mind and shakes it like a puppy shakes a rag doll. A lot of good that does us."
-- The Book of the SubGenius

"When they discovered that reality was more complicated than they thought, they just swept the complexity under a carpet of epicycles. That is, they created unnecessary complexity. This is an important point. The universe is complex, but it's usefully complex."
-- Larry Wall

"I can't imagine a more complete and precise answer to the question 'for what reason...?' than 'none'. The fact that you don't like the answer is your problem, not the universe's."
-- Lee Daniel Crocker

"In the end they all moved in fantasies and not in the daily tide of their seemingly useless lives. Souls forever lost in the terrifying freedom of their existence."
-- Shinji and Warhammer40k

"Thus the freer the judgement of a man is in regard to a definite issue, with so much greater necessity will the substance of this judgement be determined."
-- Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring

"There will always be some that cannot be saved.
It is impossible to save everyone.
If I have to lose five hundred to earn one thousand,
I will abandon one hundred and save the lives of nine hundred.
That is the most efficient method.
That is the ideal----
Kiritsugu once said that.
Of course I got mad.
I really got mad.
Because I knew that without being told.
Because I myself was saved like that.
I don't even need to be told something as obvious as that.
But still----I believed that someone would be a superhero if they saved everyone even though they think like that.
It may be an idealistic thought or an impossible pipe dream, but a superhero is someone who tries to save everyone in spite of that."
-- Emiya Shirou, in Fate/stay night
(visual novel by Kinoko Nasu; Unlimited Blade Works path, Mirror Moon translation)
An Especially Elegant Evpsych Experiment
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2009-02-13T14:58:18.000Z

In a 1989 Canadian study, adults were asked to imagine the death of children of various ages and estimate which deaths would create the greatest sense of loss in a parent. The results, plotted on a graph, show grief growing until just before adolescence and then beginning to drop. When this curve was compared with a curve showing changes in reproductive potential over the life cycle (a pattern calculated from Canadian demographic data), the correlation was fairly strong. But much stronger - nearly perfect, in fact - was the correlation between the grief curves of these modern Canadians and the reproductive-potential curve of a hunter-gatherer people, the !Kung of Africa. In other words, the pattern of changing grief was almost exactly what a Darwinian would predict, given demographic realities in the ancestral environment... The first correlation was .64, the second an extremely high .92.

(Robert Wright, summarizing: "Human Grief: Is Its Intensity Related to the Reproductive Value of the Deceased?" Crawford, C. B., Salter, B. E., and Lang, K.L. Ethology and Sociobiology 10:297-307.)

Disclaimer: I haven't read this paper because it (a) isn't online and (b) is not specifically relevant to my actual real job. But going on the given description, it seems like a reasonably awesome experiment. [Gated version here, thanks Benja Fallenstein. Odd, I thought I searched for that. Reading now... seems to check out on the basics. Correlations are as described, N=221.]

The most obvious inelegance of this study, as described, is that it was conducted by asking human adults to imagine parental grief, rather than asking real parents with children of particular ages. (Presumably that would have cost more / allowed fewer subjects.) However, my understanding is that the results here squared well with the data from closer studies of parental grief that were looking for other correlations (i.e., a raw correlation between parental grief and child age).

That said, consider some of this experiment's elegant aspects:

A correlation of .92(!) This may sound suspiciously high - could evolution really do such exact fine-tuning? - until you realize that this selection pressure was not only great enough to fine-tune parental grief, but, in fact, carve it out of existence from scratch in the first place.
People who say that evolutionary psychology hasn'

...
The Evolutionary-Cognitive Boundary
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2009-02-12T16:44:43.000Z

I tend to draw a very sharp line between anything that happens inside a brain and anything that happened in evolutionary history. There are good reasons for this! Anything originally computed in a brain can be expected to be recomputed, on the fly, in response to changing circumstances.

Consider, for example, the hypothesis that managers behave rudely toward subordinates "to signal their higher status". This hypothesis then has two natural subdivisions:

If rudeness is an executing adaptation as such - something historically linked to the fact it signaled high status, but not psychologically linked to status drives - then we might experiment and find that, say, the rudeness of high-status men to lower-status men depended on the number of desirable women watching, but that they weren't aware of this fact. Or maybe that people are just as rude when posting completely anonymously on the Internet (or more rude; they can now indulge their adapted penchant to be rude without worrying about the now-nonexistent reputational consequences).

If rudeness is a conscious or subconscious strategy to signal high status (which is itself a universal adapted desire), then we're more likely to expect the style of rudeness to be culturally variable, like clothes or jewelry; different kinds of rudeness will send different signals in different places. People will be most likely to be rude (in the culturally indicated fashion) in front of those whom they have the greatest psychological desire to impress with their own high status.

When someone says, "People do X to signal Y", I tend to hear, "People do X when they consciously or subconsciously expect it to signal Y", not, "Evolution built people to do X as an adaptation that executes given such-and-such circumstances, because in the ancestral environment, X signaled Y."

I apologize, Robin, if this means I misunderstood you. But I think it really is important to use different words that draw a hard boundary between the evolutionary computation and the cognitive computation - "People are adapted to do X because it signaled Y", versus "People do X because they expect it to signal Y".

"Distal cause" and "proximate cause" doesn't seem good enough, when there's such a sharp boundary within the causal network about what gets computed, how it got computed, and when it will be recomputed. Yes, we have epis...
Cynicism in Ev-Psych (and Econ?)
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2009-02-11T15:06:44.000Z

Though I know more about the former than the latter, I begin to suspect that different styles of cynicism prevail in evolutionary psychology than in microeconomics.

Evolutionary psychologists are absolutely and uniformly cynical about the real reason why humans are universally wired with a chunk of complex purposeful functional circuitry X (e.g. an emotion) - we have X because it increased inclusive genetic fitness in the ancestral environment, full stop.

Evolutionary psychologists are mildly cynical about the environmental circumstances that activate and maintain an emotion. For example, if you fall in love with the body, mind, and soul of some beautiful mate, an evolutionary psychologist would like to check up on you in ten years to see whether the degree to which you think your mate's mind is still beautiful, correlates with independent judges' ratings of how physically attractive that mate still is.

But it wouldn't be conventionally ev-psych cynicism to suppose that you don't really love your mate, and that you were actually just attracted to their body all along, but that instead you told yourself a self-deceiving story about virtuously loving them for their mind, in order to falsely signal commitment.

Robin, on the other hand, often seems to think that this general type of cynicism is the default explanation and that anything else bears a burden of proof - why suppose an explanation that invokes a genuine virtue, when a selfish desire will do?

Of course my experience with having deep discussions with economists mostly consists of talking to Robin, but I suspect that this is at least partially reflective of a difference between the ev-psych and economic notions of parsimony.

Ev-psychers are trying to be parsimonious with how complex of an adaptation they postulate, and how cleverly complicated they are supposing natural selection to have been.

Economists... well, it's not my field, but maybe they're trying be parsimonious by having just a few simple motives that play out in complex ways via consequentialist calculations?

Quoth Leda Cosmides and John Tooby (famous EPers):

"The science of understanding living organization is very different from physics or chemistry, where parsimony makes sense as a theoretical criterion. The study of organisms is more like reverse engineering, where one may be dealing with a large array of very different compone...
Informers and Persuaders
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2009-02-10T20:22:55.000Z

Suppose we lived in this completely alternate universe where nothing in academia was about status, and no one had any concept of style. A universe where people wrote journal articles, and editors approved them, without the tiniest shred of concern for what "impression" it gave - without trying to look serious or solemn or sophisticated, and without being afraid of looking silly or even stupid. We shall even suppose that readers, correspondingly, have no such impressions.

In this simpler world, academics write papers from only two possible motives:

First, they may have some theory of which they desire to persuade others; this theory may or may not be true, and may or may not be believed for virtuous reasons or with very strong confidence, but the writer of the paper desires to gain adherents for it.

Second, there will be those who write with an utterly pure and virtuous love of the truthfinding process; they desire solely to give people more unfiltered evidence and to see evidence correctly added up, without a shred of attachment to their or anyone else's theory.

People in the first group may want to signal membership in the second group, but people in the second group only want their readers to be well-informed. In any case, to first order we must suppose that none of this is about signaling - that all such motives are just blanked out.

What do journal articles in this world look like, and how do the Persuaders' articles differ from the Informers'?

First, I would argue that both groups write much less formal journal articles than our own. I've read probably around a hundred books on writing (they're addictive); and they all treated formality as entropy to be fought - a state of disorder into which writing slides. It is easier to use big words than small words, easier to be abstract than concrete, easier to use passive -ation words than their active counterparts. Perhaps formality first became associated with Authority, back in the dawn of time, because Authorities put in less effort and forced their audience to read anyway. Formality became associated with Wisdom by being hard to understand. Why suppose that scientific formality was ever about preventing propaganda?

Both groups still use technical language, because they both care about being precise. They even use big w...
(Moral) Truth in Fiction?
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2009-02-09T17:26:12.000Z

A comment by Anonymous on Three Worlds Collide:

After reading this story I feel myself agreeing with Eliezer more on his views and that seems to be a sign of manipulation and not of rationality.

Philosophy expressed in form of fiction seems to have a very strong effect on people - even if the fiction isn't very good (ref. Ayn Rand).

Robin has similar qualms:

Since people are inconsistent but reluctant to admit that fact, their moral beliefs can be influenced by which moral dilemmas they consider in what order, especially when written by a good writer. I expect Eliezer chose his dilemmas in order to move readers toward his preferred moral beliefs, but why should I expect those are better moral beliefs than those of all the other authors of fictional moral dilemmas?

If I'm going to read a literature that might influence my moral beliefs, I'd rather read professional philosophers and other academics making more explicit arguments.

I replied that I had taken considerable pains to set out the explicit arguments before daring to publish the story. And moreover, I had gone to considerable length to present the Superhappy argument in the best possible light. (The opposing viewpoint is the counterpart of the villain; you want it to look as reasonable as possible for purposes of dramatic conflict, the same principle whereby Frodo confronts the Dark Lord Sauron rather than a cockroach.)

Robin didn't find this convincing:

I don't think readers should much let down their guard against communication modes where sneaky persuasion is more feasible simply because the author has made some more explicit arguments elsewhere... Academic philosophy offers exemplary formats and styles for low-sneak ways to argue about values.

I think that this understates the power and utility of fiction. I once read a book that was called something like "How to Read" (no, not "How to Read a Book") which said that nonfiction was about communicating knowledge, while fiction was about communicating experience.

If I want to communicate something about the experience of being a rationalist, I can best do it by writing a short story with a rationalist character. Not only would identical abstract statements about proper responses have less impact, they wouldn't even communicate the same thought.

From The Failures of Eld Science:

"...Work expands to fill the time allotted, ...
...And Say No More Of It
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2009-02-09T00:15:35.000Z

Followup to: The Thing That I Protect

Anything done with an ulterior motive has to be done with a pure heart. You cannot serve your ulterior motive, without faithfully prosecuting your overt purpose as a thing in its own right, that has its own integrity. If, for example, you're writing about rationality with the intention of recruiting people to your utilitarian Cause, then you cannot talk too much about your Cause, or you will fail to successfully write about rationality.

This doesn't mean that you never say anything about your Cause, but there's a balance to be struck. "A fanatic is someone who can't change his mind and won't change the subject."

In previous months, I've pushed this balance too far toward talking about Singularity-related things. And this was for (first-order) selfish reasons on my part; I was finally GETTING STUFF SAID that had been building up painfully in my brain for FRICKIN' YEARS. And so I just kept writing, because it was finally coming out. For those of you who have not the slightest interest, I'm sorry to have polluted your blog with that.

When Less Wrong starts up, it will, by my own request, impose a two-month moratorium on discussion of "Friendly AI" and other Singularity/intelligence explosion-related topics.

There's a number of reasons for this. One of them is simply to restore the balance. Another is to make sure that a forum intended to have a more general audience, doesn't narrow itself down and disappear.

But more importantly - there are certain subjects which tend to drive people crazy, even if there's truth behind them. Quantum mechanics would be the paradigmatic example; you don't have to go funny in the head but a lot of people do. Likewise Godel's Theorem, consciousness, Artificial Intelligence -

The concept of "Friendly AI" can be poisonous in certain ways. True or false, it carries risks to mental health. And not just the obvious liabilities of praising a Happy Thing. Something stranger and subtler that drains enthusiasm.

If there were no such problem as Friendly AI, I would probably be
devoting more or less my entire life to cultivating human rationality; I would have already been doing it for years.

And though I could be mistaken - I'm gue...