And what could be more virtuous than seeing connections? Surely the wisest of all human beings are the New Age gurus who say, “Everything is connected to everything else.” If you ever say this aloud, you should pause, so that everyone can absorb the sheer shock of this Deep Wisdom.
There is a trivial mapping between a graph and its complement. A fully connected graph, with an edge between every two vertices, conveys the same amount of information as a graph with no edges at all. The important graphs are the ones where some things are not connected to some other things.
When the unenlightened ones try to be profound, they draw endless verbal comparisons between this topic, and that topic, which is like this, which is like that; until their graph is fully connected and also totally useless. The remedy is specific knowledge and in-depth study. When you understand things in detail, you can see how they are not alike, and start enthusiastically subtracting edges off your graph.
Likewise, the important categories are the ones that do not contain everything in the universe. Good hypotheses can only explain some possible outcomes, and not others.
It was perfectly all right for Isaac Newton to explain just gravity, just the way things fall down—and how planets orbit the Sun, and how the Moon generates the tides—but not the role of money in human society or how the heart pumps blood. Sneering at narrowness is rather reminiscent of ancient Greeks who thought that going out and actually looking at things was manual labor, and manual labor was for slaves.
As Plato put it in The Republic, Book VII:1
If anyone should throw back his head and learn something by staring at the varied patterns on a ceiling, apparently you would think that he was contemplating with his reason, when he was only staring with his eyes . . . I cannot but believe that no study makes the soul look on high except that which is concerned with real being and the unseen. Whether he gape and stare upwards, or shut his mouth and stare downwards, if it be things of the senses that he tries to learn something about, I declare he never could learn, for none of these things admit of knowledge: I say his soul is looking down, not up, even if he is floating on his back on land or on sea!
Many today make a similar mistake, and think that narrow concepts are as lowly and unlofty and unphilosophical as, say, going out and looking at things—an endeavor only suited to the underclass. But rationalists—and also poets—need narrow words to express precise thoughts; they need categories that include only some things, and exclude others. There’s nothing wrong with focusing your mind, narrowing your categories, excluding possibilities, and sharpening your propositions. Really, there isn’t! If you make your words too broad, you end up with something that isn’t true and doesn’t even make good poetry.
And DON’T EVEN GET ME STARTED on people who think Wikipedia is an “Artificial Intelligence,” the invention of LSD was a “Singularity,” or that corporations are “superintelligent”!
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1. Plato, Great Dialogues of Plato, ed. Eric H. Warmington and Philip G. Rouse (Signet Classic, 1999).
96
How to Seem (and Be) Deep
I recently attended a discussion group whose topic, at that session, was Death. It brought out deep emotions. I think that of all the Silicon Valley lunches I’ve ever attended, this one was the most honest; people talked about the death of family, the death of friends, what they thought about their own deaths. People really listened to each other. I wish I knew how to reproduce those conditions reliably.
I was the only transhumanist present, and I was extremely careful not to be obnoxious about it. (“A fanatic is someone who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.” I endeavor to at least be capable of changing the subject.) Unsurprisingly, people talked about the meaning that death gives to life, or how death is truly a blessing in disguise. But I did, very cautiously, explain that transhumanists are generally positive on life but thumbs down on death.
Afterward, several people came up to me and told me I was very “deep.” Well, yes, I am, but this got me thinking about what makes people seem deep.
At one point in the discussion, a woman said that thinking about death led her to be nice to people because, who knows, she might not see them again. “When I have a nice thing to say about someone,” she said, “now I say it to them right away, instead of waiting.”
“That is a beautiful thought,” I said, “and even if someday the threat of death is lifted from you, I hope you will keep on doing it—”
Afterward, this woman was one of the people who told me I was deep.
At another point in the discussion, a man spoke of some benefit X of death, I don’t recall exactly what. And I said: “You know, given human nature, if people got hit on the head by a baseball bat every week, pretty soon they would invent reasons why getting hit on the head with a baseball bat was a good thing. But if you took someone who wasn’t being hit on the head with a baseball bat, and you asked them if they wanted it, they would say no. I think that if you took someone who was immortal, and asked them if they wanted to die for benefit X, they would say no.”
Afterward, this man told me I was deep.
Correlation is not causality. Maybe I was just speaking in a deep voice that day, and so sounded wise.
But my suspicion is that I came across as “deep” because I coherently violated the cached pattern for “deep wisdom” in a way that made immediate sense.
There’s a stereotype of Deep Wisdom. Death. Complete the pattern: “Death gives meaning to life.” Everyone knows this standard Deeply Wise response. And so it takes on some of the characteristics of an applause light. If you say it, people may nod along, because the brain completes the pattern and they know they’re supposed to nod. They may even say “What deep wisdom!,” perhaps in the hope of being thought deep themselves. But they will not be surprised; they will not have heard anything outside the box; they will not have heard anything they could not have thought of for themselves. One might call it belief in wisdom—the thought is labeled “deeply wise,” and it’s the completed standard pattern for “deep wisdom,” but it carries no experience of insight.
People who try to seem Deeply Wise often end up seeming hollow, echoing as it were, because they’re trying to seem Deeply Wise instead of optimizing.
How much thinking did I need to do, in the course of seeming deep? Human brains only run at 100Hz and I responded in realtime, so most of the work must have been precomputed. The part I experienced as effortful was picking a response understandable in one inferential step and then phrasing it for maximum impact.
Philosophically, nearly all of my work was already done. Complete the pattern: Existing condition X is really justified because it has benefit Y. “Naturalistic fallacy?” / “Status quo bias?” / “Could we get Y without X?” / “If we had never even heard of X before, would we voluntarily take it on to get Y?” I think it’s fair to say that I execute these thought-patterns at around the same level of automaticity as I breathe. After all, most of human thought has to be cache lookups if the brain is to work at all.
And I already held to the developed philosophy of transhumanism. Transhumanism also has cached thoughts about death. Death. Complete the pattern: “Death is a pointless tragedy which people rationalize.” This was a nonstandard cache, one with which my listeners were unfamiliar. I had several opportunities to use nonstandard cache, and because they were all part of the developed philosophy of transhumanism, they all visibly belonged to the same theme. This made me seem coherent, as well as original.
I suspect this is one reason Eastern philosophy seems deep to Westerners—it has nonstandard but coherent cache for Deep Wisdom. Symmetrically, in works of Japanese fiction, one sometimes finds Christians depicted as repositories of deep wisdom and/or mystical secrets. (And sometimes not.)
If I recall correctly, an economist once remarked that popular audiences are so unfamiliar with standard economics that, when he was called upon to make a television appearance, he just needed to repeat ba
ck Econ 101 in order to sound like a brilliantly original thinker.
Also crucial was that my listeners could see immediately that my reply made sense. They might or might not have agreed with the thought, but it was not a complete non-sequitur unto them. I know transhumanists who are unable to seem deep because they are unable to appreciate what their listener does not already know. If you want to sound deep, you can never say anything that is more than a single step of inferential distance away from your listener’s current mental state. That’s just the way it is.
To seem deep, study nonstandard philosophies. Seek out discussions on topics that will give you a chance to appear deep. Do your philosophical thinking in advance, so you can concentrate on explaining well. Above all, practice staying within the one-inferential-step bound.
To be deep, think for yourself about “wise” or important or emotionally fraught topics. Thinking for yourself isn’t the same as coming up with an unusual answer. It does mean seeing for yourself, rather than letting your brain complete the pattern. If you don’t stop at the first answer, and cast out replies that seem vaguely unsatisfactory, in time your thoughts will form a coherent whole, flowing from the single source of yourself, rather than being fragmentary repetitions of other people’s conclusions.
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97
We Change Our Minds Less Often Than We Think
Over the past few years, we have discreetly approached colleagues faced with a choice between job offers, and asked them to estimate the probability that they will choose one job over another. The average confidence in the predicted choice was a modest 66%, but only 1 of the 24 respondents chose the option to which he or she initially assigned a lower probability, yielding an overall accuracy rate of 96%.
—Dale Griffin and Amos Tversky1
When I first read the words above—on August 1st, 2003, at around 3 o’clock in the afternoon—it changed the way I thought. I realized that once I could guess what my answer would be—once I could assign a higher probability to deciding one way than other—then I had, in all probability, already decided. We change our minds less often than we think. And most of the time we become able to guess what our answer will be within half a second of hearing the question.
How swiftly that unnoticed moment passes, when we can’t yet guess what our answer will be; the tiny window of opportunity for intelligence to act. In questions of choice, as in questions of fact.
The principle of the bottom line is that only the actual causes of your beliefs determine your effectiveness as a rationalist. Once your belief is fixed, no amount of argument will alter the truth-value; once your decision is fixed, no amount of argument will alter the consequences.
You might think that you could arrive at a belief, or a decision, by non-rational means, and then try to justify it, and if you found you couldn’t justify it, reject it.
But we change our minds less often—much less often—than we think.
I’m sure that you can think of at least one occasion in your life when you’ve changed your mind. We all can. How about all the occasions in your life when you didn’t change your mind? Are they as available, in your heuristic estimate of your competence?
Between hindsight bias, fake causality, positive bias, anchoring/priming, et cetera, et cetera, and above all the dreaded confirmation bias, once an idea gets into your head, it’s probably going to stay there.
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1. Dale Griffin and Amos Tversky, “The Weighing of Evidence and the Determinants of Confidence,” Cognitive Psychology 24, no. 3 (1992): 411–435, doi:10.1016/0010-0285(92)90013-R.
98
Hold Off On Proposing Solutions
From Robyn Dawes’s Rational Choice in an Uncertain World.1 Bolding added.
Norman R. F. Maier noted that when a group faces a problem, the natural tendency of its members is to propose possible solutions as they begin to discuss the problem. Consequently, the group interaction focuses on the merits and problems of the proposed solutions, people become emotionally attached to the ones they have suggested, and superior solutions are not suggested. Maier enacted an edict to enhance group problem solving: “Do not propose solutions until the problem has been discussed as thoroughly as possible without suggesting any.” It is easy to show that this edict works in contexts where there are objectively defined good solutions to problems.
Maier devised the following “role playing” experiment to demonstrate his point. Three employees of differing ability work on an assembly line. They rotate among three jobs that require different levels of ability, because the most able—who is also the most dominant—is strongly motivated to avoid boredom. In contrast, the least able worker, aware that he does not perform the more difficult jobs as well as the other two, has agreed to rotation because of the dominance of his able co-worker. An “efficiency expert” notes that if the most able employee were given the most difficult task and the least able the least difficult, productivity could be improved by 20%, and the expert recommends that the employees stop rotating. The three employees and . . . a fourth person designated to play the role of foreman are asked to discuss the expert’s recommendation. Some role-playing groups are given Maier’s edict not to discuss solutions until having discussed the problem thoroughly, while others are not. Those who are not given the edict immediately begin to argue about the importance of productivity versus worker autonomy and the avoidance of boredom. Groups presented with the edict have a much higher probability of arriving at the solution that the two more able workers rotate, while the least able one sticks to the least demanding job—a solution that yields a 19% increase in productivity.
I have often used this edict with groups I have led—particularly when they face a very tough problem, which is when group members are most apt to propose solutions immediately. While I have no objective criterion on which to judge the quality of the problem solving of the groups, Maier’s edict appears to foster better solutions to problems.
This is so true it’s not even funny. And it gets worse and worse the tougher the problem becomes. Take Artificial Intelligence, for example. A surprising number of people I meet seem to know exactly how to build an Artificial General Intelligence, without, say, knowing how to build an optical character recognizer or a collaborative filtering system (much easier problems). And as for building an AI with a positive impact on the world—a Friendly AI, loosely speaking—why, that problem is so incredibly difficult that an actual majority resolve the whole issue within fifteen seconds. Give me a break.
This problem is by no means unique to AI. Physicists encounter plenty of nonphysicists with their own theories of physics, economists get to hear lots of amazing new theories of economics. If you’re an evolutionary biologist, anyone you meet can instantly solve any open problem in your field, usually by postulating group selection. Et cetera.
Maier’s advice echoes the principle of the bottom line, that the effectiveness of our decisions is determined only by whatever evidence and processing we did in first arriving at our decisions—after you write the bottom line, it is too late to write more reasons above. If you make your decision very early on, it will, in fact, be based on very little thought, no matter how many amazing arguments you come up with afterward.
And consider furthermore that We Change Our Minds Less Often than We Think: 24 people assigned an average 66% probability to the future choice thought more probable, but only 1 in 24 actually chose the option thought less probable. Once you can guess what your answer will be, you have probably already decided. If you can guess your answer half a second after hearing the question, then you have half a second in which to be intelligent. It’s not a lot of time.
Traditional Rationality emphasizes falsification—the ability to relinquish an initial opinion when confronted by clear evidence against it. But once an idea gets into your head, it will probably require way too much evidence to get it out again. Worse, we don’t always have the luxury of overwhelming evidence.
I suspect that a more
powerful (and more difficult) method is to hold off on thinking of an answer. To suspend, draw out, that tiny moment when we can’t yet guess what our answer will be; thus giving our intelligence a longer time in which to act.
Even half a minute would be an improvement over half a second.
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1. Dawes, Rational Choice in An Uncertain World, 55–56.
99
The Genetic Fallacy
In lists of logical fallacies, you will find included “the genetic fallacy”—the fallacy of attacking a belief based on someone’s causes for believing it.
This is, at first sight, a very strange idea—if the causes of a belief do not determine its systematic reliability, what does? If Deep Blue advises us of a chess move, we trust it based on our understanding of the code that searches the game tree, being unable to evaluate the actual game tree ourselves. What could license any probability assignment as “rational,” except that it was produced by some systematically reliable process?
Articles on the genetic fallacy will tell you that genetic reasoning is not always a fallacy—that the origin of evidence can be relevant to its evaluation, as in the case of a trusted expert. But other times, say the articles, it is a fallacy; the chemist Kekulé first saw the ring structure of benzene in a dream, but this doesn’t mean we can never trust this belief.
So sometimes the genetic fallacy is a fallacy, and sometimes it’s not?
The genetic fallacy is formally a fallacy, because the original cause of a belief is not the same as its current justificational status, the sum of all the support and antisupport currently known.
Rationality- From AI to Zombies Page 36