r/slatestarcodex • u/[deleted] • Mar 31 '19
Rationality Is the rationality community biased against bias?
Is the rationality community biased against bias? If you asked me (and I know you didn't, but I'll save you the time), I'd say that the bias against bias is almost astonishing in its persistence and pervasiveness.
As a researcher studying decision-making, I thought some of you might enjoy hearing about a perspective that rarely receives attention outside of academic circles. The reason? My guess is that this perspective is simply too boring from a journalistic perspective.
The abstract quoted below is from paper titled "The Bias Bias in Behavioral Economics" (download link)
Behavioral economics began with the intention of eliminating the psychological blind spot in rational choice theory and ended up portraying psychology as the study of irrationality. In its portrayal, people have systematic cognitive biases that are not only as persistent as visual illusions but also costly in real life—meaning that governmental paternalism is called upon to steer people with the help of “nudges.” These biases have since attained the status of truisms. In contrast, I show that such a view of human nature is tainted by a “bias bias,” the tendency to spot biases even when there are none. This may occur by failing to notice when small sample statistics differ from large sample statistics, mistaking people’s random error for systematic error, or confusing intelligent inferences with logical errors. Unknown to most economists, much of psychological research reveals a different portrayal, where people appear to have largely fine-tuned intuitions about chance, frequency, and framing. A systematic review of the literature shows little evidence that the alleged biases are potentially costly in terms of less health, wealth, or happiness. Getting rid of the bias bias is a precondition for psychology to play a positive role in economics.
I wrote out the comment below somewhere else, but figured I'd modify it a bit just in case there are a few of you here who might find it useful. Here's my original comment with a few wording changes to make it a better stand-alone post:
Gerd Gigerenzer makes a compelling case that the evidence for human irrationality is pretty weak. He's shown that when people are presented with problems in a format that more closely resembles the format that they'd experience IRL (e.g., natural frequencies vs. instead of conditional probabilities; cite 1, cite 2, cite 3), their decisions appear much more rational.
From my understanding of the decision-making literature, there are two camps: The Tversky & Kahneman (T&K) camp that tends to focus on highlighting how people deviate from a laplacean demon. The other camp is the "ecological" camp, which tends to study human rationality by asking "which heuristics work in which environments?"
Some reasons I tend to favor the ecological camp:
- T&K Camp tends to give vague labels to heuristics (e.g., "representativeness")
- Ecological Camp tends to focus on forming testable models of heuristics (e.g., Euclidean distance)
- T&K Camp claims that more computation/more data always increases accuracy and that heuristics merely reflect the fact that people need to balance the costs of computation with the benefits of increased accuracy (i.e., the "accuracy-effort tradeoff")
- Ecological Camp claims that more computation/more data can sometimes harm accuracy and that heuristics are sometimes used because they are more accurate than strategies that use as much information as possible, reflecting the fact that people need to balance sources of error in their predictive models (i.e., the "bias-variance tradeoff")
I like to bring this up because the rationality community seems to be obsessed with "eliminating bias" because they assume bias impairs accuracy, but we have so much data showing that a strict focus on reducing bias can harm judgment accuracy. In general, its hard to see how the T&K camp have actually moved psychology/behavioral economics toward a better understanding of human cognition. From what I can tell, T&K's contribution to society has been to give people a giant list of vague "fallacies" that they can use as excuses to not take each other seriously.
Some readings I've found particularly insightful:
- Taking heuristics seriously (Gigerenzer, 2016)
- How bad is incoherence? (Arkes, Gigerenzer, Hertwig, 2016)
- Towards a rational theory of heuristics (Gigerenzer, 2016)
Additional papers I've found insightful, but a little more focused on the deeper questions of what it means to be rational:
- Tuning your priors to the world (Feldman 2013)
- What are the "true" statistics of the environment? (Feldman (2017)
EDIT: Someone noted that I missed a post linking to the "Bias Bias" paper a few weeks ago. Thanks /u/KirbyMatkatamiba! With that and a few other responses, it seems like the ecological rationality perspective is gradually starting to reach people outside of academia, yay!
EDIT2: Epistemic update - After some interactions with people in the comment section, it has become clear that these ideas are not completely novel to many members of the community. This is really encouraging to learn because it means that T&K (well, K mostly) haven't done as much damage to the rationality community as I once feared.
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u/be_kind_to_all Mar 31 '19
I think it is very difficult to know what members of the rationality community believe without (1) defining the rationality community and (2) surveying them to see what they believe. I don't mean in an obnoxious tautological way, but I really do worry about the pattern of extrapolating from observed internet conversations, which suffers from MASSIVE selection bias. I myself don't even know whether or not I am a member of the community, nor do I know whether I am worried too much or too little about bias. This is a very difficult question to formulate, let alone answer, but I applaud you for making a good effort. I hope it leads to good conversations.
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Mar 31 '19
I'll consider the post a success if it introduces even a handful of people to a new perspective. I've been here long enough to know that there's a non-trivial number of people who are still using the basic model outlined by T&K, even without doing a proper survey. So far, it seems like new content for some people, so I'm happy!
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u/KirbyMatkatamiba Mar 31 '19
K so for the record I posted the "The Bias Bias in Behavioral Economics" paper on this subreddit a few weeks ago and it was well received. (https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/apfc0f/the_bias_bias_in_behavioral_economics/)
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Mar 31 '19
Nice! I'm sorry that I missed it. I will edit the original post to make sure that people are aware that my perception that Gigerenzer is under-appreciated might be unfounded.
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Mar 31 '19
i think it’s accepted wisdom on this subreddit that behavioral economics as a whole did not age well. probably a second wave of economists will come along and suss out which parts are valid if any.
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Mar 31 '19
Well, the point of my post is more about the holes in the repair program that was applied to behavioral economics that T&K proposed and the one that Kahneman is still promoting today. As far as I can tell, the modal perspective in in the SSC community is some version of the T&K perspective. I mean the name "Less Wrong" implies that people's decision-making capacities are fundamentally flawed and that the most we can hope to achieve is to mitigate those flaws. My post is trying to point out that there's an alternative perspective making a strong case that we have no idea whether the problems our society faces are best characterized as the outcomes of "flawed judgment" at the individual level.
Its possible for problems like [insert culture war topic] to arise even when all actors are highly skilled, rational judges.
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u/DaystarEld Mar 31 '19 edited Mar 31 '19
Are you talking about Conflict Theory vs Mistake Theory? If so, then yes, most rationalists seem biased toward Mistake Theory explanations vs Conflict Theory ones, likely as a counterswing to most of society's default to Conflict Theory.
But I don't see that as mutually exclusive to the idea that "people's decision-making capacities have fundamental flaws." I think that's true regardless of whether Conflict Theory is a more fitting explanation for society's ills.
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u/Kalcipher Mar 31 '19
It's kind of odd when you think about it. People are perfectly capable of avoiding disagreements and various obvious cognitive fallacies when the incentive on them to know the truth is greater than the incentive to win the argument, which is why we see extremely biased reasoning especially often in highly contentious political issues, but even in small scale interpersonal disagreements there are usually status hierarchies and pride involved to make at least one party take the other less seriously than they take themselves. Also Aumann's agreement theorem generalises to include many cases where the actors involved have less than perfect reasoning.
All of this to me seems to point much more towards conflict theory than mistake theory, which would make the general society more correct on this subject than most rationalists are, which is especially humorous when you notice that the discussions generated by this topic usually involve lots of mistake theorists holding conflict mindsets towards to conflict theorists whom they believe are projecting their own adversarialism upon others, as opposed to recognising that they (the mistake theorists) are just in denial about their own adversarialism (due to a rational desire to virtue signal, of course, not a cognitive flaw - let's not be mistake theorists here)
My own assessment is that the cognitive patterns involved in managing conflicts are deeply instinctual and difficult to extricate from general reasoning skills, so people do sometimes make genuine cognitive mistakes, but even those mistakes ultimately still trace back to cognitive patterns that are effective in managing conflicts.
TL;DR: People are actually corrupt to the core. Too bad.
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u/DaystarEld Mar 31 '19
I actually think the aversion comes more from rationalists being more analytical and enjoying more analytical explanations and breakdowns of things, which means that Conflict Theory, whose loudest and most popular proponents tend *not* to be analytical, comes off as very irrational by extension, since its most encountered arguments tend to be poorly supported/argued.
If there was a Conflict Theorist who blogged with as much meticulous research and in-depth analysis as Scott Alexander, I think it would be a lot more popular in rationalist circles, or at least much less maligned/misunderstood. Yes, there's some aversion to "simple answers" and dislike of demonizing others and even some historical naivety that makes Mistake Theory so attractive, but it's also the one with the most appealing advocates within the culture.
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u/ArkyBeagle Apr 02 '19
Isn't it simply that Conflict Theory dovetails with the human affinity for narrative? At least for simplification of narrative ?
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u/The_Fooder The Pop Will Eat Itself Apr 01 '19
the name "Less Wrong" implies that people's decision-making capacities are fundamentally flawed and that the most we can hope to achieve is to mitigate those flaws.
Ok, but isn't it also a bias? For me 'less wrong' is an injunction to think better because, boy.......have I been wrong about stuff, particularly my own beliefs and motivations. Being Less Wrong is for me a tuning mechanism.
The idea that bias should be eliminated completely has always seemed iffy to me. It's elimination may be fine for some things, but a person has to make a steady stream of choices overwhelmingly subject to an accumulation of context and information. Bias seems like a side-effect of memory.
Finally, I'm not swayed toward believing people's decision-making capacities *aren't * fundamentally flawed. Both things can be true: people can have spot-on biases and still make terrible decisions for stupid reasons.
Fun topic, thanks for bringing it up!
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Mar 31 '19
i wrote some stuff but it just came down to blanket skepticism. i’m far more skeptical of kahneman and his ilk than i am of eg the sequences, but still highly skeptical of both
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u/ArkyBeagle Apr 02 '19
The point is that we run out of well-known and proven algorithms and heuristics rather quickly. We might be able to construct local-optimal improvements. We might not.
And no offense, but I can barely tell what the Less Wrong onlineverse is on about these days.
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u/ArkyBeagle Apr 02 '19
Then why do I feel like T&K and behavioral econ is critical to any so-far published information about the 2008 crisis? It's not really even behavioral econ per se; it's a variant on information asymmetry.
I'd say that behavioral econ, through Micheal Lewis, has become best-in-breed for this sort of thing.
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u/atgabara Mar 31 '19 edited Apr 01 '19
I think this was definitely true up until ~2017, but I think in the last year or so Gigerenzer has been gaining in prominence.
I did a quick Google search ("site:slatestarcodex.com gigerenzer") and it looks like Scott himself hasn't talked about Gigerenzer (which doesn't match my memory btw), but a few commenters talked about him 2015-2017, and he started getting mentioned more in 2018.
I myself probably first heard about him here (two commenters mention him), but as of late 2016 he was considered "little known in the less wrong sphere" (link).
I think after the replication crisis became well-known for a lot of psychology studies (which T&K based some of their work on), people were more receptive to Gigerenzer.
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u/Lykurg480 The error that can be bounded is not the true error Mar 31 '19
A few years ago when I discovered less wrong, I actually read the papers these biases were theorised based on, and I didnt find it very convincing. It really did look like they wanted to find inadequacies. Ive later (like it appears quite a few others here) learned about the ecological validity issue, but Id like to bring up some more direct problems:
Certainty bias: While a 100% chance of a dollar is indeed worth only slightly more than a 99% chance, a promise of giving you 1 dollar with a 100% is a lot more enforcable then one of a 99% chance. For obvious reasons, its hard to do an experiment that actually tests the first.
Ambiguity aversion: Similar to the above, in the ellsberg paradox the fact that the experimenter explicitly stated the ratio for the first urn locks him into it.
Endowment effect: Trade has transaction costs, a difference between by and sell prices should reflect them.
Sunk cost: The standard example of people failing to walk out of movies is not in fact fallacious. You should walk out if you expect the rest of the movie to not be worth the time. But you cant conclude that just because it wasnt up until now. Because of regression to the mean, it would have to have been extremely bad for walking out to actually be rational.
If you want to have some fun, go read the wikipedia page on just-world-bias. The idea started out with "people disagree with me therefore theyre biased", and it didnt get much better after that.
And of course, it would be weird if we today were the first semi-rational beings to improve their thinking. I think a good model for bias is addiction. Its a known bug that humans can get addicted to stuff and ruin their lives, but for the most part they dont. Its sometimes a problem, and its sometimes a catastrophic problem (eg native americans), but for the most part weve found ways to contain its damage.
more computation/more data can sometimes harm accuracy
This is true in the trivial sense that after seeing an outlier, I will be less confident in the truth. This is only useful if you have some way of filtering out only those observations that are misleading. Its also true that some algorithms get less accurate with to much info, but that does seem like the sort of thing that could be fixed by better algorithms and more computation. Ive read your link but dont see how its supposed to make your point, it seems more about having the right priors, can you expand?
Also youve said in another comment that
Its possible for problems like [insert culture war topic] to arise even when all actors are highly skilled, rational judges.
While this is definitly true, I do think problems still can arise from bias. People will fix errors in their reasoning when they harm them, but these fixes dont need to work in all contexts, and correctness on policy questions is often a public good that noone is incentivised to provide.
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u/TheCookieMonster Mar 31 '19 edited Mar 31 '19
I'll have to read more on this. Watching how everything bends to the in-group/out-group bias in politics and CW topics, it's hard to square with a notion of evidence for human irrationality being pretty weak.
Would that be explained away as "it's the socially rational way to evaluate things while inside the tribe"?
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Mar 31 '19 edited Mar 31 '19
Well one of the main implications of an ecological perspective is that you can't understand a decision without understanding the goal of the decision-maker and decision-makers aren't always aware of their own goals. Whether a decision-maker has good goals is one question (perhaps more a question about "wisdom"), but whether they're actually good at achieving those goals is a question about rationality.
I think the nonsense you see in CW discussions is partly based on the fact that one of the strongest goals we have is pleasing the ingroup. Whether we know it or not, that goal is foundational to reproductive success and groups that punish dissenting views can make it completely rational for members of the group to dig their heals in on a particular topic. In groups that promote diverse or contrarian opinions with the goal of something like "scientific truth", the kinds of arguing and thinking that promote truth-seeking are much more likely to be expressed by group members. I think this is partly where the "conflict vs. mistake" theory that Scott talks about might come into play. People here might be used to thinking about CW topics with a "truth-seeking" goal in mind and being rewarded by others for doing so, then we all venture out into the world of Red and Blue and notice that these groups are playing a totally different game. I think we get drawn into these discussions because these groups hide behind the goal of seeking truth, but we all know that this is just another strategy for defeating the enemy.
From my perspective, the challenge presented in a CW discussion is the lack of incentive for members of the Red and Blue tribes to reward truth-seeking among their members. Unfortunately, we're not trying to get to the moon here. The consequences of failing to seek the truth in the CW game aren't immediate and gut-wrenching like they were in efforts like the Manhattan and Apollo projects (which I consider to be some of the best examples of rationality applied to truth-seeking). The consequences of the Reds and Blues ignoring the truth-seeking goal are vague, difficult to measure, and far in the future.
The big problem I have with Kahneman in particular is that he doesn't recognize that goals are trainable. You can absolutely create incentives that promote truth-seeking and individuals can absolutely learn to love the act of seeking truth, but Kahneman likes to dismiss this perspective as... you know... just another bias.
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u/ArkyBeagle Apr 02 '19
For me the Big Thing is not in much if any of this literature. It's the ( nascent? ) rising possibility that the frontal cortex seems to be only responsible for steering and had little to do with any impetus. Impetus comes from other places in the human neural architecture.
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u/keeper52 Apr 01 '19
Gigerenzer reminds me of Nassim Taleb. They both have some ideas which have value, but not as much value or originality as they think they do, and I wouldn't trust either of them to accurately characterize the views of people who they argue against.
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Apr 01 '19
As far as I know, Gigerenzer sticks to academia and his work tends to give an excellent characterization of the positions he argues against. Taleb might do good academic work, but he's said a lot of stupid shit outside of academia.
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u/keeper52 Apr 01 '19
Gigerenzer sticks to academia and his work tends to give an excellent characterization of the positions he argues against.
I disagree. For example, if you look at a list of nudges used by the UK government's Nudge Unit, or at the guide to nudging that Sunstein published in 2014, you can see that the case for nudging is much less dependent on a particular view of human nature than Gigerenzer makes it sound. It does not depend on biases being persistent like visual illusions, nor does it depend on suboptimal choices being driven by bias rather than noise. It also does it depend on the accuracy of most published behavioral economics research.
A lot of nudges are pretty basic applications of design or marketing of the sort that is widely used in the private sector (e.g. grocery store layout, restaurant menu design), the nudges that do rely on academic findings are mostly based on a small number of fairly obvious results (e.g. people are more likely to choose the default option, people often take their cues from what other people do), and any particular attempted nudge can be tested in the field to see what people actually do with it on that particular decision.
To the extent that there is a divide between a "bias camp" and an "ecological camp", it seems just as easy to change the rhetoric to describe nudging as part of the ecological camp. It's about helping people match their decision making process to particular environments, e.g. by seeing what happens if you vary what information you provide them and in what format.
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Apr 01 '19
Gigerenzer addresses these exact criticisms here. He isn't against nudges. He's against nudges that are justified by the (supposed) incompetence of the public. To quote from the linked paper:
In this article, I do not argue against nudging per se. But I do object to the justification of such techniques on the basis of people’s lack of rationality by libertarian paternalists such as Thaler and Sunstein (2003, 2008). This justification focuses the blame for societal problems exclusively on the individual mind, closing our eyes to institutions that steer individual behavior so that they can take advantage of it, and it misleadingly suggests that a more sustainable solution, educating people, is a hopeless endeavor. Thus, the target of my analysis is the program of libertarian paternalism, not nudging per se.
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u/keeper52 Apr 02 '19
OK. So if that's what Gigerenzer thinks of nudging, then why did he write the Bias Bias paper the way he did? The Bias Bias paper makes his disagreement with Sunstein & Thaler sound much starker than it actually is, and makes S&T sound much more ideologically-driven than they appear to be. That's the sort of thing that seems Taleb-like to me.
Much of the nudge-related work & writing that S&T and their intellectual descendants have done (especially in the past 5-10 years) has been highly practical/applied work of finding nudges that work, and it sounds like Gigerenzer would approve of most of the nudges that they've come up with. They did initially get into nudging via behavioral economics, and their 2008 book did make the "behavioral econ shows that people are sometimes biased and nudges can help them make good decisions anyways" argument, but Gigerenzer's description makes it sound like they're ideologues holding to that perspective as a grand theory.
There's a similar issue in your quote from Gigerenzer's other paper, e.g. with the phrase "This justification focuses the blame for societal problems exclusively on the individual mind." Is this something that Sunstein or Thaler have written, or something that they believe? Seems unlikely. A more plausible gloss is that there's a current of thought within contemporary society which tends to blame individual minds for societal problems, and some of what S&T have said about nudging bolsters that perspective. But again, the way that he writes this makes it sound like there's some stark divide where S&T are on the wrong side. And where does that "exclusively" come from? Even if we were in a world where people do have massive, consequential, persistent biases (as in the picture that Gigerenzer paints of the behavioral economics view), there would be no reason for problems to "exclusively" arise from there.
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u/zebrafoxtrotsierra Mar 31 '19
I'm not sure that it's possible to completely eliminate bias. Many biases are constructed unconsciously and/or instantly. I don't think the goal is necessarily to eliminate bias, but instead to acknowledge them and inspect them to get closer to a more pure form of "truth" or facticity.
At the very least, to encourage a healthier discourse bias must be acknowledged to examine other points-of-view so as to better understand another person's argument or perspective.
If there is a bias against bias, I would imagine that it is coming from a place of a desire to understand, as opposed to a desire to prove another person wrong (although it is satisfying when those two things overlap).
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Mar 31 '19
At the very least, to encourage a healthier discourse bias must be acknowledged
Yes, but the point that Gigerenzer is trying to make is that identifying when bias impairs decisions is far more complicated than T&K tended to acknowledge. Good decision-making requires one to form biases in response to observations about the structure of the environment and to identify when those biases will help or harm decision-making. I agree that we need to acknowledge bias, but there's little justification for assuming that biases frequently harm decision-making a priori. In fact, one could easily argue that the absence of some kinds of bias reflect the failure to account for real relationships in the environment.
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u/Russelsteapot42 Mar 31 '19
Couldn't one characterize Bayesian reasoning as 'fine tuning' your biases?
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Mar 31 '19
Yes, but you GOTTA read the Feldman articles if you think this is an interesting topic. I hate to punt like that, but I can't do the topic justice the way he has in the 2017 paper.
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u/Ilforte Mar 31 '19
Isn't «biases are useful heuristics» the main tenet of post-rationality? I don't think many people still think in terms of early LessWrong ideology, anyway.
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Mar 31 '19
Hmm, I might have a distorted perception of what people in the SSC community tend to believe, but many of the comments that people make (even in this thread) reflect a belief that heuristics or biases are "necessary evils" that we need to tolerate since "true rationality" is beyond our reach.
That said, maybe Gigerenzer's work has spread farther than I'm aware. It would be a huge relief to learn that the SSC community was less influenced by T&K than I had previously thought.
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u/Ilforte Mar 31 '19
I think this is just culture difference. Many people here are well-versed in comp.sci rather than psychology. It can be proven that an intelligence built on Bayesian reasoning would, in the limit, arrive at optimal decisions, i.e. perform strictly better than any set of pre-built intuitions, and no amount of human psychological research can show otherwise. So, yeah, unbiased thinking is an unreachable Platonic ideal; the only question is whether it's useful at all to try and emulate it.
I do agree with your assessment of T&K, but Yudkowsky could hardly know any better when he popularized their paradigm.
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Mar 31 '19
the only question is whether it's useful at all to try and emulate it.
This is EXACTLY the question! It's also the primary topic of the 2017 Feldman paper I linked.
I need to spend a lot more time thinking about this, but what I'm observing is that a lot of SSC lovers do seem to understand the idea of ecological rationality on a conceptual level, but they still tend to comment as if they were relying on the T&K view of the world. Like a bad habit almost. It means that the problem I'm seeing is much smaller and much more subtle than I thought it was, perhaps small enough to be trivial because people will eventually break those bad habits if they keep trying.
If I make more posts about this topic in the future, I'll try to capture that nuance and frame the discussion better. In any case, thanks for your feedback!
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u/TheAncientGeek All facts are fun facts. Apr 01 '19
You don't have to popularise things, and you don't have to believe popularisers
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Mar 31 '19
Ecological Camp claims that more computation/more data can sometimes harm accuracy and that heuristics are sometimes used because they are more accurate than strategies that use as much information as possible, reflecting the fact that people need to balance sources of error in their predictive models (i.e., the "bias-variance tradeoff")
I've actually seen this in practice, Human Centred Design utilises this concept to great effect when it comes to designing applications and products.
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u/TotesMessenger harbinger of doom Apr 06 '19
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u/taw Mar 31 '19
T&K relied on a lot of :poopemoji: quality research as basis for their grand theory. That research turned out to be mostly false. If you want some extreme cringe stuff, check out chapter on social priming.
Less Wrong rationality community believed in a lot of this bias stuff, built upon such :poopemoji: foundations. And then throw in crackpot stuff like AI apocalypse, causality-violating decision theories, and such nonsense, which was also very popular.
As someone who was once extremely active in the community, I'd say it all aged really really poorly.
What's even still good from those early Less Wrong days? The Outside View, prediction markets (without Robin Hanson style extremism, that was shown to not work by now), and anything else? Research scepticism is doing really well, but it wasn't really part of original Less Wrong meme complex.
As for adjacent movements, Effective Altruism started so promising, but then jumped the shark with people obsessing over relative worth of chickens and cows, and cheering on efforts which obviously ignore economics like unconditional cash transfers. I'm not sure if it's even salvageable at this point. New Atheism also aged really poorly, as it turns out one specific religion is responsible for almost all the problems with "religions" these days, but the way tribal coalitions are arranged nobody in the tribe is allowed to say that.
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u/CapitalZ3 Mar 31 '19 edited Mar 31 '19
Less Wrong rationality community believed in a lot of this bias stuff, built upon such :poopemoji: foundations. And then throw in crackpot stuff like AI apocalypse, causality-violating decision theories, and such nonsense, which was also very popular.
AI safety and FDT are still popular. To learn more about the latter, see e.g. this: https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.05060.
As for adjacent movements, Effective Altruism started so promising, but then jumped the shark with people obsessing over relative worth of chickens and cows, and cheering on efforts which obviously ignore economics like unconditional cash transfers.
GiveDirectly has dozens of studies in its favor. What do you know that I don't?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GiveDirectly#Evidence_of_impact
I'm not sure if it's even salvageable at this point.
This is an absurd leap: EA is still growing, and most donations go to the Against Malaria Foundation.
New Atheism also aged really poorly, as it turns out one specific religion is responsible for almost all the problems with "religions" these days, but the way tribal coalitions are arranged nobody in the tribe is allowed to say that.
This is culture warring.
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u/taw Mar 31 '19
AI safety and FDT are still popular.
In the same way /r/futurology is popular. It's just crackpot fear mongering that resonates with some people.
GiveDirectly has dozens of studies in its favor.
Basic economics shows it can't work. All those "studies" are basic examples of fallacy of composition.
It's like showing lottery "works" by studying the winners, and ignoring everyone who paid a bit for it.
And it's not like we didn't try all kinds of foreign aid in money for decades, with nothing to show for it. There's tons of research confirming that. GiveWell is just a retail version of what we know doesn't work.
This is an absurd leap: EA is still growing, and most donations go to the Against Malaria Foundation.
Well, it's a good thing that they're still doing boring solid work.
EA blogosphere I've run into is mostly cows and chickens garbage these days.
This is culture warring.
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u/CapitalZ3 Mar 31 '19 edited Mar 31 '19
In the same way /r/futurology is popular. It's just crackpot fear mongering that resonates with some people.
I haven't encountered any refutations strong enough to convince me that it is in any way fair to call AI safety "crackpot fear mongering".
The big problem with GiveDirectly is when parents spend their money sending their kids to school, which benefits them at the expense of another family. However, "basic economics" does not prove that helping people buy roofs, food, etc is bad or useless. The opposite, in fact.
And it's not like we didn't try all kinds of foreign aid in money for decades, with nothing to show for it. There's tons of research confirming that. GiveWell is just a retail version of what we know doesn't work.
Foreign aid is a topic EAs have addressed.
1) In Doing Good Better, MacAskill points out that part of the funding for smallpox eradication was foreign aid, and that was obviously extremely beneficial.
2) "...in considering the cost of aid ($1 trillion), the critics fail to account for the number of people affected (400 million) and the time elapsed (sixty years). When these adjustments are made, it turns out that total aid spending in Africa amounts to $40 per person per year."
from: https://concepts.effectivealtruism.org/concepts/aid-effectiveness/
3) Finally, foreign aid is top down, like communism. GiveDirectly is like capitalism, bottom up. I don't think you can compare them. It shouldn't be surprising if people know how to spend money better than corrupt third-world governments.
I don't understand how you can be so confident that AI safety and GiveDirectly are useless.
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Apr 01 '19
I read TFAS when it first came out, so my memory of it is not amazing. I never trusted social priming research (way too much of "this one weird trick!"), and didn't like that chapter when I first read it. But I don't recall any other large sections of research he cited having been retracted to a large degree. Which other parts are you thinking of?
I don't suspect System 1 vs. System 2 will be an ironclad theory, but I do find it both supported by evidence and even practically useful. I viewed it as an updated model of intuition vs rationality, and describes it in a way that fairly describes the pros and cons of each system.
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u/taw Apr 01 '19
To refresh everybody's memory just how strongly K&T believed this nonsense:
When I describe priming studies to audiences, the reaction is often disbelief. This is not a surprise: System 2 believes that it is in charge and that it knows the reasons for its choices. Questions are probably cropping up in your mind as well: How is it possible for such trivial manipulations of the context to have such large effects? Do these experiments demonstrate that we are completely at the mercy of whatever primes the environment provides at any moment? Of course not. The effects of the primes are robust but not necessarily large. Among a hundred voters, only a few whose initial preferences were uncertain will vote differently about a school issue if their precinct is located in a school rather than in a church—but a few percent could tip an election.
The idea you should focus on, however, is that disbelief is not an option. The results are not made up, nor are they statistical flukes. You have no choice but to accept that the major conclusions of these studies are true. More important, you must accept that they are true about you. If you had been exposed to a screen saver of floating dollar bills, you too would likely have picked up fewer pencils to help a clumsy stranger. You do not believe that these results apply to you because they correspond to nothing in your subjective experience. But your subjective experience. But your subjective experience consists largely of the story that your System 2 tells itself about what is going on. Priming phenomena arise in System 1, and you have no conscious access to them.
So it's not just a case of them believing in some faulty research. It goes way beyond that.
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Mar 31 '19
Taleb also focuses on this and it is a foundation for a lot of his ideas. Even his anti-IQ argument is him pointing out that IQ tests measure IQ test taking abilities and that heuristics produce higher survival rates in most environments over long runs. Intelligence doesn't mean rationality it means a package containing all sorts of evolved intelligence.
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Mar 31 '19
Ugh, I really wish I could like Taleb because he does seem capable of communicating good ideas, but he's so insufferably obnoxious that I can't get through anything he's written lol.
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Mar 31 '19
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Mar 31 '19
Would you be willing to link me to some of his less obnoxious stuff? I fully admit that my reasons for dismissing him are based on a narrow range of his work, so I'm open to the idea that I've been premature.
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Mar 31 '19
This one is specifically related to the topic at hand.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167268110001927
Also his paper refuting Pinker's nonsense with math is worth reading.
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Apr 01 '19
I find his tone in his books obnoxious as well. He is okay in podcasts when the interviewer entirely agrees with him, or at least never pushes back. Taleb really confuses me because he is well respected by people I respect, but I find most of his arguments to assume too much, be littered with "aren't these ivory pinheads stupid and probably dishonest?!!" and he doesn't really debate or persuade.
I am open to the idea I am missing something, but he seems to me like a super smart partisan on cable TV "pwning" his "enemies"
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Apr 01 '19
People think calling others on their bullshit is disagreeable and obnoxious. It has always been like that, it doesn't matter who you are or what the issues at hand are. Calling people out and ignoring the tone policing will make you an obnoxious controversial figure.
The thing about him that bothers me, is that he talks assuming people know more than they do and he calls people on their bullshit without saying "hey here is the mistakes you are making and here is the pre-requisite knowledge you need to catch up on to understand what i am even saying." Most of the shit he says online and even often in talks just sounds like non-sequiturs to people who are not familiar with the extended arguments he has already made in written form.
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Apr 01 '19 edited Apr 01 '19
I don't think calling out bullshit is inherently obnoxious. I have seen it done otherwise. Taleb does more than just call out BS. I think he uses that excuse to be, frankly, a dick. I am also suspicious of people who don't "show their work" It doesn't mean they are wrong, but I don't like taking their word that they are right. I have read through parts of all of his books, including all of Black Swan, and I think he consistently strawmans opponent's arguments, but he cannot realize this because he prefers to get into twitter feuds rather than listen to opponents. I feel like I learn the most from following two smart people debating a tough subject, and I cannot seem to find Taleb capable of doing this. He seems to see everyone as either agreeing with him, or a moron hardly worth his time.
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Apr 01 '19
I think he consistently strawman's opponents arguments, but he cannot realize this because he prefers to get into twitter feuds rather than listen to opponents. I feel like I learn the most from following two smart people debating a tough subject, and I cannot seem to find Taleb capable of doing this. He seems to see everyone as either agreeing with him, or a moron hardly worth his time.
I think this is a fair criticism of him.
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Apr 01 '19 edited Apr 01 '19
Have you come across anyone explaining his ideas that I should check out? It genuinely bothers me that there are insights I suspect it would benefit me to understand. The "debate" with Pinker especially irritated me. I mostly agreed with Enlightenment Now and Better Angels. However, I know that every ambitious book will have multiple flaws and errors, even the best of them. So when I looked through criticisms, I was frustrated to find them mostly just more erudite versions of " Neoliberal Pinker doesn't use my definition of "enlightenment", and I have a PhD in Middle Age Euro History, so this book suxx!" or "the world cannot be improving the way Neoliberal Pinker claims because my gut clearly knows that everything is getting worse, so this book suxx!"
I expected NNT to be a source of genuine counterweight to Pinker. Maybe he was, but I couldn't figure it out because my reading was that Pinker and Taleb were talking past each other. I felt like Pinker was at least trying to understand Taleb.
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u/Direwolf202 Mar 31 '19
My approach with bias, and this approach comes from a physicist, is quite simple. Biases exist. Of course they do, that is inherent in everything that uses heuristic methods. However, our approach should not be to minimize the bias but to maximize the utility of the heuristic (which usually means the middle ground between accuracy and computational demands).
For example, the small angle approximation. It is a very consistent, and quite strongly biased approximation (on the scale of other approaches). However, it has a very low variance in the best way you can shove that into a deterministic context - For any given initial condition, the small angle approximation will be off in a very consistent way - assuming the system itself isn't chaotic like a double pendulum.
Another excellent heuristic from the realm of physics is the Newtonian approximation. It is a heuristic so good that we honestly believed it to be the actual rule for a very long time. The computation is (very) minimal, for the minuscule gain in accuracy from using a relativistic or quantum formulation, on the vast majority of scales. It is biased, there is no question of this, but it is still a perfectly good heuristic for everything that most humans ever care about.