Choice

N.E. Miller and J. Dollard, of social cognitive theory fame, tried to explain all mental illness in terms of internal conflict. (Everyone makes mistakes. I'm trying to illustrate a point here, okay?) According to their theory, internal conflict occurs when a person faces a difficult choice, dubbed as approach-approach conflicts, avoidance-avoidance conflicts, and approach-avoidance conflicts. Approach-approach conflicts refer to when you've got two equally appealing choices. Now, a lot of people envy those who even get to make that choice. I know I do. That doesn't change the fact, though, that those "conflicts" do get under people's skin and cause measurable, non-trivial amounts of stress. Avoidance-avoidance conflicts are, naturally, worse: this is what you have to deal with when you've got two equally unappealing choices and must pick one. Moral dilemmas love forcing you to make this choice. And then there are approach-avoidance conflicts, which I guess were just thrown in for completeness's sake. I mean, it's not even really a choice when you've got an appealing option vying for your decision with an unappealing option. You just pick the appealing one. Done.

The trouble is that, in real life, most choices are all of these combined. 'Tis a scarce day when you've got two options that are both just as bad or just as good, without elements of the other. Say you're trying to decide which college to go to. One is an upper-echelon, high-status school, that will be very difficult for said fictional version of you, and very expensive, and the other will make it easy for you to get a degree without much financial stress but, you know, with the economy and all, maybe you need that high status degree to get a job.

God damnit.

People love to say freedom of choice is The Greatest Thing Ever. It isn't. Choice is like most good things: good until too much of it, then bad afterwards. Too much choice causes stress, decreases overall happiness level, and depletes your ego. You might recognize that phrase from the work of Roy Baumeister, whose research shows that making decisions actually expends energy you can't notice disappearing, much as expending self-control temporarily weakens your self-control.

I used to go with the crowd, thinking freedom of choice is an Unquestionably Great Thing. But just as the pursuit of happiness makes you unhappy, I don't trust the wisdom of the philosophers of antiquity. The writers of the Constitution did not have the benefit of modern psychological knowledge.

One of the most horrible implications of my idea presented here, if correct, is that it is an essentially unsolvable problem. Russel and Norvig said, "Refusing to act is like refusing to allow time to pass." Most people simply cannot make fewer decisions than they already do, though they might be able to trick themselves into thinking they're not deciding.

The brain is just not designed for very many choices. "Fight or flight" is pretty much the only one usually acted on in the ancestral environment. Maybe the decision to overthrow the Tribe Captain occasionally enters the ancestral mind and that's why we're able to make complicated decisions at all. I'd be able to discuss this in more depth if I were an evolutionary psychologist.

Barry Schwartz, whose Scientific American article is linked to above, also has an excellent TED talk on the matter. Dan Gilbert touches upon it in one of his TED talks too.

As food for thought, I did manage to find two somewhat legitimate sources of disagreement. The Research Digest has an article citing studies that made generalizations from small-scale experiments that the "too-much-choice effect" is exaggerated, a claim that I find dubious or preposterous (take your pick). Reason.com, a politically charged blogmagazine, has an article that makes surprisingly good points. For those who don't want to read it, I think the position is best summarized in two quotes from the article, namely: "Since different people care intensely about different things, only a society where choice is abundant everywhere can truly accommodate the variety of human beings," and, "At the heart of the anti-choice argument is a false dichotomy: We can have a narrow range of standardized choices, or we can live with options that are infinite, dizzying, and always open." I would keep in mind, though, that from their website's about page, it is clear that individual liberty is one of their deontological ideals. Also, to meta-nitpick the article: half of it is just nitpicking Schwartz's book. A more meaty objection: the article is not research-based at all.

Trying to argue this seems to provoke gut-reaction disagreement from everyone I mention it to. However, I'm afraid I cannot take a five-second rejection as evidence that I am wrong. This has been the response every single time I've mentioned this, so I'm hoping the comments on this post do better than that. For those who still disagree, take your freedom of choice. I'll ask for what I want: freedom from choice!

Further reading:

• Harmful Options, which I wish I knew about before writing this essay. 
• Velleman's Sorrow of Options

"You" Do Not Exist

You do not exist. You heard me. You don't exist. If you think you do, you're just fooling yourself.

Buddhism agrees with me. Walpola Rahula said:

"Buddhism stands unique in the history of human thought in denying the
existence of such a Soul, Self, or Atman. According to the teaching of the Buddha,
the idea of self is an imaginary, false belief which has no corresponding reality, and
it produces harmful thoughts of 'me' and 'mine', selfish desire, craving, attachment,
hatred, ill-will, conceit, pride, egoism, and other defilements, impurities and
problems. It is the source of all the troubles in the world from personal conflicts to
wars between nations. In short, to this view can be traced all the evil in the world."

One immediate reaction many of you will have is, "Hold on! You haven't even defined 'the self' yet!" and this is a legitimate thought. But my personal definition of "self" doesn't actually matter for proving my point. I like to think of "the self" as the center of narrative gravity; in other words, "the self" is a story you tell which may be more-or-less factual (though you should be aware that there are things you think you know about yourself, that are false) but is, fundamentally, an incomplete point-of-view. The story you tell about yourself, "the self", while certainly very compelling because we are programmed to respond to stories, is not yourself-in-reality. You might regard that previous sentence as obvious. (Most of you, I hope.) I am not the first to write on the human's tendency to narrativise himself, and as such it is not my primary topic. But I'm afraid I had to cover it in this paragraph to close the inferential distance for the next paragraphs.

Let me clarify something about the first four sentences in this post. "You don't exist," resembles, in a mutated and deformed way, my actual belief, but I am not saying that there are no atoms creating thoughts, abilities, traits, and stories that correspond roughly to things you consider to be yourself. It's just that you're wrong about almost all of them. For one thing, you probably think you're pretty great. Going through the various studies mentioned on that page, you might be thinking, "Ah, but those results don't apply to me." They do, though. They may not apply to your "the self" but they apply to you. That's what I mean when I say your story is fictional, i.e., that you don't exist the way you think you do.

The fundamental attribution error goes in four directions. Everyone who reads even a little bit about it knows that it means people over-attribute actions to personalities rather than situations (the correspondence bias). People who study biases also know that it means people under-attribute their own behaviors to their personalities, emphasizing the situations. However, I noticed that both of these tendencies apply mostly to negative situations and are reversed when regarding positive situations, especially with rivals. The one says, "He got a promotion because he's friends with the boss, not because of his merit," and right away after, "I won the game because I overcame the obstacle of the horrible team I was assigned to." People who realize that this tendency exists and is true for everyone still commit the fallacy! You cannot escape your own bias!

It is this very systematized failure to notice one's own failures (an infinite recursion of failure) that causes the illusion of continuous consciousness. If you think you're correct about thinking that you are a unified whole and not a thousand shards of conflicting entities, of course you're going to think you're correct about thinking you're correct about thinking that you are a unified whole.

Most of the time, it doesn't matter that your self isn't a separate, homuncular entity distinguishable from the rest of you. After all, you do end up doing particular things, rather than falling to the ground, collapsing into erratic, seizure-like muscle spasms, because you can't make up your mind whether to move your entire leg forward or backward. Often enough, your thousand secret motivations coincide! Your desire to stay alive and your desire to experience pleasure work together when it's dinnertime. The subject of this article matters when you are conflicted. (Side note: if you were a coherent self, it would be impossible to ever be conflicted about anything.) Your "self" starts to look a little less coherent when your desire for pleasure and desire for continued health clash when facing an unguarded jar of cookies. Or far worse, when your desire to win at life faces your inner Bruce.

While researching this topic, I found that what I'm saying here is unoriginal, which is encouraging, because it means the ideas have merit enough to have been presented elsewhere. Every modern philosopher of consciousness seems to have taken these views, except David Chalmers. His consciousness papers can be found here. He argues that consciousness cannot be reduced to physics and thus requires metaphysical and epiphenomenal explanations. I'm not even going to begin trying to refute that idea, as it requires a whole model of the universe different from my own, and I'd have to construct a really enormous, complicated argument involving many layers and probably several long posts. Thankfully, someone else already did that, and you can read it here.

It's also important for you to recognize that, even if you read this article and every link in this article, and you agree with the conclusion, you may still have the lingering feeling that it's not true, because it feels like you still exist as a coherent, consistent, singular entity. This means the question hasn't been fully dissolved. For that, you'll have to study lots of evolutionary psychology, neurology, and other cognitive science, and you might even have to make brand-new discoveries. Good luck.

Further reading:

• Selfhood quotes, compiled by yours truly. You should read them. 
• No-Self at Dharma Overground
• Which Parts Are "Me"?
• Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
• The Mind's I (especially Dennett's short essay "Where Am I?")
• Consciousness Explained
• How Can We Be Persons if There is No Self?
• Reasons and Persons
• A Social-Cognitive Neuroscience Analysis of the Self
• The Trouble with Change: Self-Verification and Allegiance to the Self (tangentially related)
• The Nature of Self
• The Curse of Identity
• Three Dialogues on Identity
• Monothematic Delusions and Perception

Serenity and Shikata

 My favorite artifact of the Christian tradition is the serenity prayer, which goes like this:

God, grant me the Serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
the Courage to change the things I can,
and the Wisdom to know the difference.

Well, god isn't going to grant those things, but I think it's actually a pretty good way to go through life. The Japanese have a similar saying:

仕方がない

pronounced shikata ga nai, meaning "it can't be helped". I like that. I say it myself during assaults by the universe on my well-being. There are those who don't approve of the phrase, saying it hurts people and takes away their willpower, but I don't buy it. We are talking about the same country whose culture espouses isshoukenmei - to make a desperate effort as though one's life were at stake. And you'd need a Hell of a case to convince me that a phrase that helps people deal with suffering is a net negative.

There's a lot to be said on accepting life's little frustrations. If you get cut off in traffic, it's easy to get mad, but this does not help you in any way. So it might benefit you to teach yourself that it's just something to accept, to react with shikata ga nai. Then again, if you're an AI researcher, maybe you can help push self-driving cars and actually solve the problem. Even then, though, it's not very helpful to get mad at the (probably not actually a jerk) person for cutting you off. Only when something terrible happens, like your best friend dying in an accident do you curse the heavens and decide that you're not going to accept the status quo of tragedy anymore.

Okay, so really big problems that aren't inevitable are quite reasonable to get adaptively pissed off about. But what about really big inevitable problems, tragedies that can never be rectified?

Like what?

You could say that, at the moment, I'm siding with "courage to change the things I can" rather than "serenity to accept the things I cannot change." Also, it doesn't bother me that I'm trying to deal with the impossible.

"Many acquire the serenity to accept what they cannot change, only to find the "cannot change" is temporary and the serenity is permanent." - Steven Kaas

But once again, when terrible things happen and there really is nothing you can do about it, there's no solace except swallowing your own eyeballs, lighting your legs on fire, amputating your liver, and gurgling the words, "I can't do anything about it. I will solve other problems instead."

There are people who try to sidestep the unbreakable dichotomy of acceptance and volition. They will say things like, "Sometimes the truth hurts too much to be worth knowing." No. If there is a problem, and you don't know about it, your ignorance doesn't change the existence of a problem. You can only fix it if you know what it is. If it's too late? Then the problem still wasn't caused by your knowing. The fact that there's no longer any solution just means you didn't know soon enough. We live in a world of only true things; they are there to be known, and ignoring them won't make them better.

Carl Rogers had a similar, if overly mystical, idea. His version of self-actualization requires that a person accepts his flaws, in order to change them. In other words, denial is no path to recovery. In much the same way, you have to admit to being irrational before you can be rational. Oh, dear reader, isn't this obvious? Isn't it quite clear in your mind that false beliefs do not lead you to a better life?

"Ignorance is bliss," is nonsense. More ignorance does not bring you closer to maximum joy; it brings you closer to being a rock. Recall the Litany of Gendlin.

I don't care that my will is not very strong, that my real-world efficacy isn't even noticeable. I'm going to do what I can to solve all the problems.

How and Why I Became a Transhumanist

In 1911, Bobby Leach survived a plunge over Niagara Falls in a steel barrel.

Fourteen years later, in New Zealand, he slipped on an orange peel and died.

We immortals call these people 'almosts'.

In ninth grade, I tried to draw Hector from Fire Emblem: The Blazing Sword straight from memory. This was the result. I kept the drawing because it was the best drawing I had ever done. From this you might gather that I am not good at drawing. The man I drew was clearly not Hector, but he was similar. In tenth grade, I gave him a name, Torthus, and eventually I gave him a whole complicated personality. He was to be one of three main characters in a video game that will never be made, and be frozen solid for hundreds of millennia to later become one of precisely eleven survivors of the apocalypse, all of them men.

The primary thing about this universe, once the world population became eleven, is that nobody would age, and nobody would reproduce. There were just eleven people, and I came up with a really complicated plot to follow that will never be written. Meanwhile in the real world, I started thinking huh. Not slowly becoming decrepit and dying of old age would actually be pretty sweet. and eventually huh, not dying at all would be even sweeter. One typical knee-jerk reaction to the prospect of immortality is "oh no you'd have to watch all your loved ones die!" and I mean, come on. Is that your true rejection? There are SO MANY easy ways to shoot down that point.

• Your loved ones could be immortal too! This is probably the best way to counter the point.
• Some like to counter this by saying, "You'd get bored of your loved ones!" No, god damnit, you haven't been immortal. You don't know that would happen. There's no good reason to even suspect it would happen.
• Some people like to counter this by saying that their loved ones wouldn't choose to be immortal, so it wouldn't be worth it. This is the same logic that says "perfectly rational" people will choose to defect in prisoner's dilemmas. It takes a long time to explain why that logic is flawed, but the short response is: No.
• You already have to watch people die. And, in fact, being immortal yourself would reduce this burden on your friends, who would then not have to watch you die.
• There is no possible way that you could be eternally sad about any loss. Even in our currently rather short lifespans, people whose life partners die do not typically mourn for their remaining forty-odd years.
• Some of us do not have loved ones.

You know who writes stories of how awful immortality would be? Mortals! What do they know?
 

Even science agrees with me, as you can tell by this highly scientific chart

People tend to view death and aging as acceptable things because they're "inevitable". I can sympathize with this notion. But when death isn't inevitable, like for young people today (probably), people forget why they accepted death in the first place and start rationalizing its existence. I started bringing this up with people I knew, but I always got the same typical rejections. "Death gives meaning to life." "Immortality would be boring." "What would you do with your life?" "Dictators would live forever!" "I'd eventually become a different person!" "We'd lose our human dignity if we lived forever." Just a bunch of cached thoughts. I started thinking that nobody on the damn planet actually thought about death, that the entire reason it is accepted is a cultural zeitgeist.

Birthday cakes are consolation prizes for not being immortal.

Then, one great day, I discovered that there were other people who thought this way. "Holy smokes! There are other sane people after all!" I must have thought. These people called themselves transhumanists, because I guess the people who named the idea did not want it to spread.

Transhumanist? Is that like transgender? That doesn't describe me at all!

Well, I'm glad I found some of these people, because some of them are much better writers than I am. Luke Muehlhauser wrote Death is a problem to be solved. Nick Bostrom wrote The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant. Alcor writes on curing death. If I could afford cryonics, I'd sign up right away.

Then it turned out that the transhumanists also support human enhancements other than curing death. Why wouldn't they? Humans have been "enhancing" themselves since the invention of the loincloth. Drawing a line at how much enhancement is allowed is stupid. So, for years, I was a member of a group whose existence I was not even aware of until August 2011.

It is time to demolish the lie that death is a good thing. There is no case for the removal of a sapient life from the universe, none at all.

My desire to live forever is half the reason I want to reduce existential risk. If all humans die, then I die, and that's unacceptable. The other half of why I want to reduce existential risk is because I don't want anyone else to have to die, either.

Who wants to live forever? I do I do I do pick me pick me pick meeeeee

For those newer to transhumanism than I am, here are some good resources.

A Personal Note on Self-Driving Cars

For this post, I am violating my convention of posting timeless essays. This piece will become obsolete when everybody uses exclusively self-driving cars.

On January 5, 2012, I could have killed someone. I had the blinker on and was about to change lanes to let the person behind me pass, and the motorcyclist was pulling into the lane on my right just as I was about to do the same, and if I hadn't been paying attention, if I had been on the phone or doing one of a thousand other stupid things instead of paying god damned attention, I would have killed her.

I wouldn't call it a close call. It's not like I tend to not pay attention. It's more that I think if I was an iota less responsible, I might not have looked, and someone would have died.

Getting into a car (or, more accurately, a Motorized Murder Machine [or, more accurately, a Motorized Thing That Kills People But Might Still Be A Net Good Under Cost/Benefit-Analysis, which you have to admit is less catchy]) terrifies me. Driving is boring, but worse is how every time you do it, you could die.

After the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, people drove cars more and took airplanes less. They did this for the perfectly rational reason that the enhanced security made going anywhere by airplane a real pain, but also for the irrational reason that they were afraid of terrorist attacks. Per mile and per trip, cars kill more people than airplanes. I thus conclude that people died as a result of this irrational fear, in car crashes. (I can't find any data on traffic rates, commercial flight usage, or automobile accidents over the last 15 years. I can imagine being wrong, but it doesn't seem likely.)

People fear the wrong things.

There's a reason people talking about the availability heuristic always use the example of how people overestimate their chances of dying in a terrorist attack or other newsworthy events: people keep doing it no matter how much it's explained. (There are plenty of other things people are irrational about thanks to this heuristic, like nuclear plants. That's not the point of this post.) The largest cause of death for young people is vehicle accidents. That's not because they're bad drivers. It's really not. It's because nobody is a good driver. There were no cars in the ancestral environment. Driving, like typing and surgery, is a new skill. And because of this, teenagers die in car accidents.

This is not okay.

Driving a car "feels" safer than flying in an airplane because people think they're in control of where the car goes. Isn't this an awful situation? People will actively choose cars in favor of airplanes for safety reasons and then die. No, they don't deserve to die because they made a stupid decision. Neither does anybody they crash into.

Driving is the canonical example of illusory superiority. Look at those results. 90% of Americans profess themselves to be above the median in driving skill. This delusion would be bad enough without risk compensation. People seem to have a baseline level of risk that they prefer to endure: people with burglar alarms are less likely to lock their doors; people who think they're smart are less likely to study for important tests; people drive very carefully when a little drunk. This is consistent with my experience. When I'm walking and holding a cup of coffee, its chance of spilling seems to be independent of how much coffee there is; I walk faster after drinking more. People who think they're better drivers will drive more recklessly.

Which brings us to self-driving cars.

The only self-driving car ever to crash was being driven by a human at the time. This really ought to be the nail in the coffin for anyone who prefers the "control" of manual driving. But as the airplane usage rates indicate, statistics about how safe self-driving cars are may not make any difference in people's preferences whatsoever. If self-driving cars became mandatory, and if their rates of crashing are a thousandths of today's manually-driven cars, people would still blame crashes on "the computers" and lament that they would have done better on their own.

But you can do better than that. You've just seen how stupid it is to want to feel like you're in control of a multi-ton death machine and how much safer self-driving cars have already been compared to human drivers. You ought to realize that self-driving cars are only going to improve over time, while humans will stay exactly as good at driving as they are now. You know how much better it would be, for yourself and others (think of the time you'd save!), if you had a self-driving car. So help me out, huh? Spread the word: self-driving cars are the way to go. Maybe pay attention to the Robocars blog. I don't really know. I'm not good at spreading my favorite causes.

GoodSearch Microgiving

Small donations matter. That's why I like GoodSearch. That's also why I have ads on this blog, but I digress. GoodSearch is a service that donates an entire cent to a given charity every time you use it to search the web. If you don't think that's a lot of money, in December 2011 Google recorded twelve billion search requests from the United States. If Google donated a cent to charity for every search, that would be four million dollars donated per day on United States searches alone.

That would be a lot of money.

GoodSearch is currently small, which is how it's able to provide such a huge return-on-investment for doing searches. If it gets bigger, it will be forced to pay fractions of pennies to charity for searches. But that's not really a problem: you do searches anyway. This is almost free money for charity. The only cost to the user is a few annoyances, which I'll cover in a bit.

First, how to use GoodSearch. From the homepage:

1. Make an account.
2. Choose a cause. I chose the Singularity Institute, but you are of course free to choose whichever. Beware, though, that charities are inefficient by default, and your money is better off going to an efficient charity.
3. Download the GoodSearch toolbar. I know how annoying toolbars are, but this one is a bit special: it serves its entire purpose even when it's hidden. Doing this will allow you to make GoodSearch your default search engine.
• If toolbars bother you that much, this step is optional. You can change your browser's preferences to use GoodSearch as the default search engine and manually check whether the websites you buy things from use GoodShop.

And that's it. You could use GoodDining, but I don't eat at restaurants, so I can't tell you anything about that. GoodShop works automatically when you have the toolbar, but it takes "up to 8 weeks" for that information to show on your profile, so the delayed fuzzies probably have diminished effect. But as I like to say, there's a difference between doing good and feeling good.

I use GoodSearch by typing searches into the browser bar. (I have Google at the right because it works as a calculator. I don't use that for searches.) It comes with a few problems, namely:

• They send a few annoying emails. These stop after a while.
• The search algorithm is not as good as Google's. I am never satisfied with image searches on GoodSearch, and a small but annoying part of the time, I'm not satisfied with a web search either. That said, this can be a good thing sometimes. SEO generally optimizes for Google, and GoodSearch occasionally shows useful things Google does not. This is handy if "filter bubbles" bother you. This could easily be the biggest problem GoodSearch has, but it would be a shame if something so small prevented potential donations.
• At the time of writing, the toolbar is not compatible with Chrome or Tor. This shouldn't matter, since the toolbar is optional, but maybe it does anyway.
• GoodSearch gives off a general air of used car salesmanship, like it's always trying to get you to buy something through the most jarring advertisement techniques known. For example, it awards points and arbitrary labels like "GoodPerson".

All of these categorize as general friction. I earn about two dollars a month by searching, and since I wouldn't pay two dollars to get rid of the recurring elements of that set, this is a good deal. To someone for whom those tribulations aren't worth two dollars a month, there is nothing I can say. We are different classes of person, and if you are one such person I wish you well but please do not leave comments on this post.

This post is titled "GoodSearch Microgiving", not "GoodSearch". Now it's time to talk about microgiving in general.

The heuristic I use for all decisions is a modified form of Douglas Hofstadter's superrationality: I do what I wish someone else in my position would do. Adopting this rule has had profound changes on my behavior, including implications I had never thought of. For example, I avert in a small way the tragedy of the commons. I also avert the tragedy of the anticommons because I wish people in my position would share more.

This matters when considering a donation. Not donating because "a small amount wouldn't help much" is just a mass excuse. Charities would rather you give something now than wait until you have "enough" to make an impact. All donations make an impact. The size changes with donation amount, but if anything this is a reason to stop donating zero, not a reason to not start donating more than zero! What's better: some impact or none?

I don't deny the possibility that you have literally no money to spend. But if you are in a position to donate, consider how rich you are. Even if the absolute measure of your donated money bothers you (which it probably doesn't), you can know that small amounts of money really do make big differences, even if you can't feel that difference emotionally. Thus it is said: if you want to feel good, donate to charity. If you want to do good, donate to an efficient charity.

I used to be a fan of freerice.com. I don't think they're a scam, but they could be. I like what they're trying to do, but I don't know how effective they are. The rice could be donated to poor countries at the cost of impoverished farmers' careers for all I know. Possibly the worst problem is that while you're on freerice clicking words, you can't do anything else; you are utterly unproductive (it sure doesn't teach you vocabulary). GoodSearch is different. It donates to a charity of your choice for something you already do. The marginal cost is slim, and you decide where the money goes.

This article took about three hours to compose and edit. According to my algorithm, it pays for itself eventually if I cause even one person to sign up for GoodSearch. If you've read this page and haven't done so, I want to know why.

Detecting Pseudoscience: A Few Links

I stumbled upon a number of pseudoscience detection kits. So, I figured I'd search for a few more, optimizing for information, and share. If you know of other good ones, post them in the comments.

Richard Feynman's essay, Cargo Cult Science, is a classic. If you haven't read it, you need to read it.

Peter Norvig's Warning Signs in Experimental Design and Interpretation is also a must-read. It explains in detail the sorts of statistical fallacies that go into the publishing of a false paper. It also explains why this happens and how to spot it. See also his interview with Kathryn Schulz.

John Baez has a jocular jab at bad physics with his Crackpot Index.

I rather like Steven Dutch's Science, Pseudoscience, and Irrationality index. The vastness of the material is incredible, and as far as I've been able to tell, it is all worth-while. My personal favorite is his What Pseudoscience Tells us About Science.

Quackwatch is a website dedicated to this sort of thing, especially in the fields of medicine and health (which are distinct). Of particular interest are the famous Seven Warning Signs of Bogus Science and a statement by 32 Russian gentlemen on why pseudoscience is bad and why science should beat it up.

The unfortunately-acronymed Committee for Skeptical Inquiry has an article, also written by a Russian, on why pseudoscience is dangerous and should be beaten up.

Russians do not tolerate pseudoscience.
Screenshot from Burnt by the Sun.

James Randi (who spoke at the Singularity Summit in 2010) is a wonderful man. In the same vein as the previous two items on this list, here's his TED talk. Everyone knows about this guy, so I'll say no more.

There's a website that compiles many painful stories about what pseudoscience and easy-to-avoid irrationality do to people. It's called what's the harm? and it's hard to get the need for beating pseudoscience up without knowing or reading about people whose lives have been ruined or at least impacted by trickery and deception, even when there is no intent to harm.

Speaking of which, some fine people made a site called Extraordinary Claims. If you believe in any of the nonsense depicted on that page, please never read this blog again.

Political Calculations has a pseudoscience detection article with a really nice little chart. More importantly for me, it has links to more stuff about pseudoscience, so I don't have to cover those here.

Ben Goldacre and Michael Shermer both have nice TED talks on bad science and both have web sites. Shermer wrote a page called the Baloney Detection Kit, which, frankly, only made it to this list because it mentioned Carl Sagan.

Richard Dawkins wrote a wonderful letter to his daughter when she turned ten about good reasons and bad reasons for believing things.

Undiscriminating Skepticism at Less Wrong covers the tendency to be overly skeptical of true claims for cultural, or in-group reasons. "Skeptics" may disbelieve both true and false claims for bad reasons.

Hypothesis is an idea for a software that will make the entire internet less likely to contain false information. This is the coolest thing on the list.

What We're All Missing

I remember looking for my deodorant recently (that's right; I live a very exciting life). I had remembered it being on my dresser, so that was the first place I looked. And let me tell you, dear reader, I was shocked, absolutely shocked, to discover that it was not there. I stood in disbelief for what must have been seconds, before searching through it, picking up every object on top, opening the drawers, looking behind it, all that stuff! But no, it was nowhere near the dresser! So I looked everywhere for about 20 minutes and then gave up. I was to go without deodorant.

Then I looked on my dresser, and there it was. Right in front of me. Damn! How did I miss it?It's not like the cheese I swear I left in the fridge - I really looked for it!

Daniel Dennett's short TED talk on modern philosophy of consciousness is worth watching in full. He points out in the middle that our visual-sensory consciousness can easily fail to miss anything it hasn't been primed to notice. Here is a shorter video about your awareness:

And here's the 1999 Simons and Chabris paper about inattentional bias and change blindness.

What does all that mean?

These are case studies in momentary blindness to obvious things. This has terrifying implications for what any given person is missing out on every day and during critical moments like sparring with alligators, but even more terrifying is what this suggests about the things we miss that aren't obvious.

Human communication is the single most important recipient of doom from this observation because of a series of tragedies known as Wiio's laws. The theme park version is that there are so many ways for communication to fail that it always does. Here are just a few:

• Illusion of transparency
• Curse of knowledge
• Inferential distance
• Inattentional blindness (also the cause of the deodorant fiasco; see first paragraph)
• Near/Far thinking

Seriously, read Wiio's laws. They're a third-degree mind-blower.

Because we live in an unjust universe where people believe and say stupid things, everyone has heard the claim that 93% of human communication is nonverbal. This is a nonsense number, pulled out of whimspace and cited by so many seeking to look knowledgeable. There are many reasons I say this. It's going to depend on the expressiveness of the speakers, how receptive the conversarians are to body language and tonality, how much meaning is in the talkfellows' words, the context, and trucktons of other factors.

I define communication here as a transmission of information that affects the behavior of an organism. Multiply the amount of information retained (just information received would be inadequate) by the recipient with the amount of behavior affected and you get the amount of communication. The amount of variability in these two factors alone show that the idea of giving a single unifying percentage for "how much communication is nonverbal" is absolute nonsense. I hold that a majority of face-to-face communication in informal contexts is nonverbal, but even this will be a distribution mapped onto what will most likely be a bell curve with huge amounts of variation.1

Anyway, that's just communication. What about the memes of knowledge itself? What in the world are we all missing? In The Strangest Thing an AI Could Tell You, Eliezer Yudkowsky poses the question as a thought exercise. It's fun and all, reading the suggestions and coming up with your own, but, the more likely hypothesis is that any sufficiently strange idea is utterly inconceivable to humans. This, unfortunately, extends well into the realm of true strange hypotheses. There may well be an upper bound on human knowledge which does not penetrate into all that can be known. There may be those thoughts we cannot think but are nonetheless true. What a tragedy 'twould be! Humanity's occupancy of such a small portion of mindspace is one really BIG overlooked problem. (Aside: In accordance with the thesis of this paragraph, I could appeal to Gödelian reasoning, but this seems unnecessary. It's something to keep in mind, though.)

So far I've gone from the consequences of overlooking the obvious, the difficult, and the inconceivable, and their consequences respectively range from trivial to major, major to catastrophic, and catastrophic to inconceivably bad; the inability to comprehend an inconceivable thing may result in the worst thing that could ever possibly happen. But probably not.

What have you missed in your daily life? What has humanity missed, collectively? Historically, lots of things. Lots and lots and lots of things. There are plenty today. There will be plenty more.

Paul Graham asks about what we can't say. I ask about a little more: what we're all missing.

1 Aside: For most purposes, it is important to discriminate communication not just by what I described above, but also how closely the communicated message correlates with the actual intent of the communicated message. I skipped it for simplicity. 

From Solipsism to Empiricism

At first, I wandered down the typical path that people who commit to learning a lot of stuff generally do. The more I learned, the less I knew, I thought. I had reasons for thinking this (though not good ones). increased knowledge tends to lead you to know where the gaps in the knowledge are, right? That does tend to happen among people discovering wonders in fields of knowledge they had not explored before. But then people actually do learn things and then underestimate themselves, thinking they know less than they actually do. But that's the Dunning-Kruger effect, right? No, the Dunning-Kruger underestimation effect refers to people underestimating themselves compared to other people. I took the Socratic approach: I figured I knew more than everybody else on the average, and that I knew nothing. I eventually took a bizarre form of solipsism, which I thought was complicated but really boiled down to, "I don't know a damned thing. Not even that last thing or this thing. Uncertainty is infinite, I think. Or at least I think I think so, maybe." I was not the only person to do this. Lots of people still do it today.

Even after I abandoned the whole superiority nonsense, for the longest time, it seemed that that the more I learned, the less I knew. (This is similar to the "pessimism" approach in critical rationalism - though I didn't see it as a bad thing, or else I would have stopped trying to learn things.)

But that just seems like deep wisdom. Nonsense that sounds like wisdom tends to take the position of contradicting intuition. The problem is that intuition is not always wrong. If it was somehow always wrong, our species would not have evolved to employ it. Now, intuition is wrong a lot. But it would be absolute nonsense to reject an idea entirely because it's an intuition.

I realize, now, that the more I learn, the more I know. Duh! What idiot ever thought otherwise? Oh, right.

Now, this really was a great insight for me, but it seems so obvious in retrospect. I mainly have to thank Isaac Asimov's wonderful essay The Relativity of Wrong, which got me started on questioning the "deep" wisdom that everyone is inherently ignorant of all things, and the ideas of Bayesian probability, especially the crucial idea that partial knowledge is still knowledge. Aristotle said that you either know something completely or you know nothing at all. Socrates followed by saying that since you can't know anything completely, you can't know anything at all. Some guy said, "You can know that you exist, but everything else is uncertain." (By the way, he was relatively wrong about both of those things.) Finally, we've found a perspective of knowledge with a grounding in reality: thinking in grayscale. (To be fair, we had science show up along the way, but that barely counts. I mean, come on. Plus, I didn't want to give a history of science in this post.)

See also: My knowledge as anti-knowledge, which is less about knowledge itself and more about academia's failure to create it.

Closets Are Bad

Link: Richard Dawkins on militant atheism

This talk was some-what of a wake-up call for me. I have been an atheist for some time. I realized that nobody I know in the physical world knows this. Well, I'm 'coming out' as it were. There is a lot of negativity surrounding atheism, a stereotype that atheists aren't normal people, which is false. But there are a lot of organizations that get a lot of respect and money just for being religious, and the way I and a lot of others see it is that this respect and money comes from holding false beliefs. Now, why should this be? That is absolute nonsense.

I used to be one of those people who scoffed at Dawkins's name, thinking, "what gives him the right to try and enforce his beliefs on others?" and maybe that's the right question to ask, and maybe the answer is no. But no. What gives anybody the right to try to convince anybody of anything? It's the wrong question to ask. The right question to ask is, "Is what he says valid?" and the answer is yes. My favorite thing he says in that talk is how he points out that, in the United States, intelligent people do not become theists, and politicians never purport to be atheists, so politics is off-limits to anyone who is both intelligent and honest.

A long, long, time ago, I used to scoff at atheists in general, thinking they were just usurpers holding strange, "weird" beliefs to be part of a rebellious minority. Some of them are, but most aren't. Nowadays, I could pinpoint every last one of the named cognitive biases that led me to this incorrect conclusion. In fact, let me give that a cursory shot. Affect heuristic (atheists = bad), confirmation bias, selection bias, base rate fallacy, attentional bias, etc. Basically, I did all the wrong things that ordinarily prevent people from changing their minds in spite of evidence.

If you're not reading this, or you don't care, that's fine. Apathy is primarily a time saver; somebody who doesn't care to know what I have to say will not be moved by it anyway. And the only thing harder than changing your own dead-set beliefs is changing other people's. A lot of people try to try to be different from that, or claim to have an open mind, but most of those claims are bullshit.

The saddest result of religious disagreements, to me, is that people of differing views on the subject see each other as less human than those of their in-group. This isn't religion's fault. Evolution built it into our systems. People will claim not to do this, and then go and do it implicitly, satisfied in thinking they aren't doing it. I try really hard to remember that theists are very much people, so I hope they do the same. We are all beautiful, strong, amazing humans, and we may some day become more than that, but, for now, at least, no kind of belief, true or false or justified or unjustified, will take that away.

There are a lot of people who feel a strong need to turn to the magic of fiction or the magic of religion. That's sad, too, because of how much magic we have right here in reality. Some videos to watch:

• Why Didn't Anybody Tell Me? A bit tacky, to some, but I enjoyed it
• What does it feel like to fly over planet earth?
• Science Saved My Soul
• The Scale of the Universe and its sequel

Why the Hell am I Starting a Blog?

Another blogger is quite possibly the last thing the internet needs. Maybe another blogger is only slightly preferable to another advertisement, so that's the last thing the internet needs. In any case, another blogger is definitely at least very close to the last thing the internet needs. This goes for webcomics, too. A good heuristic if you're undecided whether to start a webcomic or blog is, "Don't do it under any circumstances."

So what went wrong in my mind, that caused me to start a blog?

The first thing that went wrong is that some jerks told me to start a blog. Apparently, I am suggestible. The second thing, and this is direly important, so you need to know it: my moniker is Grognor. So, you see, I pretty much have to. Grog's Blog. Blognor. It fits too well.

So what's this even about? You've got to have a topic, right?

Well, yes, if I aim to be popular or successful. The trouble is that I don't aim to be either of those things. But it's not like I don't have a real purpose with this blog; that is, I am doing it partially because I like hearing myself talk, as it were, but it's also because I think a lot, and thinkers have ideas, and these ideas can be good or bad but until starting this blog I've just mostly forgotten them (and also not had enough of them). I hope I can use this as a venue for feedback. From the comments, I hope for well-meaning criticism, relevant missives I overlooked, ideas that build on mine, lapses of reasoning I made, thoughts I should have thought but didn't. In a word, commentary.

"But wait! You can't just think! You have to think about something!" the hypothetical reader protests. Well, yes, I do happen to have particular topics I think about most often. My main interests are human rationality, psychology, the technological singularity, transhumanism and defeating death, catastrophic and existential risk, philanthropy and altruism, and manliness. That last one is not likely to show up very often, but it's not a joke. I take it seriously. I also want to save the world.

My primary influences for these interests are, respectively:

• Less Wrong and Overcoming Bias (shout-out to the late Robyn Dawes)
• Philip Zimbardo, David G. Myers, John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, Steven Pinker, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, Daniel Gilbert, William B. Swann, and Dan Ariely.
• the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence and associated Singularity Summits
• Aubrey de Grey's SENS Foundation, the Singularity Institute again, Accelerating Future, and Humanity+
• the Future of Humanity Institute, Nick Bostrom, Existential Risk Reduction Career Network, Global Catastrophic Risks, and the Singularity Institute again
• GiveWell, Eighty Thousand Hours, and selected utilitarian essays
• N/A

I used to waste most of my time on video games and languor until this year, and I intend to fix that in a big, big way. See also the about page.

Welcome to Grognor's blog!