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A short, nicely animated adaptation of The Unfinished Fable of the Sparrows from Bostrom's book was made recently.
Hope this is appropriate for here.
I had an epiphany related to akrasia today, though it may apply generally to a problem where you are stuck: For the longest time I thought to myself: "I know what I actually need to do, I just need to sit down and start working and once I've started it's much easier to keep going. I was thinking about this today and I had an imaginary conversation where I said: "I know what I need to do, I just don't know what I need to do, so I can do what I need to do." (I hope that makes sense). And then it hit me: I have no fucking clue what I actually need to do. It's like I've been trying to empty a sinking ship of water with buckets, instead of fixing the hole in the ship.
Reminds me in hindsight of the "definition of insanity": "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results."
I think I believed, that I lacked the necessary innate willpower to overcome my inner demons, instead of lacking a skill I could acquire.
Once I was facing akrasia and I kind of had the same thing happen. I knew what I needed to do, and I ruminated on why I wasn't doing that.
I thought at first that I was just being lazy, but then I realized that I subconsciously knew that the strategy I was procrastinating from was actually pretty terrible. Once I realized that, I started thinking about how I might do it better, and then when I thought of something (which wasn't immediate, to be sure) I was actually able to get up and do it.
I went to the dermatologist and today and I have some sort of cyst on my ear. He said it was nothing. He said the options are to remove it surgically, to use some sort of cream to remove it over time, or to do nothing.
I asked about the benefits of removing it. He said that they'd be able to biopsy it and be 100% sure that it's nothing. I asked "as opposed to... how confident are you now?" He said 99.5 or 99.95% sure.
It seems clear to me that the costs of money, time and pain are easily worth the 5/1000(0) chance that I detect something dangerous earlier and correspondingly reduce the chances that I die. Like, really really really really really clear to me. Death is really bad. I'm horrified that doctors (and others) don't see this. He was very ready to just send me home with his diagnosis of "it's nothing". I'm trying to argue against myself and account for biases and all that, but given the badness of death, I still feel extremely strongly that the surgery+biopsy is the clear choice. Is there something I'm missing?
Also, the idea of Prediction Book for Doctors occurred to me. There could be a nice UI with graphs and stuff to help doctors keep track of the predictions they've made. Maybe it could evolve into a resource that helps doctors make predictions by providing medical info and perhaps sprinkling in a little bit of AI or something. I don't really know though, the idea is extremely raw at this point. Thoughts?
1) surgery is dangerous. Even innocuous surgeries can have complications such as infection that can kill. There's also complications that aren't factored into the obvious math, for example ever since I got 2 of my wisdom teeth out, my jaw regularly tightens up and cracks if I open my mouth wide, something that never happened beforehand. I wasn't warned about this and didn't consider it when I was deciding to get the surgery.
2) If it's something dangerous, you're very likely to find out anyway before it becomes serious. eg, if it's a tumor, it's going to keep growing and you can come back a month later and get it out then with little problem.
3) even if it's not nothing, it might be something else that's unlikely to kill you. Thus the 5/1000 chance of death you're imagining is actually a 5/1000 chance of being not nothing.
You're probably misreading your doctor.
When he said "99.5 or 99.95%" I rather doubt he meant to give the precise odds. I think that what he meant was "There is a non-zero probability that the cyst will turn out to be an issue, but it is so small I consider it insignificant and so should you". Trying to base some calculations on the 0.5% (or 0.05%) chance is not useful because it's not a "real" probability, just a figurative expression.
I think you should use the cream for a week, to start with.
Also, thought experiment: Suppose a person is going to live another 70 years. If undergoing some oversimplified miracle-cure treatment will cost, one way or another, 1 week of their life, what chance of "it's just a cyst" will they accept? 99.97%. So from the doctor's perspective (neglecting other risks or resources used, taking their '99.95%' probability estimate at face value, and assuming that a biopsy is some irreplaceable road to health), your condition is so likely to be benign that the procedure to surgically check spends your life at about the same rate as it saves it.
The biggest thing is that the doctor's priorities are not your priorities. To him, a life is valuable... but not infinitely valuable -estimates usually puts the value of a life at (ballpark) 2 million dollars. When you consider the relative probability of you dying, and then the cost to the healthcare system of treatment, he's probably making the right decision (you of course, would probably value your own life MUCH MUCH higher). Btw, this kind of follows a blindspot I've seen in several calculations of yours - let me know if you're interested in getting feedback on it.
Finally, there are two other wrinkles - the possibility of complications and the possibility of false positives from a biopsy. The second increases the potential cost, and the first decreases the potential years added to your life. Both of these tilt the equation AGAINST getting it removed.
The biggest thing is that the doctor's priorities are not your priorities. [...] When you consider the relative probability of you dying, and then the cost to the healthcare system of treatment
The doctor has no incentive to minimize the cost of treatment. He makes money by having a high cost of treatment.
Revisited The Analects of Confucius. It's not hard to see why there's a stereotype of Confucius as a Deep Wisdom dispenser. Example:
The Master said, "It is Man who is capable of broadening the Way. It is not the Way that is capable of broadening Man."
I read a bit of the background information, and it turns out the book was compiled by Confucius' students after his death. That got me thinking that maybe it wasn't designed to be passively read. I wouldn't put forth a collection of sayings as a standalone philosophical work, but maybe I'd use it as a teaching aid. Perhaps one could periodically present students a saying of Confucius and ask them to think about it and discuss what the Master meant.
I've noticed this sort of thing in other works as well. Let's take the Dhammapada. In a similar vein, it's a collection of sayings of Buddha, compiled by his followers. There are commentaries giving background and context. I'm now getting the impression that it was designed to be just one part of a neophyte's education. There's a lot that one would get from teachers and more senior students, and then there are the sayings of the Master designed to stimulate thought and reflection
Going further west, this also seems to be the case with the Gospels.
With these works and those like them, there's this desire to stimulate reflection and provide a starting point for discussion. They're designed for initiates of a school of thought to progress further. Contrast this with works written by the masters themselves for their peers. It would be condescending to talk in short bursts of wisdom. No, this is where we get arguments clearly presented and spelled out. Short sayings are replaced with chains of reasoning designed to demonstrate the intended conclusion.
It would be condescending to talk in short bursts of wisdom.
It would be condescending for the master too, to talk in short bursts of wisdom to his disciples, as long as he was alive. The issue is rather that once he dies, and the top level disciples gradually elevate the memory of the master into a quasi-deity, pass on the thoughts verbally for generations, and by the time they get around to writing it down the memory of the master is seen as such a big guy / deity and more or less gets worshipped so it becomes almost inconceivable to write it in anything but a condescending tone. But it does not really follow the masters were just as condescending IRL.
You can see this today. The Dalai Lama is really an easy guy, he does not really care how people should behave to him, he is just friendly and direct with everybody, but there is an "establishment" around him that really pushes visitors into high-respect mode. I had this experience with a lower lama, of a different school, I was anxious about getting etiquette right, hands together, bowing etc. then he just walked up to me, shook my hand in a western style, did not let it go but just dragged me halfway accross the room while patting me on the back and shaking with laughter at my surprise, it was simply his joke, his way of breaking the all too ceremonious mood. He was a totally non-condescending, direct, easy-going guy, who would engage everybody on an equal level, but a lot of retainers and helpers around him really put him and his boss (he was something of a top level helper of an even bigger guy too) on a pedestal.
Inspired by terrible, terrible Facebook political arguments I've observed, I started making a list of heuristic "best practices" for constructing a good argument. My key assumptions are that (1) it's unreasonable to expect most people to acquire a good understanding of skepticism, logic, statistics, or the ways the LW-crowd thinks of as how to use words rightly, and (2) lists of fallacies to watch out for aren't actually much help in constructing a good argument.
One heuristic captured my imagination as it seems to encapsulate most of the other heuristics I had come up with, and yet is conceptually simple enough for everyone to use: Sketch it, and only draw real things. (If it became agreed-upon and well-known, I'd shorten the phrase to "Sketch it real".)
Example: A: "I have a strong opinion that increasing the minimum wage to $15/hr over ten years (WILL / WON'T) increase unemployment." B: "Oh, can you sketch it for me? I mean literally draw the steps involved with the real-world chain of events you think will really happen."
If you can draw how a thing works, then that's usually a very good argument that you understand the thing. If you can draw the steps of how one event leads to another, then that's usually a good argument that the two events can really be connected that way. This heuristic requires empiricism and disallows use of imaginary scenarios and fictional evidence. It privileges reductionist and causal arguments. It prevents many of the ways of misusing words. If I try to use a concept I don't understand, drawing its steps out will help me notice that.
Downsides: Being able to draw well isn't required, but it would help a lot. The method probably privileges anecdotes since they're easier to draw than randomized double-blind controlled trials. Also it's harder than spouting off and so won't actually be used in Facebook political arguments.
I'm not claiming that a better argument-sketch implies a better argument. There are probably extremely effective ways to hack our visual biases in argument-sketches. But it does seem that under currently prevailing ordinary circumstances, making an argument-sketch and then translating it into a verbal argument is a useful heuristic for making a good argument.
Philosophers are apparently about as vulnerable as the general population to certain cognitive biases involved in making moral decisions according to new research. Apparently, they are as susceptible to the order of presentation impacting how moral or immoral they rate various situations. See summary of research here. Actual research is unfortunately behind a paywall.
A paper "Philosophers’ Biased Judgments Persist Despite Training, Expertise and Reflection" (Eric Schwitzgebel and Fiery Cushman) is available here: http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/Stability-150423.pdf
An interactive twitch stream of a neural network hallucinating. Or twitch plays Large Scale Deep neural net.
EDIT: Fixed link.
You've messed up the link, this is it
I don't think the problem is that the book is long. It's that it basically defines it's own language and is written in that language. It's similar to a math textbook defining terms and then using those terms.
It defines for example the term "semantic reaction" and then goes to abbreviate it as s.r The gist is that if you say something the meaning of what you say is the reaction that happens in the brain of your listener when he hears the words.
It's not hard to understand that definition on a superficial level. On the other hand it's hard to really integrate it. It's a fundamental concept used throughout the book.
There is a paper out, the abstract of which says:
...Second, respondents significantly underestimated the proportion of [group X] among their colleagues. Third, [members of group X] fear negative consequences of revealing their ... beliefs to their colleagues. Finally, they are right to do so: In decisions ranging from paper reviews to hiring, many ... said that they would discriminate against openly [group X] colleagues. The more [group anti-X] respondents were, the more they said they would discriminate.
Before you go look at the link, any guesses as to what the [group X] is? X-/