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Eliezer Yudkowsky

An STM thinks highly of Eliezer Yudkowsky. So do many other people as well as himself ;). I have been introduced to his pen name “Less Wrong”. An for now I assume as an STM thinks of him.

If you google him, this is where the [essay collection][essay_start] seems to start. Eliezer’s articles have been collected and edited into a book called Rationality: From AI to Zombies. The first book is called Map vs Territory. My goal is to read and understand the ideas of rationality and hopefully apply them in my life, to get a the maximum use of this life.

The first article “What do we mean by rationality” basically defines things regarding rationality.

Epistemic rationality: believing, and updating on evidence, so as to systematically improve the correspondence between your map and the territory. The art of obtaining beliefs that correspond to reality as closely as possible. This correspondence is commonly termed “truth” or “accuracy”, and we’re happy to call it that.

Instrumental rationality: achieving your values. Not necessarily “your values” in the sense of being selfish values or unshared values: “your values” means anything you care about. The art of choosing actions that steer the future toward outcomes ranked higher in your preferences. On LW we sometimes refer to this as “winning”.

I remember reading his articles multiple times in the past, to no avail. Shit gets out of hand quickly. One thing you do not understand after another and then the point of reading the article and growing is lost. I have my hypothesis for that which I will detail and explain in a bit. But I am of the understanding that STM got his education in meta-ethics primarily through this guy so am a give my full before I give up on him.

With that I started reading the second essay. What I try to do with this essay is that I wan’t to paraphrase my understanding of each paragraph that he writes. I seem to think that he uses words a lot and sometimes the meaning is lost and based on interpretation. This is to let an external audien decide my understanding and help me correct it.

Without further ado, “Feeling Rational” everybody.

  • Hypothesis: Feelings are not rational.

Feeling rational (the essay)

A popular belief about “rationality” is that rationality opposes all emotion—that all our sadness and all our joy are automatically anti-logical by virtue of being feelings. Yet strangely enough, I can’t find any theorem of probability theory which proves that I should appear ice-cold and expressionless.

What do we mean by feelings usually? When you see many couples, holding their hands and going about, you feel sad. You probably feel angry that your friends make fun of you and so on. All these are the feelings Eliezer is talking about, let’s say.

If all sadness and joy are automatically anti-logical by virtue of being feelings, then one who believes in it should be expressionless, as expressions can convey your feelings(which are anti-logical) to others. I guess Eliezer is trying to say that if we believe that feelings are nonsense, then it does not make sense to still portray them through the face, to others. Or that somehow if you remain expressionless you attempt to discard the feeling. Not clear! Next!

So is rationality orthogonal to feeling? No; our emotions arise from our models of reality. If I believe that my dead brother has been discovered alive, I will be happy; if I wake up and realize it was a dream, I will be sad. P. C. Hodgell said: “That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.” My dreaming self’s happiness was opposed by truth. My sadness on waking is rational; there is no truth which destroys it.

In Map vs Territory, we saw that the Map is our belief and the territory is the reality. Belief and reality can be quite different.

What do we mean by rationality? The ability to systematically improve your map to correspond to the territory is rationality. (Epistemic rationality)

What do we mean by rational? An action where in one systematically improves his map to correspond to the territory is said to be rational .

In math, we call two vectors (A & B) orthogonal when vector A projected on to Vector B is 0. And so in the case of rationality and feeling, when we say they are orthogonal, I guess it means that they are two completely different things, sharing no component of each other.

Our emotions arise from our models of reality.

Here models of reality can mean the Map, i.e, your belief. If your map says that your dead brother is discovered alive, you will be happy. But once you wake up and realize that it was a dream, you are sad. I guess Eliezer is trying to say that, you update your map, i.e., update your belief to match the territory once you wake up. This is the very idea of rationality. Emotions are a result of belief.

My sadness on waking is rational

Such sadness on waking, is a result of a rational action. And hence the emotion is rational?