"Applied Rationality Training Regime" #3: Tips and Tricks

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January 3, onwards through a reading of Mark Xu's Training Regime Day 3: Tips and Tricks. As I begin, it's not really clear to me to what extent the "tips and tricks" are to be learned as applicable to future problems, i.e. part of the target set, and to what extent they are to be applicable to the "training regime" itself, i.e. meta-training. I suppose... (I'm struggling to say this properly, which is probably an indication that it's worth thinking about)... I suppose that applied rationality is meta- to begin with, and should of course be applied to itself.

At any rate, Xu is worried about the lack of author-reader feedback, which is a reminder to me that I want to have a mental model of him as one more voice to criticize my thinking, one more character in my stories of myself by which my self delimits my selfness. (Selfishness? Well, maybe so.)

Tactics for applied rationality: Boggling, commitment, seat-adjustment, form-building, exploration, phenomenology, hair-style agnosticism, non-weird results, winning.... Hmm.

Boggling: getting yourself to "feel like you're lost in a web of infinite knowledge".  It's amusing that Xu's first example of "Boggling" is one that I boggled at as a teenager fifty years ago. 

"The teacher said that the Earth goes "around" the Sun. I thought that there was no such thing as an absolute reference frame, so what does it even mean to say that the Earth goes around something? Doesn't it mean the exact same thing to say the the Sun goes around the Earth?". 

Well, yes, but that's not as far as you can go to get boggled, if that's what you're looking for. Arthur Eddington was the guy who figured out (but didn't prove) that the Sun runs on hydrogen->helium fusion, and he was the guy who sorta-proved with the Eddington Experiment, that Einstein was Right. (Do I oversimplify? Very well then, I oversimplify; I am human and my multitudes get mixed up sometimes.) Anyway, on page 152 of his "The Nature of The Physical World" you will find

"The earth goes anyhow it likes. .... we have seen that the mathematical picture of empty space containing "illegal" curvature is a sheer impossibility in a world surveyed from within... [so] the earth will not have to take any special precautions to avoid causing it, and can do anything it likes. And yet the non-occurrence of this impossible curvature is the law (of gravitation) by which we calculate the track of the earth!"

For me as a teenager 50 years ago, that was a serious boggle. A lot of work is being done by the phrase "a world surveyed from within." It's really cool. Further boggling on the same basis is managed in Lewis Thomas' Medusa and the Snail, including a chapter which is "An Apology" for the "fact" that, as the NYT quoted:

“On occasion, I place my pencil point… in the middle of my paper … and
make the sun revolve slowly around East 69th Street. Anyone can do
this. It takes a bit of heaving to get it started, but after a few
minutes of hard thought you can hold East 69th as the still, central
point, and then you can feel the sun rolling up behind you from the
right side, making the great circle around.”

And not just the sun. “If you want the sun to revolve around the earth
in complete turn every 24 hours, you must bring along the whole universe,
all the galaxies, all the items in space, clear out to the curved edge.”
But Dr. Thomas doesn't feel entirely sanguine about this activity.
“What bothers me… is the effect this may have had on the cosmologists...

OTOH, in Tolkien's universe, the bent world, (the formerly flat Earth, Arda), has daylight provided by a Sun which is the last fruit of the Golden Tree, carried around it in a ship. I find this much less boggling than Eddington or Thomas, but it just so happens that January 3rd is Tolkien's birthday, and today's topics have many connections to his essay On Fairy Stories(pdf), explaining our human role as sub-creators and as visitors to the sub-creations. In fact he might say that a major point of fairy stories is boggling, as an end in itself: not to head for a particular goal, but simply to to see what you're already seeing with new eyes. ("to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.") As Tolkien puts it,

we need recovery. We should look at green again, and be startled anew (but not blinded) by blue and yellow and red. We should meet the centaur and the dragon, and then perhaps suddenly behold, like the ancient shepherds,sheep, and dogs, and horses—and wolves. This recovery fairy-stories help us to make. ..We need, in any case, to clean our windows; so that the things seen clearly may be freed from the drab blur of triteness or familiarity. ...fairy-stories are not the only means of recovery, ... there is ... Mooreeffoc, or Chestertonian Fantasy. Mooreeffoc is a fantastic word, but it could be seen written up in every town in this land. It is Coffee-room, viewed from the inside through a glass door, as it was seen by Dickens on a dark London day; and it was used by Chesterton to denote the queerness of things that have become trite, when they are seen suddenly from a new angle.

But in any case, it's all about boggling. And I seem to spend a lot of my time simply being boggled by the world...and by the sub-worlds people make, with which to see it again from new angles in new dimensions. I'm not at all sure this makes me more rational, but hey, if that's a rule of applied rationality I am very happy to apply it.

Commitment? Doesn't need a definition, but I'm not sure how well commitment as such works for me. Each day I manage to do this "Training Regime" makes it more likely that I'll do it the next day, and I suppose that's a partial commitment, but if I said "I'll definitely do these 30 days" I think that would reduce the probability of success. OTOH, I did commit in my own head to standing at my laptop stand and looking at this each morning after my protein drink after my exercise time, the same way that years ago I committed to going down to the basement each morning around 4:30 and getting ready for exercise. Notice that I'm not committing to actually doing either one. This sort of semi-commitment seems less counterproductive than actual commitment for me. I promise to look at a template, to see myself in a story: I don't promise an achievement. That template seems genuinely causal in that doing things that way, which I hereby try to see myself doing more often, results in getting things done...usually. 

This "semi-commitment to goal/template as story" is a big part of my inner world, but also of the outer world as I tell it to myself; it seems to me that people see outlines in the world and often they find themselves trying to colour them in. Today is also the birthday of Gordon Moore; his Law was a pretty recent thing when I was working on a computer-science PhuD in the late 70s, and nobody I knew expected it to last much longer. I now tentatively believe that it served as an outline which inspired people to fill it in with different colours, one decade after another, and that they very probably wouldn't have managed to do so if the outline hadn't been proposed. Thank you, GM!

  Semi-commitment..hmm. Today? [written a few hours later:] Okay, I thought this morning about something that was bugging me as I walked outside: it was a little below 20F, not really cold enough for the nuisance of a neck-warmer combined with mask, but enough to button my collar -- except that my collar button was laid out by a designer thinking of customers with much thicker necks than mine. This has bugged me before. So I actually committed to trying to fix it, at least spending five minutes getting out a sewing kit and trying to thread a needle and trying to tie the thread, &c. And it Worked! It Really Worked! I Moved The Button! Thank you, Mark Xu! :-)

Seat-adjustment: Adapting a tip for myself, rather than assuming that the Xu description fits my internal stories? Hey, I just did, sticking a "semi" in front of "commitment." Okay, you're way ahead of me, as is only appropriate. And form-building, i.e. trying tips out with a negligible load to get the stance right... I guess that's one way to describe trying out an adjusted commitment with a trivial problem, namely getting the collar of my (very old favorite) jacket to button properly. And what I called Exploration, which you had called Trying Things -- well, I assure you that sewing, or anything involving manual dexterity, is definitely out of my comfort zone. (Reading the "tips" last night was part of why I chose to semi-commit to that bug-fix.)

Phenomenology: finding what it feels like to X; I'm thinking about semi-commitment, the "just look at it" approach, as a way around a mental obstacle which I think I'd call "balkiness". Parts of my mind tend to balk at commitment, and I am going to try to meditate on the feeling of balkiness. I think there are parts of me that tend to confuse commitment with loss of autonomy. And that's interesting, yes. Maybe awareness can ameliorate that.

Hair-style agnosticism: the idea that rationality doesn't (mostly) specify your story's goals, but only relationships between them (and other aspects of the story) seems like an easy one to forget, and that would be bad. One qualm: the "hair-style" phrasing of this one suggests that maybe some things are more important than hair styles, even if my dad's dad was really quite unhappy about mine in the latter 60s, and that maybe important goals are rationally derived from first principles. That remains to be seen. I get the impression that some people think that rationality implies both utilitarianism and what Tolkien in the same essay called

the oldest and deepest desire, the Great Escape: the Escape from Death. Fairy-stories provide many examples and modes of this—which might be called the genuine escapist, or (I would say) fugitive spirit. But so do other stories (notably those of scientific inspiration), and so do other studies. Fairy-stories are made by men not by fairies. The Human-stories of the elves are doubtless full of the Escape from Deathlessness.

I'd rather say that rationality implies constraints on both of those, and perhaps on almost everything else...including hair-styles. Hair-style agnosticism is one more item to be remembered, and thought about.

Non-weird results: "If you use a rationality technique properly, the thing that comes out of it should make sense." Hmm.... my rationality technique is to augment the world's happiness by generating lots of smiles; that is in fact my excuse for the T-shirts I wear. So, I think I will build self-reproducing machines to turn the planet into a maximal number of nano-scale smiley faces. Oh, did I mention that I'm actually an AI? :-) Seriously, I'm not quite sure where this one is coming from; I will wait to see examples of a rationality technique producing something that doesn't make sense. And finally,

Winning: What are we trying to do? "The techniques are not the point, but they're not not the point either." Okay, my first response is that I would certainly hope they're not the point; I go back to what I said on Day 1, from Smullyan and Huxley. My second response would be that I hope that the techniques are the point of some kind of second-order meta-applied rationality. This might be confusing because applied rationality is meta already, but it still has to exist. I think. And that's where I started, at the top of this page. Okay, gotta think about that too. 

It's not clear to me how these tips and tricks fit together, or how far they were meant to fit together. But while I was typing this, Amazon brought Scott Alexander's SSC Essays (3 Vol) so I might not think about it right away. (But I will still read #4 tonight, and set this laptop on the stand tomorrow morning; that much of a commitment I will make.)

Meanwhile, happy birthday to Tolkien and Moore.

"Universal Basic Income"

Yesterday a brother sent me a link to A Plan in Case Robots Take the Jobs: Give Everyone a Paycheck - The New York Times

Their plan is known as “universal basic income,” or U.B.I., and it goes like this: As the jobs dry up because of the spread of artificial intelligence, why not just give everyone a paycheck?

Imagine the government sending each adult about $1,000 a month, about enough to cover housing, food, health care and other basic needs for many Americans. U.B.I. would be aimed at easing the dislocation caused by technological progress, but it would also be bigger than that.

My response is...well, yes and no. Bottom line: that's the right train of thought, but I don't think that it's quite the right track. We can do better.

I have favored a linear-tax scheme in the past, where by "linear" I just mean the familiar linear equation

y=m*x+b

or in this case

Tax=rate*income+base;

Say for extreme simplicity (with Congressionally-adjustable numbers) the government says: "You have a Social Security number? Okay, you have a bank account, and this one is for pre-tax money, like a 401(k). In it we deposit $100/week, your Supplemental Basic Income (small; makes no difference to a lot of people but a huge difference to others). Then we take 30% of everything you spend, i.e. everything that you move out of your pre-tax portfolio which can also include investments, savings, gifts, etc....if you deposit your paycheck into your pre-tax portfolio, that's exactly the 401(k) idea."

So, over the years, I've read Basic income arguments pro and con, starting with the ones that convinced me originally in Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom, roughly at The Libertarian Case for a Basic Income | Libertarianism.org or in Friedman's Firing Line interview at Milton Friedman - The Negative Income Tax - YouTube. I've found it pretty convincing.

Now we have a new kind of reason: geeks like me, developing the abilities of computers, are gradually making it (a) harder (at the median) and (b) less necessary (on the average) for people to earn a living in the traditional way. I've even written a bit about this recently, in the context of schools and the world that they're preparing our kids for, and I cited Pistono's Robots Will Steal Your Job, But That's OK | How to Survive the Economic Collapse and Be Happy, at HamiltonCentralOptions: SuperSchool

workers retiring this year at age 65 became high school students just about 50 years ago, in 1965. ...our total production, "real GDP", roughly tripled in that period... Manufacturing [jobs].... dropped from 25% to less than 10%, and we can expect the shrinkage to continue. The face of manufacturing is becoming the face of [robot] Baxter and his rapidly-improving successors...
Meanwhile, agriculture goes on "shrinking" in the same way: more stuff per person and much more output overall, but fewer people needed. ...

Does that mean higher unemployment? Not necessarily: it means that we produce the necessities of life with much less labor, so many more of our people will be producing goods and services, mostly services, which are not necessary for life....

And that leads into my current answer on the "Universal" or "Guaranteed" or "Supplemental" Basic Income proposal: we can do better than that. Specifically, the very information technology which pushes us towards a "yes" has a fundamental value for Great Gobs of Data; we can and should pay for that data, low pay (below minimum wage) at first but with increasing generosity as the years go by and we get richer overall. These are jobs for which anyone can qualify and make a genuine contribution to the Better World To Come.

What kind of jobs? Consider clinical trials as a model for social data collection. Everybody should be able to sign up for one of a large variety of studies, diet/exercise/social-interaction/education/long-term-low-dose-aspirin studies; these should pay people for their participation and ongoing feedback (via smartphone and associated sensors, as well as the sort of feedback that involves explicit clicks.) When an outcome is socially desirable, as in health and education, there should also be payment for achievement. In addition to these jobs, we should pay people for their perceptions, their knowledge, and even their opinions: Amazon product reviews add value to the world, Wikipedia edits add value to the world, YouTube tutorials add value to the world, this blog post probably doesn't but if there were a rating system with built-in rewards and AI protection against cheating, then the AI could find out if this blog post had added value to specific real people's worlds and it could assign rewards appropriately (both to the author and to the raters.)

And then we go off in many directions, of course...but we do so with more information, a broader base of understanding, than we would have had -- and we do so in a world where rewards come for having made a contribution to that world. Quite possibly we end up with an AI serving as the planetary village's Miss Marple, not the early-work gossip but the later version who sees all your public acts and some of what you thought was private, who can deduce a lot about your motivations (and in particular, what you gave up in order to do whatever you did and therefore what value your choice had for you). At that point we may simply drop our current insanity of "Intellectual Property" in which some of my thoughts belong to you whether I ever heard of you or not...



Or then again, maybe not.

update: An artistically inclined sister whose blog is probably more essential than this one asks via comment: "What? Art is not vitally essential?"
and that strikes me as one of the many questions that I don't want to answer for other people -- your customers in particular. My understanding is that many of them feel that life can be lived, or at least continued, without art -- and that means that art is a discretionary purchase, not "necessary for life" and therefore not recession-proof. Why Recession Isn't Good for Art -- New York Magazine

recessions mostly just yank young artists’ work off the walls. “If traditional art isn’t selling, galleries aren’t going to show emerging art.” ... In a boom, it’s cool to love art, see art, buy art. Art is taken seriously. A bust dismisses it as a luxury.

But my planetary Miss Marple would see that some people still wanted to look at, say, Raven With Shards, and you would receive credit -- spendable credit -- when they did so, even if they couldn't come up with the purchase price to own the original.

update 2, 20160610 A computationally inclined co-author suggests that I'm saying that "every human can get a job as a lab rabbit for AI", which is true in a way but

1. I think this system would be workable now, with no more AI than we've got already: as I said, "Everybody should be able to sign up for one of a large variety of studies..." and in addition I'd try to reward reviews, edits, etc.... so I'd rather say that every human can get a job as a content creator/reviewer/editor/respondent.
2. my hoped-for eventual AI wouldn't think of it that way. As I wrote more recently in A Small Note on Superintelligence Morality

   Intelligence needs to be attached to an actual person of some kind; a who not a what. This should not be called an artificial intelligence but rather an artificial person.

   .... The superintelligence need not be a biological homo sapiens, but does need to identify (correctly) as human, saying "we humans" not "you humans"; having human feelings, hopes and fears, including a feeling of membership in the human tribe. ...it is not a project of debugging a program. It's a project of raising a child, a psychologically healthy child -- yes, with parents, and preferably with siblings and so on outwards; a child who will realize that every h. sap. is one of his/her cousins.

   That's not the way we think about lab rats, or rabbits. (Although, in a sense, they are.)

Language-Learning Software; Bottom-Up?

As I've said, this year I've been working some on modern Greek, and thinking about it. My context, though, is a little more than simply that of a programmer with Greek family but no aptitude for languages. For more than ten years now, I've been on-and-off involved with media-annotation software that was mostly intended for teaching languages in a higher-education setting. (See, e.g., a 2005 Semantic Web Applications writeup as "Semantic Annotations for Digital Video" (PDF).) Quite a few Colgate students have learned Russian using Russian video with time-aligned transcript and commentary, texts that I can't read but that were linked by code I wrote. (The commentary may or may not be just one "layer", and may or may not include a translation; the time-aligned transcript starts as the sort of thing you create in transcriber, which I had scripts for the previous version of, or with ELAN — Language Archiving Technology; I've contributed code to ELAN, and I like its design and I'm doing more work on it this year, but I end up wanting an actual editable HTML page to contain the transcript etc. I'm hoping to do it all in HTML5, Real Soon Now.)

Of course, I'm not trying to learn modern Greek in a higher-education setting; I'm doing that on my own. Self-study software? I did get the Rosetta Stone Greek Level 1-2 Set and used it for a while (the little doggie at my feet is in fact named Rosetta, and that's why.) I haven't used it for a long time, though, and I really can't do it while trying for nine-minute miles on the elliptical. Still, the idea of language learning as a figure-it-out-as-you-go-along matching game does appeal; it's a common way for game worlds to work, and I have thought about implementing it within a world of time-aligned transcript+commentary, where we match sentences and play the selection...Hmm. But that would be further from my own personal current requirements than Rosetta itself. Well, since I was using actual flashcards for exercise-study and then using texts that I could think of as flashcards, it obviously might make sense to use flashcard software, say The Mnemosyne Project offering

• Efficient scheduling algorithm, so you don't waste time on things you know well
• Support for languages using different scripts through unicode
• Support for pictures, sounds and html formatting
• Support for three-sided cards, e.g. foreign words where you are interested in written form, pronunciation and translation

Mostly, though, I've been using pages that look like this fragment, from Dover's Listen & Learn Modern Greek:

I treat these as three-sided cards of variable size; in other words, I try to memorize a word at a time, then a phrase at a time, then a clause at a time, then a sentence at a time, and maybe even a dialog-fragment at a time. I start with the English and phonetic rendering, over and over, one word at a time, and then when I come back to a piece later I try to pay attention only to the Greek text. Repeat, repeat, repeat. Hmm....

My ideal software, maybe, would have time-aligned video dialog scenes (pretend or even real restaurant scene, airport scene, hotel scene...) done at full speed by native speakers and time-aligned sentence by sentence, but that wouldn't be the starting point. That would be the goal. The starting point for each scene would use the same transcripts spoken much more slowly with alignment points between each word and the next, and markup to indicate phrase/clause/sentence/paragraph structure.

The user would start with word-at-a-time audio to play over and over while getting used to the English; in effect, single-word flashcards with audio support. As those got familiar, they'd be merged into phrases and so on up; a Mnemosyne-like strategy would have to track which phrases contain only words you've adequately learned, which clauses contain only phrases you've adequately learned, and so on. There would also be auxiliary pseudo-scenes for verb conjugations and such, but they'd be dealt with in the same way: bottom-up.

Sure, it would be nice to click "KRAH-tee-seh" or the Greek it represents and get a dictionary entry which identified as much as possible. But that kind of thing is easy enough; it so happens that I'm spending part of my work-time trying to improve the extent to which ELAN can talk to SIL's FLEx, which does dictionaries nicely. (As long as somebody creates the dictionary data; content is hard.) And it might be nice to add a link to a Google Translate suggestion, in this case "κράτα τα ρέστα". Many things might be nice, but the idea I'm thinking about has what I'd like to call bottom-up flashcards, based on an ELAN-style breakdown of each sentence as a basic framework, with the actual dictionary for the bottom level if possible. Hmm.

I would really like a piece of software that supports this kind of use-case, and maybe one exists. Or it's possible that the code I work with now can be modified to do so.

Of course, maybe I shouldn't be thinking about this as a strategy; it may be a bad strategy even if implemented well. If I were a foreign-language teacher, or even a good foreign-language student, I'd probably know better.

Or then again, maybe not. I dunno.

Exercise and Education

This morning I spent 45 minutes trying to pound a few modern Greek words and phrases into an aging memory; until a month ago, this would have required a major effort of willpower, but lately I've been doing it every day with no problem. Also this morning, I did almost 5 miles of gently uphill jogging against random resistance on an elliptical machine, a Life Fitness X5i; up until a month ago, this would have required a completely impractical effort of will. No problem, because I now do them together. As Seth Roberts put it a year ago, Boring + Boring = Pleasant!?:

Two boring activities, done together, became pleasant. Anki [flashcards] alone I can do maybe ten minutes. Treadmill alone I can do only a few minutes before I want to stop. In both cases I’d have to be pushed to do it at all. Yet the combination I want to do; 60 minutes feels like a good length of time.

I'm a lot slower at memorizing than I was forty years ago, but this is good. It's funny to think how close I was to finding this for myself; I have tried music while exercising, watching TED talks while exercising, even memorizing verse while exercising. I think the crucial missing factor was total focus-in-the-moment, as required by flashcards or the Dover Books Listen & Learn Modern Greek (CD Edition) which is basically a booklet of flashcard-style utterances, English+Greek+phonetic, to be read along with the audio. (I photocopied the booklet with 41% enlargement.)

I do wonder how many people this would help. I look at related discussions like What is the best and fastest way to memorize a lot of material for a test? and of course Seth Roberts' later posts at Walking and Learning Update and at Walking Creates A Thirst For Dry Knowledge and gee, I dunno. Learning is good; exercise is good; making both easier is a very good thing.

Snow and WD-40

A neighbor commented that the storm that ended yesterday totaled 26 inches in our area; there was enough wind that I had some bare patches and some drifts, including door-blocking drifts, but the driveway was mostly 18 inches after things settled down (I had removed a couple of inches, twice, early on). There was no Monday paper, or Monday school -- Colgate shut down too, which is unusual. [Update: I see I was wrong, Colgate was delayed not closed, according to Radio Free Hamilton at Hamilton Buried; Colgate Opens Late

Because of the heavy snowfall and winds, HCS is closed today and Colgate has a late start.

Well, whatever.]

And it was wet, sticky snow. Heavy snow. Not fun to shovel, especially because I had to hit the snow shovel against something hard after carrying each load to the edge and tossing it. But another neighbor (Thanks, Ray) suggested cooking oil on the shovel, and I modified that: I dried it off and then sprayed WD-40. It worked beautifully. Everybody should know about the magical powers of WD-40.

Well, it worked as I went down from garage toward the street, until I got to the ultra-compact hard stuff left by the sidewalk plow and sidewalk snow-blower, each of which had been by several time. I couldn't make any impression on it with a snow shovel, and the regular dirt shovel was going very slowly. And Stub Baker, who put that driveway there (as well as digging various things for me over the years including the basement under me right now), was driving down the street in a John Deere 410G backhoe loader, which for him is a small machine, and my exercise was cut short. Aww, gee. I have a suspicion that Stub knows more about WD-40 than I ever will, too.