I think therefore I am .. better?

October 30, 2017 2:07 AM

Inadequacy and Modesty - “When should I think that I may be able to do something unusually well?”
posted by Gyan (25 comments total)

"Modesty is the last refuge of fools and incompetents" - me.
posted by merlynkline at 2:59 AM on October 30, 2017

When should I think that I may be able to do something unusually well?

When you're told so by people who do it for a living, and not before.
posted by flabdablet at 4:12 AM on October 30, 2017 [1 favorite]

> "When you're told so by people who do it for a living, and not before."

So if you're, say, a woman, then possibly never, no matter what your actual level of skill?

A different metric may be required in many cases.
posted by kyrademon at 4:37 AM on October 30, 2017 [57 favorites]

the message of modesty tends to be: “You can’t expect to be able to do X that isn’t usually done, since you could just be deluding yourself into thinking you’re better than other people.”

The writing here seems to be working toward refuting this, and I'm looking forward to reading it further.

Quick counterpoint to the quote above: Most people don't _do_ stuff, so the probability of succeeding if you have a decent education and emotional intelligence is high, especially if you "smell right" to people who can help you/buy what you are selling. Success has nothing to do with you being special.

Unfortunately, those who are doing stuff seldom have time (or inclination) to sit still long enough to get new information, and the ease with which they actually can succeed (see above) means they think it's easy for everyone with a backbone. Overcoming that self-reinforcing attitude would be key to making a better society.
posted by amtho at 5:13 AM on October 30, 2017 [3 favorites]

My response to Mr. Yudkowsky's question was addressed solely to Mr. Yudkowsky who is not, to the best of my knowledge, a woman.
posted by flabdablet at 5:28 AM on October 30, 2017 [2 favorites]

Consider the following:

In real life, when I asked a group of twenty relatively young people how many of them had ever found a $20 bill on the street, five raised their hands, and only one person had found a $20 bill on the street on two separate occasions. So the empirical truth about the joke is that while $20 bills on the street do exist, they’re rare.

And his use of the word "empirical" seems to follow this kind of pattern throughout. I certainly hope this is meant as a joke, but it's of a piece with the usual caliber of Yudkowsky's work, in which Bayesian thinking means never having to admit you have insufficient or subjective support for your truth claims and no friendly axiom should be subjected to the indignities of critical examination.
posted by kewb at 6:26 AM on October 30, 2017 [8 favorites]

...and now I have less wrong in my browser history again. Why would you do that to me?

I am not even going to spend the effort to read what is probably another pile of magical thinking and unexplored biases. Someone tell me if I'm wrong.
posted by pan at 6:35 AM on October 30, 2017 [11 favorites]

The whole thing suffers from being a collection of false dilemmas. On preview: pan, you're not wrong.

"You can’t expect to be able to do X that isn’t usually done, since you could just be deluding yourself into thinking you’re better than other people."

What about the times X isn't usually done just because it isn't done – why must X necessarily be better? Why must being right be a goal? Why must having a unique startup idea be a goal?

A lot of "unique" ideas aren't. A lot of successful startups aren't unique. A lot of failed startups were unique. Many excellent musicians aren't successful. Many incredible authors, artists, scientists, etc. die destitute, their ideas only recognized after death. If that.

Exceptional does not equate to successful. There is no single path to success, though "hard work" is the shared ingredient most of the time (but that ingredient does not guarantee it either – just ask any potato farmer during a blight, for instance) and each of us is born unique.

That's not even getting into how success is defined. Those of us who have pets would likely consider them to be quite successful: cat is successfully cat, dog is successfully dog. Thus the expression, "every cat/dog is the best cat/dog."
posted by fraula at 6:39 AM on October 30, 2017 [11 favorites]

> "My response to Mr. Yudkowsky's question was addressed solely to Mr. Yudkowsky"

Fair enough.
posted by kyrademon at 7:53 AM on October 30, 2017

And his use of the word "empirical" seems to follow this kind of pattern throughout.

I found a $20 on the ground just last year. So the chance of finding one is at least 50%!
posted by thelonius at 8:32 AM on October 30, 2017

i don’t like yudkowsky much either but the amount of hate he gets seems out of proportion with how annoying he is.

i think this article specifically actually makes a good point, which is that “you can’t beat the markets” is true for like the literal stock market but not true in many important areas, not because markets aren’t reasonably efficient but because in those areas, the conditions required for an efficient market don’t exist.
posted by vogon_poet at 10:00 AM on October 30, 2017

True story I found a $100 dollar bill on a sidewalk two years ago

I spent (most of) it on delivery Indian food
posted by vibratory manner of working at 11:18 AM on October 30, 2017 [5 favorites]

Yes, but when would a hypothetical future AI demon-god think I'm unusually good at something? And would this save me (or an immortal digital recreation of me) from its wrath?

The whole thing suffers from being a collection of false dilemmas.

Yudkowsky in a nutshell.
posted by Sangermaine at 12:39 PM on October 30, 2017 [3 favorites]

The thing about inadequacy is... there are people who, for reasons of temperament or social structure, feel inadequate and need to be supported to speak up more. And there are people who, for the same reasons, have an over-inflated ego and need to figure out how to learn from other people.

I don't think Yudkowsky is in the first category.
posted by zompist at 1:12 PM on October 30, 2017 [5 favorites]

Has anyone actually read the article? I feel like this hate pile-on maybe comes from past experience with the author? It's a chatty article, written by a guy just raring to go past the intellectual boundaries he himself has set. He has some reasonable things to say. There are so many worse things in this world.
posted by Dmenet at 2:42 PM on October 30, 2017 [1 favorite]

I feel like this hate pile-on maybe comes from past experience with the author?

I think so, yeah
posted by thelonius at 2:57 PM on October 30, 2017 [1 favorite]

Yes, I read it. The example he himself chooses is one key: he frames it as "Why do I think I'm smarter than the Bank of Japan?" He presents this as a puzzle to be solved, and in fact solves it to his satisfaction: yes, he is smarter than the Bank of Japan. This is a weirdly egoistic framing, when he points out himself that there are economists who held the same opinion of the Bank. There could be an interesting story about "what should we think when experts disagree", but he makes it about himself.

Or considering entrepreneurship, he wonders "Will I be able to find any good ideas that aren’t already taken?" Again, why make it about ego? Some confidence that you will do well is probably needed to start a business, but you certainly don't need a unique idea.

Plus, I think his idea of "modesty" is largely a straw man; despite his quotations, no one actually believes that an argument from authority is always correct.

I don't think he's a villain, but he strikes me as comically unaware of his own ego. He is aware that other people can over-inflate their understanding, but he's writing a book-length argument that that can't possibly apply to him.
posted by zompist at 3:23 PM on October 30, 2017 [3 favorites]

Reading about this guy's CV, or lack thereof, does pull into clarity what kind of person we are dealing with.
posted by Dmenet at 3:34 PM on October 30, 2017 [1 favorite]

No one has the slightest idea what smart means. Its conflation with success is more often unexamined veneration and laughably reptilian. I more often discern when I am not wholly stupid about something, and even that I'm not more stupid than some, or many. How I might discriminate, distinguish, and define what the hell is going on along those lines is on somewhat firmer footing and ancillary to a goal because doubt is an empowering tool.
posted by lazycomputerkids at 3:46 PM on October 30, 2017 [1 favorite]

From the link: "This suggests that a typical person’s guesses about how they did on a test are evidence, but not particularly powerful evidence: the top quartile is underconfident in how well they did, and the bottom quartiles are highly overconfident."

Ya I get this, for example the head cook who went to like Howard Johnsons' seminars for a year and a half is basically testing me with the cutting board.
"PLACE WAX PAPER UNDER THAT, TO PREVENT CONTAMINATION"

So I point out his error with time waste, resource waste and the fact that it is called a cutting board not a WAX PAPER board.
Telling you, even the ego behind a fish fryer is fraught with what pasees as common sense.
posted by clavdivs at 6:58 PM on October 30, 2017

I liked the essay. There's really some outsized hate for Yudkowsky around here.

Medicine is a great area for thinking about the issues brought up in the essay. Medical care (in the US), while obviously effective in some ways, has big blind spots that are important for everyone to understand when interfacing with it. You end up needing to develop a folk theory of medical expertise: which kinds of conditions doctors are good at treating and which they aren't (e.g. anything chronic or "mind/body"); which kinds of new medical treatments get researched and disseminated most and which tend to get neglected (e.g. non-patentable drugs).

Not dismissing but contextualizing expertise (plus perhaps being willing to do some low-risk n=1 experiments), is the frame from which it makes sense to, as the author does, try out an unusual light therapy for seasonal affective disorder -- huge amounts of artificial light, much more than normal light boxes -- that AFAIK the medical community isn't talking about. Or, for example, to try taking MDMA for PTSD (just now starting to get official recognition); or get the help of a midwife or doula during pregnancy.
posted by gold-in-green at 1:06 AM on October 31, 2017 [1 favorite]

MDMA for PTSD (just now starting to get official recognition)

I'm not sure if they did anything with PTSD then, but the first time I even heard of MDMA was a Newsweek article in the 80s, that talked about therapists having good results using it in sessions for some patients. But then it turns out people were taking it to get high too, so, Schedule 1.
posted by thelonius at 2:02 AM on October 31, 2017

I liked the essay. There's really some outsized hate for Yudkowsky around here.

Step back: this is an excerpt of a self-published book, one that makes strong claims about "expertise" without doing things like citing sources and, at least in this excerpt, without using careful methodology.

People here are criticizing Yudkowsky's methods of argument, especially his use of bare assertions to cover what is often vague, limited, or shaky evidence.

When you find things like this (from the second chapter, linked at the bottom of the first), it should set off warning bells:

I am now going to introduce some concepts that lack established names in the economics literature—though I don’t believe that any of the basic ideas are new to economics.

It should especially do so when the chapter that follows cites not a single example of the economics literature and evinces no real familiarity with it. These are typically the signs of crankery, or at least dilettantism.

Why is anything less than saying that Yudkowsky's essay is nice and clever and insightful apparently parsed as "hate?" Isn't the response Yudkowsky's getting the result of asking critical thinking questions about his work?
posted by kewb at 3:18 AM on November 1, 2017 [1 favorite]

My mistake: Yudkosky cites a single paper from 2016, and uses a blog to find another paper from 1977. So he cites two examples of the economics literature, neither of them in support of his bold claims that he is adding new terms to the field.

And then he closes with this:

There’s a whole lot more to be said about how to think about inadequate systems: common conceptual tools include Nash equilibria, commons problems, asymmetrical information, principal-agent problems, and more.

There’s a whole lot more to be said about how to think about inadequate systems: common conceptual tools include Nash equilibria, commons problems, asymmetrical information, principal-agent problems, and more. There’s also a whole lot more to be said about how not to think about inadequate systems.

In particular, if you relax your self-skepticism even slightly, it’s trivial to come up with an a priori inadequacy argument for just about anything.....

That last quoted sentence? That, too, should set off warning bells. This is pretty half-baked stuff.
posted by kewb at 3:27 AM on November 1, 2017

There's really some outsized hate for Yudkowsky around here.

I don't hate him, not even slightly. Doesn't change the fact that much of his writing, this included, is both tedious and misconceived.

HPMOR is less so.
posted by flabdablet at 3:29 AM on November 1, 2017 [1 favorite]