4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
3yr ago·Edited 3yr ago
Bounded rationality is a real field of study, describing optimal behaviour for agents who can't actually reason and obtain information infinitely for free.
Even Yudkowsky concedes that rationality is about winning. It seems pretty straightforward to see that someone who is still busy calculating probabilities to see if some skub paper checks out while the police remove him from the premises as the debt collector wants to foreclose his home is not winning. As a corollary, if the gut feeling strategy consistently gets better outcomes than the "reason and logic" one, it's more rational.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
Monicen 3yr ago
As I said in a parallel comment, I am meaning to explain why people can rationally choose to leave these essays unread and not have their beliefs shifted by them much, to push back against the "rationalists are ignoring this high-quality argument, which proves they are not so rational after all" rhetoric that the essay itself and its proponents are employing. Also, both the addressee of the essay and the backdrop community of this forum use a much more specific definition of "rationality" and "rationalism" than the dictionary one as a core part of their identity. I doubt that Alexandros does not know this, so to suddenly insist on the dictionary definition seems rather disingenuous.
project your distrust on to others as if they must rely their trust upon you more than their own cognitive skills
I think something is still off about your use of words (the "project", "rely their trust") which might result in us talking past each other to some extent, but I'm emphatically not trying to say that anyone should take my word for it. I've already declared that I know little about the field! However, with bounded resources, two rational actors can in fact arrive at different beliefs. I'm asserting that I'm acting rationally in continuing to treat Ivermectin as ineffectual and not reading the essay, and other people who do the same may be doing so as well. Some other people who did not read the essay and continue believing that and acting as if Ivermectin works against COVID may also be acting rational. People who actually read the essay and updated their beliefs to treat Ivermectin as effective may also be acting rational. Therefore, the circumstance that the essay is being dismissed is not prima facie evidence that the community is widely lacking in rationality. (Of course, someone who would stand to benefit a great deal from being convinced that Ivermectin works and can afford understanding the essay would be irrational to ignore it, and conversely someone who should have better things to do with their time may be irrational in reading and updating on the essay.)
The Wikipedia page you linked to makes it clear that "bounded rationality" is a theoretical concept used in posthoc decision-making modeling (such as in economics) and is not something one uses, as your comment does, to buttress a rationalizing of their subjective-intuitive belief giving an impression of it being more factual that it actually is.
Does it? Provide a citation saying that it's only used in post-hoc modelling. I'm not a fan of waving around real-life credentials in general, but here it's probably worth saying that I've actually published in the field and I can assure you there is a plethora of papers written explicitly from the perspective of planning future actions - and, either way, the separation between post-hoc and non-post-hoc you seem to be postulating does not exist, since anything that can be used to evaluate an outcome can also be used to estimate optimal actions, if you know anything about the relationship between actions and expected outcomes at all.
That's the kind of sophistry only rationalists can come up with!
By "rationalists", do you now mean people who swear by "reason and logic", or are you back to using the more specific definition?
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
Monicen 3yr ago
I don't think your impression is correct, and moreover this kind of attempt to psychoanalyse your interlocutor is really not conducive to having a conversation where even one of the participants walks away with a benefit. Could you please actually engage with the content of my claim, instead of trying to dismiss it by way of something that seems to amount to "dictionary definitions say this is now how you do rationality"? The claim is not that complex: for many people in the community, it is utility-maximising to ignore this essay and continue disbelieving in Ivermectin's efficacy, because the essay takes a lot of time and effort to evaluate, the extra utility gained if it is in fact correct is small, and there are common priors that it would be surprising (that is: unlikely) if Ivermectin works against COVID. Therefore, because the definition of "rational" used by "rationalists" is very close to "utility-maximising", as far as rationalists are concerned the essay and discourse around it are not in fact strong evidence that rationalists are failing to be rational. If you disagree with any part of this, state which one! I would find it interesting to see your counterarguments about that. I would not find it interesting to see further arguments that I am only thinking those thoughts because I hate the author.
We can see the results of arguments that someone who aims to be X (their definition) is betraying their principles because they are failing to be X (your definition) around us every day, for X="not racist", "just" etc.; personally, at least, I don't like these results.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
Monicen 3yr ago
I'm not disputing your rationalization per see.
So you think the argument is correct? In that case, what are we even disagreeing about? The argument concluded that the rationalist community is not being particularly "irrational" or even doing anything clearly wrong in not reading and reacting to the text. Do you want this to change? If not, I don't see why you even bother posting about it. If yes, I think I offered some reasonably actionable ways in which you could make it change. Of course, if you think those ways are not actually actionable, this does reflect badly on the case itself: for instance, if even people interested in and informed on the topic can't propose a mechanism of action by which Ivermectin is supposed to help against COVID, this makes it more likely that such a mechanism doesn't exist.
And Instead of "continue disbelieving in Ivermectin's efficacy" it would be more accurate to say people "don't care to change one's mind based on new information because one cannot even be bothered to understand it".
The world is full of texts that claim to improve your life drastically which I assume you haven't all read, ranging from self-help books to religious scriptures. If I tell you that Dianetics (the Scientology book) is very definitively correct and will improve your life for the better, will you go read it? If not, why not? Do you also "not care to change your mind based on new information because you cannot even be bothered to understand it"? Is every explanation you have for not reading those texts also a "rationalisation" as you define the term, or do you figure that your reasoning there is more legitimate somehow?
[...] your orignal comment [...] saying "[...] I suggest everyone do so."
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
Monicen 3yr ago
"Rationalisation" is just a label you applied to my reasoning though, and from what I can tell you have at no point actually argued in what way it failed to be a rational argument. You don't prove that something is a not-X by labelling it a Y and then asserting without proof that Y implies not-X.
But, before I leave, since you asked "Can you quote where you think I said that?" - it was from the part I already quoted above, "For most everyone else, it would be more rational to ignore the essay, leave your prior largely unshifted" which is code for saying "Yea, continue trusting what you have read from Scott, even though this gigantic rebuttal is claiming he is not fully right." instead of saying, for example, "Realize that what you understood from Scott may not be entirely right; if you want to know for sure however you must read this gigantic rebuttal." I guess you have overlooked the implicit authority bias in this whole thing.
How do you figure it is code for that completely different statement? Telling me what my statement is supposedly code for is pretty silly; I might as well go and say that in your post, "See you around." is code for "I am the most rational being to ever exist and you should all bow before me", with the same level of authority. Did you miss the part where I said that you should leave your prior unshifted, that is, if you already believe Scott's post to be wrong and Ivermectin to work against COVID, you should also continue believing that? This is markedly different from suggesting that people trust me, or Scott, or anyone on the topic of whether Ivermectin works. At most you could take what I wrote as arguing that reading this essay is probably not worth the typical reader's time, not because I believe it is probably wrong (though I do) but because I believe that it is a waste of time even if it is right. Rather than leaning on mine or anyone's authority, I believe I outlined a fairly reproducible argument, along with a set of inputs that lead to the conclusion. If your inputs are different, your mileage may naturally vary.
(Perhaps it is necessary to reiterate that something can be true and not worth wasting time on for 99.99...% of people, e.g. the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem. In the realm of maths, I will also continue believing that the abc conjecture is unproven and not invest time in reading Mochizuki's claimed proof, even though I think it's still possible that it does wind up checking out, and would likewise consider the same stance rational without claiming even an inkling of authority.)
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Notes -
Bounded rationality is a real field of study, describing optimal behaviour for agents who can't actually reason and obtain information infinitely for free.
Even Yudkowsky concedes that rationality is about winning. It seems pretty straightforward to see that someone who is still busy calculating probabilities to see if some skub paper checks out while the police remove him from the premises as the debt collector wants to foreclose his home is not winning. As a corollary, if the gut feeling strategy consistently gets better outcomes than the "reason and logic" one, it's more rational.
As I said in a parallel comment, I am meaning to explain why people can rationally choose to leave these essays unread and not have their beliefs shifted by them much, to push back against the "rationalists are ignoring this high-quality argument, which proves they are not so rational after all" rhetoric that the essay itself and its proponents are employing. Also, both the addressee of the essay and the backdrop community of this forum use a much more specific definition of "rationality" and "rationalism" than the dictionary one as a core part of their identity. I doubt that Alexandros does not know this, so to suddenly insist on the dictionary definition seems rather disingenuous.
I think something is still off about your use of words (the "project", "rely their trust") which might result in us talking past each other to some extent, but I'm emphatically not trying to say that anyone should take my word for it. I've already declared that I know little about the field! However, with bounded resources, two rational actors can in fact arrive at different beliefs. I'm asserting that I'm acting rationally in continuing to treat Ivermectin as ineffectual and not reading the essay, and other people who do the same may be doing so as well. Some other people who did not read the essay and continue believing that and acting as if Ivermectin works against COVID may also be acting rational. People who actually read the essay and updated their beliefs to treat Ivermectin as effective may also be acting rational. Therefore, the circumstance that the essay is being dismissed is not prima facie evidence that the community is widely lacking in rationality. (Of course, someone who would stand to benefit a great deal from being convinced that Ivermectin works and can afford understanding the essay would be irrational to ignore it, and conversely someone who should have better things to do with their time may be irrational in reading and updating on the essay.)
Does it? Provide a citation saying that it's only used in post-hoc modelling. I'm not a fan of waving around real-life credentials in general, but here it's probably worth saying that I've actually published in the field and I can assure you there is a plethora of papers written explicitly from the perspective of planning future actions - and, either way, the separation between post-hoc and non-post-hoc you seem to be postulating does not exist, since anything that can be used to evaluate an outcome can also be used to estimate optimal actions, if you know anything about the relationship between actions and expected outcomes at all.
By "rationalists", do you now mean people who swear by "reason and logic", or are you back to using the more specific definition?
I don't think your impression is correct, and moreover this kind of attempt to psychoanalyse your interlocutor is really not conducive to having a conversation where even one of the participants walks away with a benefit. Could you please actually engage with the content of my claim, instead of trying to dismiss it by way of something that seems to amount to "dictionary definitions say this is now how you do rationality"? The claim is not that complex: for many people in the community, it is utility-maximising to ignore this essay and continue disbelieving in Ivermectin's efficacy, because the essay takes a lot of time and effort to evaluate, the extra utility gained if it is in fact correct is small, and there are common priors that it would be surprising (that is: unlikely) if Ivermectin works against COVID. Therefore, because the definition of "rational" used by "rationalists" is very close to "utility-maximising", as far as rationalists are concerned the essay and discourse around it are not in fact strong evidence that rationalists are failing to be rational. If you disagree with any part of this, state which one! I would find it interesting to see your counterarguments about that. I would not find it interesting to see further arguments that I am only thinking those thoughts because I hate the author.
We can see the results of arguments that someone who aims to be X (their definition) is betraying their principles because they are failing to be X (your definition) around us every day, for X="not racist", "just" etc.; personally, at least, I don't like these results.
So you think the argument is correct? In that case, what are we even disagreeing about? The argument concluded that the rationalist community is not being particularly "irrational" or even doing anything clearly wrong in not reading and reacting to the text. Do you want this to change? If not, I don't see why you even bother posting about it. If yes, I think I offered some reasonably actionable ways in which you could make it change. Of course, if you think those ways are not actually actionable, this does reflect badly on the case itself: for instance, if even people interested in and informed on the topic can't propose a mechanism of action by which Ivermectin is supposed to help against COVID, this makes it more likely that such a mechanism doesn't exist.
The world is full of texts that claim to improve your life drastically which I assume you haven't all read, ranging from self-help books to religious scriptures. If I tell you that Dianetics (the Scientology book) is very definitively correct and will improve your life for the better, will you go read it? If not, why not? Do you also "not care to change your mind based on new information because you cannot even be bothered to understand it"? Is every explanation you have for not reading those texts also a "rationalisation" as you define the term, or do you figure that your reasoning there is more legitimate somehow?
Can you quote where you think I said that?
"Rationalisation" is just a label you applied to my reasoning though, and from what I can tell you have at no point actually argued in what way it failed to be a rational argument. You don't prove that something is a not-X by labelling it a Y and then asserting without proof that Y implies not-X.
How do you figure it is code for that completely different statement? Telling me what my statement is supposedly code for is pretty silly; I might as well go and say that in your post, "See you around." is code for "I am the most rational being to ever exist and you should all bow before me", with the same level of authority. Did you miss the part where I said that you should leave your prior unshifted, that is, if you already believe Scott's post to be wrong and Ivermectin to work against COVID, you should also continue believing that? This is markedly different from suggesting that people trust me, or Scott, or anyone on the topic of whether Ivermectin works. At most you could take what I wrote as arguing that reading this essay is probably not worth the typical reader's time, not because I believe it is probably wrong (though I do) but because I believe that it is a waste of time even if it is right. Rather than leaning on mine or anyone's authority, I believe I outlined a fairly reproducible argument, along with a set of inputs that lead to the conclusion. If your inputs are different, your mileage may naturally vary.
(Perhaps it is necessary to reiterate that something can be true and not worth wasting time on for 99.99...% of people, e.g. the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem. In the realm of maths, I will also continue believing that the abc conjecture is unproven and not invest time in reading Mochizuki's claimed proof, even though I think it's still possible that it does wind up checking out, and would likewise consider the same stance rational without claiming even an inkling of authority.)
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