Counterfactual Social Thought

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I keep feeling like I need to study Bayes nets in order to clarify my thinking about society. (This is probably not standard advice given to aspiring young sociologists, but I'm trying not to care about that.) Ordinary political speech is full of claims about causality ("Policy X causes Y, which is bad!" "Of course Y is bad, but don't you see?—the real cause of Y is Z, and if you hadn't been brainwashed by the System, you'd see that!"), but human intuitions about causality are probably confused (and would be clarified by Pearl) much like our intuitions about evidence are confused (and are clarified by Bayes).

Almost every policy proposal is, implicitly, a counterfactual conditional. "We need to implement Policy A in order to protect B" means that if Policy A were implemented, then it would have beneficial effects on B. But most people with policy opinions aren't actually in a position to implement the changes they talk about. Insofar as you construe the function of thought as to select actions in order to optimize the world with respect to some preference ordering, having passionate opinions about issues you can't affect is kind of puzzling. In a small group, an individual voice can change the outcome: if I argue that our party of five should dine at this restaurant rather than that one, then my voice may well carry the day. But people often argue about priorities for an entire country of millions of people, vast and diverse beyond any individual's comprehension! What's that about?

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Missing Words III

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Loopy is slang for "crazy", but I think it should be repurposed to refer to the quality of thinking the same sorts of thoughts over and over again, never breaking patterns, being stuck indefinitely at the same stage of intellectual development. You could argue that this is a form of craziness compared how an ideal agent would allocate cognitive resources, but I think it's pretty normal and common in our world, not the kind of craziness generally recognized as crazy.

Iff as Conditional Chain

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I'm not sure I like how when we want to prove that two statements are equivalent, we typically say "A if and only if B" and we prove it by separately proving "both directions" A ⇒ B and B ⇒ A, but when we want to prove three or more statements are equivalent, we typically say "The following are equivalent" and prove a "circular chain" of conditionals (1) ⇒ (2) ⇒ [...] ⇒ (n) ⇒ (1), as if these were different proof strategies. Because really, the "both directions" business is just a special case of the chain-of-conditionals idea: (1) ⇒ (2) ⇒ (1). At the very least, one of my books ought to have mentioned this.

Self-Esteem Is Overrated

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Maybe self-esteem makes sense for deontologists who think that being a good person is a matter of obeying some knowable set of rules, but I think that the goodness of a person is a real number, probably bounded but with no known upper bound. Saying "I'm a good enough person just the way I am; I deserve self-esteem" isn't bad so much as it is meaningless: once you know what you've done and how close the results were to (your current estimate of) what the results should have been, then there's nothing left to describe, no further question to be answered.

Missing Words II

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We need a word that means almost the same thing as sellout (in the sense of "a person who compromises their principles for financial gain"), but conveys the idea that the problem is not selling out, but selling out for too low of a price. We all have to make trade-offs; there isn't any one principle that takes lexical priority over every other valuable thing in life: sometimes it makes sense to compromise your ideals in exchange for money or power or fame or fitting in.

But you could at least haggle!

Dialogue on Weird Social Movements

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"Some of my Facebook 'friends'—that is, distant acquaintances—are political radicals: here's a picture of the words 'KILL COPS' spraypainted on the ground, with five 'Likes.' It would be psychologically interesting to know what that feels like."

"Huh."

"'Weird' really isn't as useful of a category as I typically think it is. These radicals are outcasts from the society that they want to remake, whereas lots of people in our crowd have mainstream jobs and power. And yet I'm usually inclined to think of us as 'weirder,' because destroying capitalism and the corporate state is comparatively easier to explain."

"Is it more common?"

"That probably depends on exactly where we draw the boundaries around social circles? Our group of core supporters is tiny, but the group of people who've read Ray Kurzweil and approved is pretty big. And no doubt I don't have a good model of what the smartest and most serious radicals believe, just as they have no idea what we believe."

"Yeah."

"Smashing capitalism also looks more straightforward; it's not clear what a transhumanist analogue of the Occupy movement would do exactly. 'Let's all go spend eight years studying bioinformatics! Death to itself!'"

Seriously Now

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"But it's kind of funny how my current idea of morality is so different and so much improved from what I picked up in childhood."

"Is it?"

"Well, funny is the wrong word; maybe it's better to say notable when what I really want is just to note it, just to make it salient, maybe eventually salient enough such that I can actually start to be moral for once, instead of continuing to sit and cry about how I was betrayed."

Can't Break Clean

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For five years I've known that at some point I need to stop shouting, "the Authorities lied to me; why why why why did they lie to me?!" and start saying, "Okay, so extant social institutions are flawed in knowable ways, and my parents and teachers didn't tell me. Given my current state of information, this shouldn't actually be surprising, so let's stop crying about it and get on with the whole world optimization thing."

But I don't know how to make the switch; after five years, I still don't know how to break clean. It's so much easier to wallow in the pain. Maybe some amount of wallowing was even justified, this time five years ago. But now, I clearly have much better things to do with my life.

Vast Expanses of Imperfection

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Hard Truths from Soft Cats opines that

Your flaws don't make you beautiful or unique. They make you flawed.

While I agree re beauty, technically, your flaws actually do make you unique: the number of ways in which one can be flawed is vastly larger than the number of ways in which one can be perfect; the probability that someone else would turn out to be damaged in exactly the same way you are, is negligible.

It's just that uniqueness is overrated.

Nothing Good in Life Scales

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The other day while rehearsing my arguments about how currently-existing social institutions are obviously insane, it became more salient that there's also no clear way to fix anything on a large scale. My perspective on How to Do Things Better is the idiosyncratic result of five years of my thinking; even if my vision is in the 99th percentile of Arbitrary People's Idiosyncratic Visions of How to Do Things Better (and everyone thinks that about herself, so don't take my word for it), it's not very transferable.

"Life Is Worth Protecting Now"

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What makes a true story inspirational? I think people usually use that word to describe happy stories, stories that make us think that the world is a better place than we previously thought. But sometimes I want to use it to describe sad stories that remind us that the world is far worse than just the parts of it we're used to seeing firsthand, stories about innocent people being hurt by arbitrary causes. It's inspirational in the sense of a call to action, a reminder that there's still important work to be done in the world: I can't solve this particular problem, but there's a reference class of people containing me (reasonably intelligent, reasonably ambitious people, striving to become more effective) who can help fix a reference class of problems including this one—and that is a sacred responsibility that must not be betrayed. Or however you translate folderol like "sacred responsibility" and "must not be betrayed" into something more basic (Bayes-ic?).

Missing Words I

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There are a lot of really important concepts that aren't easy to talk about, because we don't have standard words for them.

Like, there needs to be a word designating the skill or quality of possessing independent judgement—the ability to make decisions without getting distracted worrying about how to explain yourself to people who won't understand. Part of me wants to just call it sociopathy, but that's clearly not the right word.

The problem is endemic. Friend of the blog Mike Blume once lamented that we don't have a gender-neutral equivalent of gentlemanly. And we don't have an atheist equivalent of doing God's work, either.

Draft of a Letter to a Former Teacher, Which I Did Not Send Because Doing So Would Be a Bad Idea

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Dear [name redacted]:

So, I'm trying (mostly unsuccessfully) to stop being bitter, because I'm powerless to change anything, and so being bitter is a waste of time when I could be doing something useful instead, but I still don't understand how a good person like you can actually think our so-called educational system is actually a good idea. I can totally understand being practical and choosing to work within the system because it's all we've got; there's nothing wrong with selling out as long as you get a good price. If you think you're actually helping your students become better thinkers and writers, then that's great, and you should be praised for having more patience than me. But I don't understand how you can unambiguously say that this gargantuan soul-destroying engine of mediocrity deserves more tax money without at least displaying a little bit of uncertainty!

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Eigencritters

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Say we have a linear transformation A and some nonzero vector v, and suppose that Av = λv for some scalar λ. This is a very special situation; we say that λ is an eigenvalue of A corresponding to the eigenvector v.

How can we find eigenvalues? Here's one criterion. If Av = λv for some unknown λ, we at least know that Av – λv equals the zero vector, which implies that the linear transformation (A – λI) maps v to zero. If (A – λI) maps v to zero, then it must have a nontrivial kernel, which is to say that it can't be invertible, and this happens exactly when its determinant is zero, because the determinant measures how the linear transformation distorts (signed) areas (volumes, 4-hypervolumes, &c.), so if the determinant is zero, it means you've lost a dimension; the space has been smashed infinitely thin. But det(A – λI) is a polynomial in λ, and so the roots of that polynomial are exactly the eigenvalues of A.