You know what to do.
This thread is for the discussion of Less Wrong topics that have not appeared in recent posts. If a discussion gets unwieldy, celebrate by turning it into a top-level post.
Is anyone else here disturbed over the recent Harvard incident where Stephanie Grace's perfectly reasonable email where she merley expreses agnosticism over the posiblity that the well documented IQ differences between groups are partially genetic is worthy of harsh and inaccurate condemnation from the Harvard Law school dean?
I feel sorry for the girl since she trusted the wrong people (the email was alegedly leaked by one of her girlfriends who got into a dispute with her over a man). We need to be extra carefull to selfcensure any rationalist discusions about cows "everyone" agrees are holy. These are things I don't feel comfortable even discussing here since they have ruined many carrers and lives due to relentless persecution. Even recanting dosen't help at the end of the day, since you are a google away and people who may not even understand the argument will hate you intensly. Scary.
I mean surley everyone here agrees that the only way to discover truth is to allow all the hypothesies to stand on their own without giving them the privilige of supressing competition to a few. Why is our society so insane that this regurarly happens even concerning views that many relevant academics hold in private (or even the majority of if in certain fields if the polling is anon)?
PS Also why does the Dean equate inteligence with genetic superiority and imlicitly even worth as a person? This is a disturbing view since half by definition will always be below average. And we're all going to be terribly stupid compared to AIs in the near future, such implicit values are dangerus in the context of the time we may be living in.
I'm a bit upset.
In my world, that's dinner-table conversation. If it's wrong, you argue with it. If it upsets you, you are more praiseworthy the more you control your anger. If your anti-racism is so fragile that it'll crumble if you don't shut students up -- if you think that is the best use of your efforts to help people, or to help the cause of equality -- then something has gone a little screwy in your mind.
The idea that students -- students! -- are at risk if they write about ideas in emails is damn frightening to me. I spent my childhood in a university town. This means that political correctness -- that is, not being rude on the basis of race or ethnicity -- is as deep in my bones as "please" and "thank you." I generally think it's a good thing to treat everyone with respect. But the other thing I got from my "university values" is that freedom to look for the truth is sacrosanct. And if it's tempting to shut someone up, take a few deep cleansing breaths and remember your Voltaire.
My own beef with those studies is that you cannot (to my knowledge) isolate the genetics of race from the experience of race. Every single black subject whose IQ is tested has also lived his whole life as black. And we have a history and culture that makes race matter. You can control for income and education level, because there are a variety of incomes and education levels among all races. You can control for home environment with adoption and twin studies, I guess. But you can't control for what it's like to live as a black person in a society where race matters, because all black people do. So I can't see how such a study can really ever isolate genetics alone. (But correct me if I'm missing something.)
Here is the leaked email by Stephanie Grace if anyone is interested.
… I just hate leaving things where I feel I misstated my position.
I absolutely do not rule out the possibility that African Americans are, on average, genetically predisposed to be less intelligent. I could also obviously be convinced that by controlling for the right variables, we would see that they are, in fact, as intelligent as white people under the same circumstances. The fact is, some things are genetic. African Americans tend to have darker skin. Irish people are more likely to have red hair. (Now on to the more controversial:)
Women tend to perform less well in math due at least in part to prenatal levels of testosterone, which also account for variations in mathematics performance within genders. This suggests to me that some part of intelligence is genetic, just like identical twins raised apart tend to have very similar IQs and just like I think my babies will be geniuses and beautiful individuals whether I raise them or give them to an orphanage in Nigeria. I don’t think it is that controversial of an opinion to say I think it is at least possible that African Americans are less intelligent on a genetic level, and I didn’t mean to shy away from that opinion at dinner.
I also don’t think that there are no cultural differences or that cultural differences are not likely the most important sources of disparate test scores (statistically, the measurable ones like income do account for some raw differences). I would just like some scientific data to disprove the genetic position, and it is often hard given difficult to quantify cultural aspects. One example (courtesy of Randall Kennedy) is that some people, based on crime statistics, might think African Americans are genetically more likely to be violent, since income and other statistics cannot close the racial gap. In the slavery era, however, the stereotype was of a docile, childlike, African American, and they were, in fact, responsible for very little violence (which was why the handful of rebellions seriously shook white people up). Obviously group wide rates of violence could not fluctuate so dramatically in ten generations if the cause was genetic, and so although there are no quantifiable data currently available to “explain” away the racial discrepancy in violent crimes, it must be some nongenetic cultural shift. Of course, there are pro-genetic counterarguments, but if we assume we can control for all variables in the given time periods, the form of the argument is compelling.
In conclusion, I think it is bad science to disagree with a conclusion in your heart, and then try (unsuccessfully, so far at least) to find data that will confirm what you want to be true. Everyone wants someone to take 100 white infants and 100 African American ones and raise them in Disney utopia and prove once and for all that we are all equal on every dimension, or at least the really important ones like intelligence. I am merely not 100% convinced that this is the case.
Please don’t pull a Larry Summers on me,
A few minor fallacies but overall quite respectable and even stimulating conversation nothing any reasonable person would consider should warrant ostracism. Note the reference to "disscused over Dinner". She was betrayed by someone she socialised with.
And yes I am violating my own advice by boldening that one sentence. ;) I just wanted to drive home how close she may be to a well meaning if perhaps a bit untactfull poster on Less Wrong. Again, we need to be carefull. What society considers taboo changes over time as well, so one must get a feel for where on the scale of forbidden a subject is at any time and where the winds of change are blowing before deciding whether to discuss it online. Something inoccus could cost you your job a decade or so in the future.
Edit: For anyone wondering what a "Larry Summers" is.
One of the people criticizing the letter accused the letter writer of privileging the hypothesis - that it's only because of historical contingency (i.e. racism) that someone would decide to carve reality between "African-Americans" and "whites" instead of, say, "people with brown eyes" and "people with blue eyes". (She didn't use that exact phrase, but it's what she meant.)
Isn't nearly everything a social construct though? We can divide people based into two groups, those with university degrees and those without. People with them may tend to live longer or die earlier, they may earn more money or earn less, ect. We may also divide people into groups based on self identification, do blondes really have more fun than brunettes or do hipsters really feel superior to nonhipsters or do religious people have lower IQs than self-identified atheists ect Concepts like species, subspecies and family are also constructs that are just about as arbitrary as race.
I dosen't really matter in the end. Regardless of how we carve up reality, we can then proceed to ask questions and get answers. Suppose we decided to in 1900 take a global test to see whether blue eyed or brown eyed people have higher IQs. Lo and behold we see brown eyed people have higher IQs. But in 2050 the reverse is true. What happened? The population with brown eyes was heterogeneous and its demographics changed! However if we took skin cancer rates we would still see people with blue eyes have higher rates of skin cancer in both periods.
So why should we bother carving up reality on this racial metric and ask questions about it? For the same reason we bother to carve up reality on the family or gender metric. We base policy on it. If society was colour blind, there would be no need for this. But I hope everyone here can see that society isn't colour blind.
For example Affirmative action's ethical status (which is currently framed as a nesecary adjustment against biases and not reparations for past wrongs) depends on what the data has to about say about group differences.
If the data shows we people with blue eyes in our country have lower mean IQs when controlling for socioeconomic status and such, we shouldn't be accusing racism for their higher college drop out rates if the rates are what is to be expected when controlling for IQs. To keep this policy would mean to discriminate against competent brown eyed people. But if there are no difference well then the policy is justified unless it turns out there is another reason that has nothing to do with discrimination behind it.
I hope that you however agree that (regardless of what the truth of this particular matter is) someone should not be vilified for asking questions or proposing hypothesises regarding social constructs we have in place, regularly operate with and even make quantifiable claims about.
PS Also why does the Dean equate inteligence with genetic superiority and imlicitly even worth as a person?
See Michael Vassar's discussion of this phenomenon. Also, I think that people discussing statements they see as dangerous often implicitly (and unconsciously) adopt the frames that make those statements dangerous, which they (correctly) believe many people unreflectively hold and can't easily be talked out of, and treat those frames as simple reality, in order to more simply and credibly call the statement and the person who made it dangerous and Bad.
The Harvard incident is business as usual: http://timtyler.org/political_correctness/
Undiscriminating skepticism strikes again: here's the thread on the very topic of genetic IQ differences.
He who controls the karma controls the world.
Less Wrong dystopian speculative fiction: An excerpt.
JulXutil sat, legs crossed in the lotus position, at the center of the Less Wrong hedonist-utilitarian subreddit. Above him, in a foot-long green oval, was his karma total: 230450036. The subreddit was a giant room with a wooden floor and rice paper walls. In the middle the floor was raised, and then raised again to form a shallow step pyramid with bamboo staircases linking the levels. The subreddit was well lit. Soft light emanated from the rice paper walls as if they were lit from behind and Japanese lanterns hung from the ceiling.
Foot soldiers, users JerelYu and Maxine stood at the top of each staircase to deal with the newbies who wanted to bother the world famous JulXutil and to spot and downvote trolls before they did much damage. They also kept their eyes out for members of rival factions because while /lw/hedutil was officially public, every Less Wrong user knew this subreddit was Wireheader territory and had been since shortly after Lewis had published his famous Impossibility Proof for Friendliness. The stitched image of an envelope on JulXutil’s right sleeve turned red. He tapped it twice and the dojo disappeared and was replaced by his inbox. He tapped on the new message and its sender appeared before him.
Henry_Neil: Jul, I just heard from my source at Alcor. The procedure was successful. He’s been admitted. It'll go public in the morning.
JulXutil: Exciting, terrifying news. What will happen to his account?
Henry_Neil: It won't go anywhere. But users who haven’t logged in for thirty days don’t get counted when the server computes controlling karma. That leaves his 40% up for grabs.
JulXutil: How much support we end up with will depend on how organized the opposition is. We need full admin powers and enough backing to amend the constitution. Henry, I need you to take care of a few high karma players. They'd interfere with our plans. I’ll tell you whom. It’ll have to be timed just right. Contact me again when you've selected your men.
Henry_Neil: If the Blindsighters have heard the news they'll try the same thing. Your karmic reputation is in danger. Take precautions, stay out of the main subreddits, especially EvPsych. You’ll hear from me soon.
To be continued...
Ask A Rationalist--choosing a cryonics provider:
I'm sold on the concept. We live in a world beyond the reach of god; if I want to experience anything beyond my allotted threescore and ten, I need a friendly singularity before my metabolic processes cease; or information-theoretic preservation from that cessation onward.
But when one gets down to brass tacks, the situation becomes murkier. Alcor whole body suspension is nowhere near as cheap as numbers that get thrown around in discussions on cryonics--if you want to be prepared for senescence as well as accidents, a 20 year payoff on whole life insurance and Alcor dues runs near $200/month; painful but not impossible for me.
The other primary option, Cryonics Institute, is 1/5th the price; but the future availability--even at additional cost--of timely suspension is called into question by their own site.
Alcor shares case reports, but no numbers for average time between death and deep freeze, which seems to stymie any easy comparison on effectiveness. I have little experience reading balance sheets, but both companies seem reasonably stable. What's a prospective immortal on a budget to do?
I have an idea that may create a (small) revenue stream for LW/SIAI. There are a lot of book recommendations, with links to amazon, going around in LW, and many of them do not use an affiliate code. Having a script add a LessWrong affiliate code to those links that don't already have one may lead to some income, especially given that affiliate codes persist and may get credited for unrelated purchases later in the day.
I believe Posterous did this, and there was a minor PR hubbub about it, but the main issue was that they did not communicate the change properly (or at all). Also, given that LW/SIAI are not-for-profit endeavours, this is much easier to swallow. In fact, if it can be done in an easy-to-implement way, I think quite a few members with popular blogs may be tempted to apply this modification to their own blogs.
Does this sound viable?
Theism. Couldn't keep it. In the end, it wasn't so much that the evidence was good -- it had always been good -- as that I lost the conviction that "holding out" or "staying strong" against atheism was a virtue.
Standard liberal politics, of the sort that involved designing a utopia and giving it to people who didn't want it. I had to learn, by hearing stories, some of them terrible, that you have no choice but to respect and listen to other people, if you want to avoid hurting them in ways you really don't want to hurt them.
I stopped being a theist a few years ago. That was due more to what Less Wrong people would call "traditional rationalism" than the sort often advocated here (I actually identify as closer to a traditionalist rationalist than a strict Bayesianism but I suspect that the level of disagreement is smaller than Eliezer makes it out to be). And part of this was certainly also emotional reactions to having the theodicy problem thrown in my face rather than direct logic.
One major update that occurred when I first took intro psych was realizing how profoundly irrational the default human thinking processes were. Before then, my general attitude was very close to humans as the rational animal. I'm not sure how relevant that is, since that's saying something like "learning about biases taught me that we are biased." I don't know if that's very helpful.
My political views have updated a lot on a variety of different issues. But I suspect that some of those are due to spending time with people who have those views rather than actually getting relevant evidence.
I've updated on how dangerous extreme theism is. It may sound strange, but this didn't arise as much out of things like terrorism, but rather becoming more aware of how many strongly held beliefs about the nature of the world there were out there that were motivated by religion and utterly at odds with reality. This was not about evolution which even in my religious phases I understood and was annoyed at by the failure of religious compatriots to understand. Rather this has included geocentrism among the Abrahamic religions, flat-Earthism among some Islamic extremists, spontaneous generation among ultra-Orthodox Jews (no really. Not a joke. And not even microscopic spontaneous generation but spontaneous generation of mice), belief among some ultra-Orthodox Jews that the kidneys are the source of moral guidance (which they use as an argument against kidney transplants).
My three most recent major updates (last six months or so) are 1) Thinking that cryonics has a substantial success probability (although I still think it is very low). This came not from actually learning more about rationality, but rather after reading some of the stuff here going back and trying to find out more about cryonics. Learning that the ice formation problem is close to completely solved substantially changed my attitude. 2) Deciding that there's a high chance that we'll have space elevators before we have practical fusion power. (This is a less trivial observation than one might think since once one has a decent space elevator it becomes pretty cheap to put up solar power satelites). This is to some extent a reevaluation based primarily on time-frames given by relevant experts. 3) Deciding that there's a substantial chance that P=NP may undecidable in ZFC. This update occurred because I was reading about how complexity results can be connected to provability of certain classes of statements in weakened forms of the Peano axioms. That makes this sound more potentially like it might be in a class of problems that have decent reasons for being undecidable.
I'm no longer a propertarian/Lockean/natural rights libertarian. Learning about rationality essentially made me feel comfortable letting go of a position that I honestly didn't have a good argument for (and I knew it). The ev-psych stuff scared the living hell out of me (and the libertarianism* apparently).
*At least that sort of libertarianism
I have a (short) essay, 'Drug heuristics' in which I take a crack at combining Bostrom's evolutionary heuristics and nootropics - both topics I consider to be quite LW-germane but underdiscussed.
I'm not sure, though, that it's worth pursuing in any greater depth and would appreciate feedback.
Today, while I was attending an honors banquet, a girl in my class and her boyfriend were arguing over whether or not black was a color. When she had somewhat convinced him that it wasn't (I say somewhat because the argument was more-or-less ending and he didn't have a rebuttal), I asked "Wait, are you saying I can't paint with black paint?" She conceded that, of course black paint can be used to paint with, but that black wasn't technically a color. At which point I explained that we were likely using two different definitions of color, and that we should explain what we mean. I gave two definitions: 1] The various shade which a human eye was seeing and the brain was processing. 2] The specific wavelength of light that a human eye can pick up. The boyfriend and I were using definition 1, where as she was using definition 2. And with that cleared up, the debate ended.
Note: Both definitions aren't word for word, but somewhat close. I was simply making the distinction between the wavelength itself and the process of seeing something and placing it in a certain color category.
One could argue that definition 2 is Just Wrong, because it implies that purple isn't a color (purple doesn't have a wavelength, it is non-spectral).
Has anybody considered starting a [email protected] team for lesswrong? Seems like it would be a fairly cheap way of increasing our visibility.
After a brief 10 word discussion on #lesswrong, I've made a lesswrong team :p
Our team number is 186453; enter this into the [email protected] client, and your completed work units will be credited.
I noticed something recently which might be a positive aspect of akrasia, and a reason for its existence.
Background: I am generally bad at getting things done. For instance, I might put off paying a bill for a long time, which seems strange considering the whole process would take < 5 minutes.
A while back, I read about a solution: when you happen to remember a small task, if you are capable of doing it right then, then do it right then. I found this easy to follow, and quickly got a lot better at keeping up with small things.
A week or two into it, I thought of something evil to do, and following my pattern, quickly did it. Within a few minutes, I regretted it and thankfully, was able to undo it. But it scared me, and I discontinued my habit.
I'm not sure how general a conclusion I can draw from this; perhaps I am unusually prone to these mistakes. But since then I've considered akrasia as a sort of warning: "Some part of you doesn't want to do this. How about doing something else?"
Now when the part of you protesting is the non-exercising part or the ice-cream eating part, then akrasia isn't being helpful. But... it's worth listening to that feeling and seeing why you are avoiding the action.
Self-forgiveness limits procrastination
Wohl's team followed 134 first year undergrads through their first mid-term exams to just after their second lot of mid-terms. Before the initial exams, the students reported how much they'd procrastinated with their revision and how much they'd forgiven themselves. Next, midway between these exams and the second lot, the students reported how positive or negative they were feeling. Finally, just before the second round of mid-terms, the students once more reported how much they had procrastinated in their exam preparations.
The key finding was that students who'd forgiven themselves for their initial bout of procrastination subsequently showed less negative affect in the intermediate period between exams and were less likely to procrastinate before the second round of exams. Crucially, self-forgiveness wasn't related to performance in the first set of exams but it did predict better performance in the second set.
I recalled the strangest thing an AI could tell you thread, and I came up with another one in a dream. Tell me how plausible you think this one is:
Claim: "Many intelligent mammals (e.g. dogs, cats, elephants, cetaceans, and apes) act just as intelligently as feral humans, and would be capable of human-level intelligence with the right enculturation."
That is, if we did to pet mammals something analogous to what we do to feral humans when discovered, we could assimilate them; their deficiencies are the result of a) not knowing what assimilation regimen is necessary for pets/zoo mammals; and b) mammals in the wild being currently at a lower level of cultural development, but which humans at one time passed through.
Thoughts?
The Cognitive Bias song:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RsbmjNLQkc
Not very good, but, you know, it's a song about cognitive bias, how cool is that?
Undiscriminating skepticism strikes again: here's the thread on the very topic of genetic IQ differences.
Oh good. Make it convenient for the guys running background searches.