My Bayesian Englightenment

  • Even though Eliezer knew about Bayes theorem and cognitive biases, he didn’t think of himself as a Bayesian until he read E.T. Jaynes’ Probability Theory: The Logic of Science
  • The only way to tackle truly difficult problems is to look for solutions that are so rigorous, they seem like the only solution, not just one solution out of many
  • Can’t just show why your way will work, have to show why other ways will not work
  • Holding yourself to that greater level of rigor saves time, not on the order of weeks or months, but on the order of decades and careers
  • Saying “Oops” is something to look forward to

What Should We Be Worried About

  • The problem with the “10,000 hours” theory of excellence is that it encourages focused effort towards a local maximum
  • The skills needed for this form of excellence don’t help one make truly novel discoveries, nor do they help communities
  • Sewall Wright’s theory of adaptive landscapes of fitness corresponds to four archetypes of acheivement:
    • Climbing – Expertise: climbing towards the current (local) fitness maximum
    • Crossing – Genius: Crossing the “adaptive valley” towards an even higher maximum level of fitness
    • Moving – Heroism: Altering the landscape of fitness to favor a particular group
    • Shaking – Rebellion: Changing the landscaping of fitness to be more even
  • The problem is that modern institutions emphasize the climbing form of adaptations over all others
  • Need alternative institutions to traditional academia for people who want to pursue paths other than the 10,000 hours theory of excellence

Intensity of Emotion Tied To Perception and Thinking

  • People have differing levels of emotional intensity
    • Some people feel emotions (both positive and negative) very intensely
    • Others have more muted emotions
  • Muted emotional expression doesn’t necessarily imply muted emotions
  • People with a wide range of emotional expression report similar levels of contentment and life satisfaction
  • People with intense emotions personalize and focus on the emotional aspects of a situation, whereas people with less intense emotions focus on the factual aspects of the situation
  • Emotional intensity appears to be heritable, with identical twins showing greater similarities in emotional intensity than fraternal twins
  • Emotional intensity appears to decline with age, with the greatest drop occurring between one’s 20s and one’s 40s
  • More emotionally intense people appear to have less physiological activity at rest than less emotionally intense people
  • the more strongly a person feels emotions, the less they appear to understand those emotions

Against Unreasonably High Standards

  • Consider the following procedure:
    • Create unreasonably high standards
    • When people fail to meet those standards, assign them “debt”
    • Provide some way for people to discharge that debt by giving up agency
  • Examples:
    • Christianity:
      • Define many natural human emotions as sins
      • Define subserviency to Jesus/church as a way to discharge debts accumulated by sinning
    • Education system
      • Define standards of behavior that are impossible to follow
      • Discharge debt by accepting punishments and displaying your subservience to the educational system
    • Effective altruism
      • Enjoying luxuries before all children have lifesaving treatment is wrong
      • Discharge that debt by donating 10% of your income
    • The rationality community
      • No one is fully rational all the time
      • Discharge debt by improving your own personal rationality and donating to high-level rationalists
  • Setting up unreasonably high standards has the following effects:
    • Hypocrisy: no one follows the standard all the time, and the standard is enforced inconsistently, often against the most vulnerable members of the community
    • Self-violence: unreasonably high standards force people’s minds to turn against themselves, and result in self-hatred
    • Distorted perception and cognition leading to motivation problems: the righteous part of the mind sometimes has trouble looking at ways a person is failing to meet a standard, and that leads to motivation issues
    • Fear: accumulating debt gives one the feeling that one can be called to account and asked to do anything, at any time
  • Systems with unreasonably high standards could be justified if they were good coordination mechanisms, but there’s no evidence that unreasonably high standards form a better basis for coordination than existing defacto norms
  • Unreasonably high standards are responsible for a great deal of violence and epistemic problems
  • We have to distinguish unreasonably high standards from preference ordering
  • Advice to the scrupulous: unreasonably high standards are a scam, and you are giving your life away to the scammers