Disclaimer

For the first time, I was actually able to read an entire article by Eliezer, without being stuck. I read the article “Why Truth” and here I am to write about it.

Everything that is in quotes (“”), is Eliezers words from the article. Everything I write below is my interpretation/paraphrasing if you will. I also will try to add other examples to help me get the meaning out better.

Why Truth?

For me truth is about discovery. What exactly I “want” to do in life as a result of the growing chaos of not being able to make decisions without knowing what to optimize for. The sheer inability to know what is right and wrong in an objective sense, is what discovering the truth stands for me.

There are three reasons why we could go after the truth. The first one could be curiosity. The questions answered as a result would be those that tingle your aesthetic sense. What questions get answered first depends on which question is more fun to solve, in essence a challenging one, despite the larger probability of coming up with the answer.

The second reason could be that you want to accomplish a real-world goal. You wan’t to build a machine that can fly, so you would like to know the truth about aerodynamics, so that you can make it fly without crashing and loosing lives. You wan’t to know the truth about morality, so you can pack your bags and get on the EA train. You wan’t to know how much you will save in a month if you buy at the cheap store, so you want data regarding pricing and so on. This, so that you can use money wisely and spend it on things that matter. If this is the reason why we want the truth, then the priority of the questions we wan’t the truth in will inform the expected utility out of the truth. A focus on knowing the truth about morality might be higher in prio for some, over knowing which supermarket to go to in order to save money.

To seek the truth for its instrumental value, i.e., the value it can add to your life might seem impure. This is one of the forms of truth seeking where we are very interested in verifying our results, and we can. Curiosity might not stay long enough to verify its answers, once the attractive mystery is gone. It appears that you can also satisfy your curiosity by listening to mythical tales about what created the world.

The third reason could be morality, that you have a duty to the society to know the truth. The difference between morality and curiosity is highlighted by the following example. When one is curious, he chooses to see behind the curtain. When one is pushed by morality, it is lot more likely that he expects others to see behind the curtain as well, and castigate those who close their eyes. For example, an STM might want his friends also to look behind the metaphorical curtain. If they don’t, they are castigated.

I tend to be suspicious of morality as a motivation for rationality, not because I reject the moral ideal, but because it invites certain kinds of trouble. It is too easy to acquire, as learned moral duties, modes of thinking that are dreadful missteps in the dance. Consider Mr. Spock of Star Trek, a naive archetype of rationality. Spock’s emotional state is always set to “calm”, even when wildly inappropriate. He often gives many significant digits for probabilities that are grossly uncalibrated. (E.g: “Captain, if you steer the Enterprise directly into that black hole, our probability of surviving is only 2.234%” Yet nine times out of ten the Enterprise is not destroyed. What kind of tragic fool gives four significant digits for a figure that is off by two orders of magnitude?) Yet this popular image is how many people conceive of the duty to be “rational”—small wonder that they do not embrace it wholeheartedly. To make rationality into a moral duty is to give it all the dreadful degrees of freedom of an arbitrary tribal custom. People arrive at the wrong answer, and then indignantly protest that they acted with propriety, rather than learning from their mistake.

Eliezer seems to be worried that in the name of morality people might pick up some dirty habits. And gives the spock example, which apparently people relate with rationality. I don’t know what he says after, neither can I even relate to the point.

As a last there are two types of thinking, one is called perceptual judgement, and the other deliberative judgement. I believe what Eliezer is trying to say regarding these two is that we need to forcefully use slow deliberative judgement rather than perceptual judgment, until a time comes that the slow deliberative process becomes subconcious. For example, knowing our biases and working to counter the effect of biases would be part of the slow deliberative system. And we switch to the other system- if ever- as and when we have trained the above into our neural circuitry that underlies the other system.

Open Issues

Some people, I suspect, may object that curiosity is an emotion and is therefore “not rational”. I label an emotion as “not rational” if it rests on mistaken beliefs, or rather, on irrational epistemic conduct: “If the iron approaches your face, and you believe it is hot, and it is cool, the Way opposes your fear. If the iron approaches your face, and you believe it is cool, and it is hot, the Way opposes your calm.” Conversely, then, an emotion which is evoked by correct beliefs or epistemically rational thinking is a “rational emotion”; and this has the advantage of letting us regard calm as an emotional state, rather than a privileged default. When people think of “emotion” and “rationality” as opposed, I suspect that they are really thinking of System 1 and System 2—fast perceptual judgments versus slow deliberative judgments. Deliberative judgments aren’t always true, and perceptual judgments aren’t always false; so it is very important to distinguish that dichotomy from “rationality”. Both systems can serve the goal of truth, or defeat it, according to how they are used.

I do not understand the iron example and how he concluded from that, that calm is an emotional state rather than a orivileged default.

To make rationality into a moral duty is to give it all the dreadful degrees of freedom of an arbitrary tribal custom. People arrive at the wrong answer, and then indignantly protest that they acted with propriety, rather than learning from their mistake.