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rationality

May 19, 20245 min read

Rationality

General page for all the shite I read on Less Wrong and such

  • Abundance mindset
    • A scarcity mindset as one where there is never enough. People are trying to take things from you, what they have is what you don’t have. As opposed to abundance mindset, that there is enough and that the usefulness is derived from others having the same.
    • ”More importantly, it turns out that there are no wasted genuine attempts to make a contribution — even if you overestimate your own talents and abilities in that particular area or lose long-term interest — because you learn so much with every attempt."
    • "Just pick an area where you are excited to contribute and give it your all” From : Russell’s the Philosophical importance of Mathematical Logic
      • By means of the constant relation we sum up in a single formula an infinity of causes and effects, and we avoid the worn-out hypothesis of the repetition of the same cause."
      • "It is the idea of functionality, that is to say the idea of constant relation, which gives the secret of the power of mathematics to deal simultaneously with an infinity of data.”
  • Trying to read through the Scott Alexander articles on Less Wrong
  • ”So my hypothesis is that if a certain side of an issue has very obvious points in support of it, and the other side of an issue relies on much more subtle points that the average person might not be expected to grasp, then adopting the second side of the issue will become a signal for intelligence, even if that side of the argument is wrong.” recognising meta contrarian tendencies. Example “misogyny / women’s rights movement / men’s rights movement”
  • Chinese Robbers fallacy
    • Base rates and their importance in determining validity of conclusions about a population.
    • Uses the example of policy brutality. When the media gives some rate of brutality, we rarely take into account what the population size is. If the rate is 2% with 100,000 cops thats awful. Then what if its 500,000 cops, the rate gets 5 times smaller. We rarely take into account the population.
    • Starts with example of select stories of cardiologists which makes them appear as generally terrible human beings, when in actual fact they may be no more terrible than the general population.
    • A lot of posts you read there is sections of example here, here and here etc. useful habit to keep is population and base rates.

    • Given that America is a big country with very many police, even a low base rate will provide many lurid police-officer-murder stories – by my calculation, two murders a week even if officers are killed only at the same rate as everyone else. While covering these is a legitimate decision, it can be deceptive unless it’s framed in terms of things like whether the rate has gone up or down, whether the rate is higher or lower for the group involved than the base rate in the population, and it still seems scary when you explicitly calculate the rate.

  • Absence of evidence is evidence of Absence
  • ”Your strength as a rationalist is your ability to be more confused by fiction than by reality; if you are equally good at explaining any outcome you have zero knowledge.”
  • Expected Evidence
  • ”the mere expectation of encountering evidence—before you’ve actually seen it—should not shift your prior beliefs."
  • "a true Bayesian, it is impossible to seek evidence that confirms a theory…You can only ever seek evidence to test a theory, not to confirm it.”
  • Hindsight Bias
  • Trying to figure out what is really something we couldn’t have determined with our current models. With hindsight bias all results seem obvious
  • Putting ourselves in the situation where we feel our models of the world could not determine the answer. And then seeing how our models stack up to the result.

Game Theory as Dark Art articles

backward reasoning

  • The unit of game theory is the choice. Which is driven by utility (some general function, could be happiness say)
  • In reasoning forward, you take each choice as it comes and choice the higher utility.
  • However, reasoning backwards can highlight where the better ‘path’ might be.
  • Line vetoe example used here, I think if you can explain it you get the post idea.

Nash Equilibrium

  • In simultaneous games you don’t really have decision trees.
  • Nash equilibria is where no player has an incentive to move unilaterally.
  • Every game has at least one Nash Equilibria. I can’t say I really understood most of this.

Real life prisoners dilemmas

  • This general template where total cooperation is needed but the cost of one or two agents not cooperating can be beneficial for those agents.
  • The notion that enforcement changes incentives. in society, we enforce cooperation through the idea of reputation and (Axelrod concept) of sufficient weight to the future.
  • Society could exist in response to the common occurrence of prisoner dilemmas, maybe this is at core what I believe following on from “Contractarianism” in [ethics](../books/FundamentalsOfEthics.md#Social Contract Theory).

TBR

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