Yesterday I read through comments on my phenomenology exercises, and was surprised by one commenters phenomenological prowess. They were extremely perceptive and articulate about the basic features of their subjective experience. I didnt know the person, and I predicted that theyd studied philosophy. Then I made an impressively long string of mistakes in frighteningly rapid succession. I considered the prediction, and told myself I was only 30% to 40% sure. I told Eliezer I predicted the commenter was a philosopher. I failed to notice confusion about the discrepancy between the prediction and the numbers, and I dont remember whether a feeling of dissonance came up and I ignored it, or whether I was completely oblivious. I expected a philosopher to be good at phenomenology, so I spent almost no time imagining other ways someone might end up capable of that much precision describing their experiences; actually, as I say that, I notice that I did think briefly about it, but I cut off that line of thought because I started to feel it suggesting I was overconfident or making some other mistake, which was aversive. (Jesus, this shit happens SO FAST.) I confused philosopher given phenomenology with phenomenology given philosopher. Moreover, I typical minded and overestimated phenomenology given philosopher. I did think about how rare philosophy majors are in the general population, but then I majorly botched my half-hearted attempt to imagine how many rationalists are philosophy majors. I really just thought, There are few in the general population, but way more among rationalists, as though way more means most, and I didnt think about how many, say, programmers there are, or mathematicians, how many people with completely different kinds of backgrounds. (Turns out theyre an environmental engineer.) In my emotions, I would have made the conjunction fallacy just then, and assigned a higher chance of someone being a philosopher rationalist than to someone being a rationalist. And then when I found out he wasnt a philosopher, I was surprised.I wasnt even surprised that I was surprised. Id *said* 30% to 40% to myself, but that cant be what I actually believed, or I wouldnt have been surprised. And then, worst of all, I told myself--and also Eliezer--that Id only predicted 30% probability, even though in my head Id said between 30% and 40%, and I noticed myself worrying I was being dishonest and then shut down *that* thought too! Grr. This is why Bayesian reasoning is a wizard skill and not a bug patch, epiphany, or tortoise. In practice, even once you understand what it is, you have to get *a lot* of difficult things right all at once. There are tons of brain quirks working against you, especially when youre reasoning about concrete stuff, like, people, that S1 can easily get its hands on and apply memory-and-association-type heuristics to. (Context for last paragraph is in the link below.)
Posted on: Wed, 05 Nov 2014 19:52:22 +0000
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