Harry Potter And The Methods Of Rationality
A revised and improved version of this essay is in my book Sci-Ence! Justice Leak! – hardback, paperback, PDF
I loathe the Harry Potter books – or at least I loathed the first four, eight years ago, when a friend sent me .txt files of the first four books. I read through them in one day, and found them unimaginative, morally repugnant, barely literate, patronising crap. I haven’t looked at them since, so it may be that my judgement of them as someone in my early twenties was very different from what my judgement would be now, in my early thirties. But I doubt it.
I have very ambivalent feelings about Eliezer Yudkowsky, the founder of the LessWrong group blog. He seems the brightest of the various Singularity advocates, but that makes it all the more annoying when at times he falls into what look like incredibly basic faults in his reasoning. I also find the way he collects zealous followers more than a little worrying – the computer scientist Ben Goertzel has recently reported getting death threats from people who believe (following Yudkowsky’s rhetoric) that Goertzel’s investigations into AI have the potential to destroy the universe. (Note that Yudkowsky has emphatically not made such threatts – he is apparently friendly with Goertzel, in fact – but that his inflammatory rhetoric has the effect of encouraging that kind of behaviour even if it’s not his *intended* effect).
While I’ve committed fanfic in the past, and recognise that it can be a valid art-form in the right hands, I think that it rarely *is* in the right hands – Sturgeon’s Law probably needs to be adapted for fanfic so that it reads “99% of everything is crap – and 99% of the 1% that’s left isn’t up to much either”.
So why am I up to my third reading of a(n as yet incomplete) Harry Potter fanfic novel by Eliezer Yudkowsky, which already weighs in at longer than most completed novels?
Put simply, it’s one of the funniest, cleverest things I’ve read in a long, long time. While Yudkowsky originally intended this as primarily a didactic tool, it’s a rather brilliant satirical novel as well. The basic idea is that Harry Potter’s mother’s sister, instead of marrying an abusive slob, married a professor of biochemistry at Oxford University, so when he gets adopted after his biological parents, Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres is brought up in a very loving family, surrounded by books on science and SF novels, and becomes a child prodigy in science before ever learning about magic. As a result, he sets about actually *analysing* how magic works, applying the scientific method to figuring out what’s *really* going on.
The results of someone able to actually *think* walking through this world that has no real logic to it and pulling at the loose ends lead to some remarkably funny moments, like when Harry makes the Sorting Hat become unexpectedly sapient by wondering about it, or his total destruction of the rules of Quidditch, but what makes the book work is the fact that it gets this humour from *actually taking the world in which it’s set, and its consequences, seriously* – and as a result it really does feel like the stakes in the story are high.
What helps as well is that the characterisation is so spot on. By this I don’t mean that the characters fit Rowling’s originals – they seem more-or-less as I remember them, other than Potter, but I’ve not read the books in nearly a decade. Rather they seem like real people. The most rounded characters are the child prodigies, Harry and Hermione, and I found some parts of the book almost painful to read having been a child prodigy myself, as Yudkowsky appears also to have been:
Aside from helping people with their homework, or anything else they needed, she really didn’t know how to meet people. She didn’t feel like she was a shy person. She thought of herself as a take-charge sort of girl. And yet, somehow, if there wasn’t some request along the lines of “I can’t remember how to do long division” then it was just too awkward to go up to someone and say… what? She’d never been able to figure out what. And there didn’t seem to be a standard information sheet, which was ridiculous. The whole business of meeting people had never seemed sensible to her. Why did she have to take all the responsibility herself when there were two people involved? Why didn’t adults ever help? She wished some other girl would just walk up to her and say, “Hermione, the teacher told me to be friends with you.”
But let it be quite clear that Hermione Granger, sitting alone on the first day of school in one of the few cabins that had been empty, in the last car of the train, with the cabin door left open just in case anyone for any reason wanted to talk to her, was not sad, lonely, gloomy, depressed, despairing, or obsessing about her problems. She was, rather, rereading Hogwarts: A History for the third time and quite enjoying it, with only a faint tinge of annoyance in the back of her mind at the general unreasonableness of the world.
There are a couple of minor flaws with the book, both tiny moments when Potter’s characterisation feels off, and it seems like Yudkowsky is putting his own thoughts in – a point where Potter attributes the success of a Jewish character to his being Jewish (Yudkowsky seems to believe intelligence to be more down to hereditable than environmental factors, and is himself ethnically Jewish), and a point where Potter dismissively writes off the minor character Ron Weasley, which almost made me stop reading – at that point the author appears to have fallen foul of the all-too-common current tendency to conflate intelligence and cruelty. Thankfully, this is the *only* point where this happens, and in general both book and protagonist show a far more enlightened moral attitude than the frankly medieval morality of the original books.
Which is not to say that this Harry Potter is a paragon – far from it. He’s a very, *very* well-drawn nuanced character, with elements clearly taken from real life (his 26-hour sleep cycle sounds very, *VERY* familiar to me, and I suspect it’s something Yudkowsky has also suffered from) but without being an author-insert character. He’s fundamentally decent and thoughtful, but a decent and thoughtful eleven-year-old with few social skills.
The other major problem in the book is more forgivable, and is just that quite a few Americanisms show up – not just in language, but in assuming that British society is like USian society in ways that it isn’t (little things like having pancakes for breakfast, as an obvious example). Those won’t affect American readers at all, and will only affect those British readers who, like me, find it more implausible that British people would naturally take the word ‘pie’ to mean a sweet rather than a savoury dish than that it’s possible to defeat soul-sucking monsters with chocolate.
The science in the book is more-or-less correct, and if you don’t already know the basics of Bayesian statistics, game theory, the scientific method and various other elements of what might be called “the study of how we know what we know”, you’ll come away with a very decent gut-level understanding of the basic concepts. But you should read it because it combines that with imagination, a decent moral sense, a rare level of intelligence and some genuine writing ability.
I think, to be honest, Yudkowsky has missed his calling. His propagandising for the SIAI seems to be putting off many people who should sympathise with his ideas (such as, but not limited to, myself), while attracting a few who shouldn’t (the death threat people mentioned above). Were he to become a full-time Science Fiction or Fantasy writer he would probably have much more success both in putting his ideas across and in not putting off his natural allies. Either way, though, if you can bear to lower your status enough to read a 700+page Harry Potter fanfic, this is the one you should read…
Do Something Nice…
The charity Reprieve, which works to help prisoners on death row, has posted an Amazon wishlist for Linda Carty, a British grandmother on death row, who reads a lot to help her cope. There were only five books on it to start with (and only one now), but I’m sure more will be added at some point, assuming Ms Carty lives that long…
The Grandfather Paradox: Experimentally Resolved?
A revised and improved version of this essay is in my book Sci-Ence! Justice Leak! – hardback, paperback, PDF
I am utterly astounded that I’d never seen this before today – an experiment that may have more profound implications for our worldview than… maybe any experiment since the Michelson-Morley experiment?
I’m going to assume here that everyone knows about the Grandfather Paradox. This is just the simple question “What happens if you have a time machine, and go back and kill your granddad so you can never be born?”, the staple of many TV science fiction shows.
Now the normal answer to that question is “You can’t, so don’t be daft”. But for physicists, that’s not good enough – apart from anything else, General Relativity allows for the existence of ‘closed timelike curves’. These are paths through space-time that act much like paths through space – you can go in at one end and pop out the other – except that the other end is somewhere else in time as well as space. So it’s theoretically possible that you *could* do that, and we’d quite like to know what would happen if you did before everyone’s granddad starts retroactively never-having-existed.
Now, the main hypothesis in physics up to now has been, in effect, that it doesn’t matter. David Deutsch, a quantum computing expert at Oxford University, demonstrated that in quantum-mechanical terms you could have an outcome that makes sense so long as you accepted the many-worlds version of reality. Essentially, the probability that you were ever born, and the probability that you killed your grandfather, would both be 1/2 – or in other words the ‘you’ in a universe where you were born would travel to a universe where you were never born, kill your grandfather there, then come back to one where you’d never killed your grandfather. Nice and simple.
However, Seth Lloyd, a quantum physicist at MIT, never liked the many-worlds hypothesis (for reasons which, I have to say, make no sense at all to me), and he and a team of colleagues came up with another, simpler, idea, which is just that if you go back in time and try to shoot your grandfather, something will stop you. Maybe the gun will misfire, maybe you’ll be arrested, maybe your grandma was having an affair with the milkman and you’re his biological grandchild – something will just make sure that you can’t do that, because it would be cheating.
Now, there are huge, huge, MASSIVE problems with this – it gets rid of causality, it allows information to come from nowhere, and it just seems like a gigantic handwave. It makes no sense at all, and just seems like a desperate attempt to try to get out of the obvious, blatant, truth that the Many-Worlds interpretation is the only one consistent with the experiments and maths. When I first read about it, I thought it was just a neat way of avoiding the truth.
Unfortunately, it appears to be true. What I hadn’t realised was that they’d *actually done the experiment*!
Lloyd and his colleagues came up with an ingenious experiment, which I’m not entirely sure I’m capable of explaining, as it’s not really sunk in yet. This will be a GROSS oversimplification, and is just designed to get the idea across – please don’t kill me for inaccuracies. The full description is in the linked PDF. This is what Pratchett, Stewart and Cohen call lies-to-adults – the story is right, but each individual fact is wrong.
Essentially, photons (light particles) can be polarised a couple of ways, and they’ll only go through stuff that’s polarised the same way. That’s why Polaroid sun-glasses work – they block all the photons that are polarised the wrong way, so only let some light through.
Now, until something detects it, a photon isn’t in any particular polarisation – it’s in all of the possible polarisations at once. But once something has detected what kind of polarisation a photon is in, it’s always been that way – quantum causality works both ways in time. So you can set up an experiment that only detects photons of one polarisation, and that way you can send a message back to the past, to the photon emitter (light source) saying “Only send photons of this type”. If you do this the right way, you can send a photon back in time (but you can’t look at the photon that’s been sent back in time until it’s come back to the time you sent it from, or the experiment can’t work). That might sound mad, but it’s the way things are – accept it for now.
Now, by doing this, you can set up a kind of quantum ‘gun’ – set it up so that the photon going back in time tries to cancel out itself coming forward in time – all you do is put something in the middle that tries to change the polarisation of the backwards-in-time photon to the opposite of the forwards-in-time one. Changing polarisation is easy, and works about 96% of the time.
It never worked on the backwards-in-time photons.
This means that if you went back in time and tried to kill your grandfather, the gun really *would* misfire! Every time.
Now, assuming their experimental design wasn’t flawed and their maths works – and it looks OK to me, but I’m not a quantum physicist – then that means a lot of things:
Firstly, it means the universe is completely deterministic. There’s no such thing as chance.
Secondly, it’s strong evidence *against* the many-worlds hypothesis – the first such evidence I’ve ever heard of. It almost certainly means there’s a single universe.
Most interestingly, it means we can say goodbye to cause-and-effect. Effects can cause their own cause. For science-fiction fans, we’re living in the universe of Bill & Ted, the Doctor Who story Blink, and By His Bootstraps, (EDIT or of this rather nice short-short story by Simon Bucher-Jones) rather than Back To The Future or Pyramids Of Mars.
This of course means that access to a closed timelike curve (something that has never been observed in the real universe, but is theoretically possible), gives you essentially godlike powers. Got a closed timelike curve and want a million quid? Just put two pence in the bank and say “tomorrow, if my account has two milion pounds or less in it, I’ll take half of the money out and bring it back today and stick it in the account.” So if tomorrow you’ve still got 2p, you’d go back and put an extra penny in, which means that actually tomorrow you’ve got 3p in, which means… and the only stable way that can work out (other than you dying or something over the next day) is for the million pounds just to appear in your bank account.
Want to write a bestselling novel? Decide to print out five hundred pages just covered with the letter “A” and send it to a publisher. If they publish it and it becomes a bestseller, you send that back to yourself. If they don’t, you print out all the letter “A” apart from one “B” at the end and send that back to yourself to try that, and repeat – the only stable outcome is that you have a novel arrive that you never actually wrote but that will be an instant bestseller. And so on.
The possibility of time-travel in a *single, consistent universe* has never been one that’s really been taken seriously before, because it was just so absurd. I’m still 90% sure that there must be a mistake somewhere – the many-worlds hypothesis, as odd as it may sound, is far, FAR less ridiculous than this. But this is one of those things where either in a few months we’ll have a very quiet paper by Lloyd saying “Oops, I was totally wrong about everything because I forgot to carry the one” or in a hundred years’ time we’ll have a totally new understanding of physics based around this paper. I really can’t see a middle ground here…
Doctor Who Live
There have been several attempts to bring Doctor Who to the stage, some more successful than others, but all very typical of the time in which they were made. Curse Of The Daleks was a gripping base-under-siege story by Terry Nation and David Whittaker, with Daleks but no Doctor, from the 1960s. In the 1970s, on the other hand, we had Seven Keys To Doomsday, by Terrance Dicks,where the Doctor has to collect MacGuffins before the Daleks do. And in the 1980s there was The Ultimate Adventure, a ludicrous pantomime by a past-it Dicks, a lot of fun but making no sense whatsoever.
And in 2010 we have Doctor Who Live, an arena show full of explosions and spectacle, with almost no dialogue, little plot, and tons of special effects, but with a flying Dalek and a Dalek-vs-Cybermen fight, and lasers…
That sounds a little cruel, and it really shouldn’t. Doctor Who Live isn’t aimed at me, and nor should it be. It’s a circus by any other name, with people in costumes, music, silly jokes, and a light show and fireworks, and it’s aimed at very small children, who were there in droves. My own favourite Doctor Who stories are things like Genesis Of The Daleks, The Aztecs, The Keeper Of Traken or The Massacre – small-scale, character-driven, dialogue-heavy stories about ideas. Doctor Who Live was never going to be any of those things.
What it is – and all it is – is pure spectacle. There’s an attempt to give it a plot (a sequel to the 1973 Robert Holmes story Carnival Of Monsters), but really it’s just an excuse for as many monsters (all from the post-2005 series, obviously, and with a heavy weighting towards Stephen Moffat’s stories) to come through the audience and scare the children, for pyrotechnics, for loud rock music (Murray Gold’s music for the new series, rearranged very effectively by Ben Foster for a 16-piece band and choir, improved immensely from Gold’s original overblown arrangements).
That’s not to say there’s nothing to recommend it to adults- Nigel Planer gives as wonderful a performance as you would expect as the showman Vorgenson, and Nicholas Briggs does a rather magnificent Churchill, and Planer’s live interaction with Matt Smith on film has a real Doctor Who feel to it (reading a recent DWM interview with Smith where he mentioned that Peter Sellers is the actor he most admires unlocked something about Smith’s performance for me, and this is the first time I’ve seen any of his work since reading that, and I’m a lot more impressed now) – but it’s really best suited for adults who have brought their children along with them.
It’s very hard for me to judge the show, because what I want from art or entertainment is very different from what it was offering. In the comments to a recent post, various of us have been talking about how much of modern entertainment is geared towards the facile and childish, and how the highbrow is being devalued in favour of the trivial. This show would not have been something I’d have chosen to do by myself (a gang of friends were going) and it’s about as trivial and childish as you can get, with absolutely no intellectual content whatsoever.
But at the same time, while there’s probably something wrong with someone in their thirties or forties who lives off Flumps and Curly-Wurlies, there is nothing wrong with having those things *on occasion*, and this show is the equivalent of eating a Sherbet fountain – not something you would want to do every day, and something you might feel a bit embarrassed about doing at all, but as a little bit of a nostalgic treat it’s fine on occasion.
The show is much better put-together, with much higher production values, than it needed to be to satisfy its target audience of children. There were a number of points where I was genuinely highly impressed by the craft and thought that had been put into the performance. But there’s a bit in one of the About Time guidebooks where Wood and Miles talk about how Doctor Who toys would have been missing the point, because the best bits in Doctor Who weren’t spaceship races or light-sabre battles but elderly character actors being frightfully clever at each other, so you couldn’t recreate them with toys, you had to recreate them by reading the books. This show, on the other hand, is almost designed for action-figure recreation, while the script probably barely fit onto five sides of A4.
I am not so totally grown-up that I can fail to appreciate the show – so many of my formative years were spent thinking about Daleks and Cybermen that seeing Real Live Ones!!!, even if they look different from the ones I liked as a kid, is enough to put a grin on my face – but I’m adult enough that, while this is an extraordinarily well put-together, charming, spectacular show, I wouldn’t recommend it to any adult who doesn’t have a deep-seated, irrational love of Doctor Who.
This seems like a deeply ambivalent review, and it is. I thoroughly enjoyed myself while I was there – and I really did – but where I can fit most other things I enjoy into an aesthetic or intellectual framework, this had about as much for the rational part of my mind (by far the biggest part) to latch on to as a fireworks display would. And seen *as* a fireworks display – as a bunch of pretty images, flashing lights and loud bangs – it’s as good as any I’ve seen. But whereas the TV show at its best could appeal to children while still having some genuinely intelligent writing worth repeat viewing as an adult (and while I’m not one of those who thinks Doctor Who is the best TV programme ever made, I would certainly say that at its best, in stories like City Of Death or An Unearthly Child or Vengeance On Varos it was in the top rank of TV of its time), tonight’s show was a spectacular for the kiddies.
That I can’t wholeheartedly recommend it to the readers of this blog (who, I flatter myself, like something with a little more intellectual roughage most of the time, rather than just sweets) merely says that we’re not its intended audience. That I still managed to have an enjoyable evening (and that despite having a migraine, meaning I was doped up to the eyeballs on painkillers) shows how well it does what it does. Nicholas Briggs in particular is to be commended – as well as his Churchill, he also provides all the Dalek, Cyberman and Judoon voices (at least some of them apparently live) and this show demonstrates what a fine voice actor he actually is. And Nigel Planer, who for most of the show is the only live-action performer on stage with any lines, carries off what is almost a one-man show at times superbly. I didn’t come out thinking I’d wasted my time and my money, which I was seriously worried I would do ahead of time.
But the people who enjoyed it most were the thousands of tiny children in their cardboard cyberman masks.
Spending Review Linkblogging
As you’d imagine, reaction to the spending review has been… mixed… at best among Lib Dems, just as it has among the general public. Here’s a few of the responses I’ve seen:
Oxfam say “The coalition has taken the tough choice to prioritise the poorest people on the planet during the bad times as well as good.”, though they give Osborne and Cameron the credit for that.
Jennie thinks it’s not as bad as the hype suggested.
Millennium, whose Daddy Richard I trust on economic matters more than almost anyone, says “Tonight Mr Danny’”champion of the spending round’ Alexander is e-mailing Liberal Democrats to say we’ve done the right thing. Well we haven’t. We’ve merely done the LEAST WRONG thing we could…This is hard, possibly the hardest thing we’ll ever do. And it’s cruel. And it may even be terribly horribly wrong…But if it succeeds, just you remember who it was who did this and did it RIGHT.”
The Social Liberal Forum say “It is heartening to see policies that we as Liberal Democrats have long campaigned for being delivered: the Pupil Premium, the universality of most welfare payments, the creation of a Green Investment Bank, Regional Growth Funds and the protection of spending for schools, the NHS, international development and science. We are pleased to see the levy on banks made permanent and Trident not renewed…There remains a significant danger, however, that many of Chancellor George Osborne’s measures will disproportionately affect the poor, the vulnerable and the marginalised in society – precisely those that depend on public services the most.”
And David Matthewman says “I want to apologise but, really, what use is an apology in this situation? I’ll make one anyway, mind you; I’m sorry about what my party (in coalition, yes, but still my party) is doing to welfare…I don’t need the apology to be accepted, and I’m aware it may not be, but I’m sorry, and I’ll continue to argue both within the party and outside it for the importance of having a strong welfare state.”
Lulu Glitch and Third Book Question
For some reason, my author page on Lulu is only showing the hardback version of my Beatles book, not the paperback. Rest assured, for those who want to buy it, it is still available here. I’m working on getting the ePub version out.
While I’m here, as some of you will know I’m currently working on a book of the Hyperposts. Once that’s out, I’ll be planning a third book. Would people rather read (bearing in mind it’ll be serialised here in draft, and also bearing in mind that it’s likely I will do the others, just not at as high a priority):
A book or books on the Beach Boys similar to my Beatles one
A book of my Doctor Who From The Beginning posts
A post-Singularity detective novel (the problem with this one will be making it different enough from Philip Purser-Hallard’s …Of The City Of The Saved that I don’t feel like a plagiarist)
Other (specify?)
If I’d Wanted A Government That Attacked The Poor, I’d Have Voted Labour
I’m waiting for a few people who know more about economics than I do, and whose views I trust, to post analyses of the Comprehensive Spending Review today. On many fronts, it’s a damn sight better than I (and most people) had worried – cuts to science funding are minor – and some things that have come out of it are actually good. A Universal Credit benefit system is a huge improvement, and not replacing Trident this Parliament is a *huge* victory for the Liberal Democrats. As George Osborne pointed out, there is actually *less* being cut than Labour had said they would cut pre-election.
Of the charities I follow on Twitter, Scope and Shelter hated it, the mental health charities seemed cautiously optimistic, and Oxfam were positively enthusiastic.
However, there are several things that have come up which are, to me, absolutely abhorrent:
The removal of full housing benefit from those between the ages of 25 and 35. This is just *wrong*.
Removing benefits from non-single people who are too ill to work EDIT who are disabled and out of work but deemed ‘able to work take on work related activity’, but whose partner works, after a year of claiming benefit. This will destroy relationships, make sick people reliant on their partners, and push people into poverty who weren’t before.
The removal of mobility allowances for those in residential care.
And, hidden in the small print in the defence review yesterday, and possibly worst of all, every email, phone call and web visit in the UK is to be monitored by the government. Despite the coalition agreement saying this will not happen.
These things can be fought, and will be fought. But depending on how our (non-ministerial) MPs vote they will make the difference between me supporting the coalition with huge reservations and wanting us to pull out as soon as possible. I certainly won’t campaign for anyone who votes for these changes without at least trying to get them amended.
What absolutely *DISGUSTS* me is that Clegg is still following his ‘own the coalition’ line, claiming this Spending Review to be liberal and fair. The changes above are not ones that I – nor, I believe, any Lib Dem voter – voted for. I am becoming more and more convinced that Clegg – who I never voted for as leader, but who I thought did an amazing job at the election and immediately afterward – is everything his detractors claim.
Most of the cuts fall into the ‘harsh but fair’ category, and I could gladly support the cuts to Elizabeth Windsor’s household budget, or the cuts in ‘defence’ spending. And in general, a cut down to 2006 levels of spending as a percentage of GDP (or 2002 levels of staffing in the public sector, depending on how you want to look at it) is not an intrinsically bad thing – certainly not the ‘greatest attack on social democracy this century’ as someone (I thought Laurie Penny, but I can’t see it on either her personal or her New Statesman blogs, so it may have been someone else) said yesterday before the cuts had even been announced.
We also mustn’t let ourselves be fooled into thinking things are worse than they are – a couple of ‘cuts’ people seem most annoyed about are to a commitment to cut cancer waiting list times, and to provide free prescriptions for certain long-term conditions. Both those things were promises made in the dying days of the last government, that have never actually come into practise. Nothing’s been cut there because nothing’s being spent, the government are just not going to do something that Labour (who, remember, wanted to cut *MORE* than this review will) said they would have done had they stayed in power.
But those listed above are – unless I am mistaken about their impact and their consequences – disgusting, immoral, and something I cannot and will not support. I will be remaining a member of the Liberal Democrats – these changes are *NOT* Lib Dem policy, they are ‘coalition’ policy, and I’m not a member of the ‘coalition party’ – but examining *very closely* the voting records of any MPs before I decide which areas to campaign in next election. I don’t have a Lib Dem MP myself, but I wil be contacting Lib Dem MPs in local constituencies and letting them know of my views here.
The cuts I’ve listed are things we would expect from the Tories, and we might not be able to stop them, but the least we can do is not pretend they’re somehow fair or right. If my analysis of this is right (and I’ll be the first to admit it isn’t if I turn out to be overreacting), then Clegg has disgraced himself by supporting these moves.
Bullet-Biters And Bomb-Testers
Sometimes serendipity happens. I was trying to think of a way to link together a couple of sections of the Hyperpost book, when I found this old post from Scott Aaronson’s blog Shtetl-Optimised.
In it, Aaronson talks about how he’d noticed that there was a lot of overlap between Libertarians and proponents of the Many-Worlds Hypothesis in quantum physics, and had tried to figure out why:
Some connections are obvious: libertarianism and MWI are both grand philosophical theories that start from premises that almost all educated people accept (quantum mechanics in the one case, Econ 101 in the other), and claim to reach conclusions that most educated people reject, or are at least puzzled by (the existence of parallel universes / the desirability of eliminating fire departments)…
My own hypothesis has to do with bullet-dodgers versus bullet-swallowers. A bullet-dodger is a person who says things like:
“Sure, obviously if you pursued that particular line of reasoning to an extreme, then you’d get such-and-such an absurd-seeming conclusion. But that very fact suggests that other forces might come into play that we don’t understand yet or haven’t accounted for. So let’s just make a mental note of it and move on.”
Faced with exactly the same situation, a bullet-swallower will exclaim:
“The entire world should follow the line of reasoning to precisely this extreme, and this is the conclusion, and if a ‘consensus of educated opinion’ finds it disagreeable or absurd, then so much the worse for educated opinion! Those who accept this are intellectual heroes; those who don’t are cowards.”
I think he’s on to something, but I think there’s a second aspect, which is what happens when those ideas actually hit reality.
Because Libertarianism and the Many Worlds Hypothesis have one big difference between them – one has immediate real-world consequences, and the other doesn’t. And that means that it is no longer a purely intellectual exercise.
Leaving aside whether the claims for Libertarianism (of the Ayn Rand type, which is what Aaronson is referring to) stack up logically, and assume for a moment one believes them to be correct, should you *act* as if you believe the claims to be correct? To take Aaronson’s example, should we privatise the fire service?
If you’re a libertarian, you believe the answer should be yes – that privatising the fire service would have the end result of fewer fires, and those fires being fought more cheaply. But what if you’re wrong? If you’re wrong, then the result would be people – potentially a lot of people – losing their homes.
So there’s a second level of calculation to be done here – how sure are you of your own reasoning ability and the information (your priors, in Bayesian terms) you use to come to your conclusions? *WHEN YOU FACTOR IN THE PROBABILITY OF YOU BEING WRONG* does the expected benefit if you’re right outweigh the expected loss if you’re wrong?
Now, on this blog I often fall into the ‘bullet biter’ side of things *when talking about ideas with no real-world immediate consequences*, because it’s both intellectually right and more interesting. But take the Many-Worlds hypothesis. I consider this the most likely of the various explanations of quantum theory I’ve read, and would put my confidence in that judgement at about 80% – I’m a bullet-biter there, and proud of it.
And I’m a bullet-biter when it comes to certain forms of alternative medicine. I’m convinced from the experimental evidence, for example, that taking certain vitamin supplements in large doses will massively decrease the risk of cancer, and have stated that on this blog too. And again, I’d put my confidence in that at about 80% (I rarely put my confidence in *anything* much above that).
Now, the downside with taking vitamins is that there’s a cost of maybe a pound a day and – if you believe the very worst possible reports, which as far as I can see have no evidentiary basis, but if we’re assuming I’m wrong we’re assuming I’m wrong – a very small increased risk of kidney stones. The benefit, if I’m right, is not getting cancer. An 80% chance of ‘not getting cancer’ outweighs a 20% chance of a 1% increase in kidney stones, so it’s worth the pound a day to me to put my money where my mouth is and actually take the vitamins.
On the other hand, one can come up with a real-world test for the Many-Worlds Hypothesis. If it’s true then, were I to stand at ground zero of a nuclear weapons test, I should expect to live through it. There would be a googolplex or so universes where I’d die instantly, but I would not experience those, because I’d die too quickly. On the other hand, there’d be a one-in-a-googolplex chance of me surviving, which according to Many-Worlds means there’s a universe where I *would* survive. That would be the only one I’d experience, so from my own point of view I’d survive.
But even though I am persuaded by the Many-Worlds hypothesis, I’m not going to try that one out.
However, there are people out there who *would* do it, who would say “No, I’ll be fine! Drop the bomb!” – let’s call them bomb-testers.
And I think while being a bullet-biter can be a good thing, being a bomb-tester never is.
A bullet-biter might say “I’m convinced the Singularity is coming, but I’ll give some money to Greenpeace just in case” while the bomb-tester would say “I’m convinced the Singularity is coming, so I’m not going to support environmental protection measures, because we’ll be gods in twenty years anyway”.
A bullet-biter might say “I’m convinced the Bible is literally true, but I’m not going to hurt anyone who thinks differently”. A bomb-tester would say “I’m convinced the Bible is literally true, so I’ll persecute homosexuals”
I think a lot of people – particularly in the ‘skeptic’ community – think of themselves as being bullet-biters when they’re actually bomb-testers. They’ve reached a logical conclusion, and are going to act on that and damn the consequences. This is why some people say Richard Dawkins and fundamentalist Christians are the same kind of person – not because their beliefs are equally unjustifiable, but because they are both certain enough of their own rightness that they’ll act on it even when the downside of that action looks to the rest of us far worse than whatever upside they believe in.
Which is not to say that “acting on one’s beliefs” is a bad thing. One reason I have more respect for Eliezer Yudkowsky (of Less Wrong ) than for other Signulatarians is that he’s willing to act on his beiefs (even though I don’t find his arguments convincing, and think he has more than a little of a Messianic streak at times). But his actions *take into account the possibility he’s wrong* – he’s acting in a way to minimise expected harm. If he’s right and he doesn’t act, the world will end. If he’s wrong and he does act, then he wastes his time and looks a fool. Were I to find his general arguments convincing, I’d be doing the same.
If you find yourself defending an intellectual position that others don’t hold, then you’re quite possibly an ‘intellectual hero’. But if you find yourself acting on that position without considering what might happen if you’re wrong, then you’ll end up a real-world villain…
Comic-Blogging Question
I want to write more about comics on here, but am very conscious that the only essays I’m planning (for expanding the Hyperpost book) are on comics by Alan Moore, Grant Morrison and Jack Kirby. There *are* comics by people who aren’t those three, and I’m sure I’ve got stuff to say about them, but I can’t think what.
What comics would people actually like to read my opinions on?
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