Who is to blame if people misunderstand you?

Robin Hanson makes the case against disclaimers:

Blog posts are short and have a broad audience. One of the worst things about writing them is having to make disclaimers. Not just legal disclaimers mind you – those are only the tip of an iceberg.

Writing is hard in part because words have many associations that vary among readers. Even when we use carefully choose our words to signal certain associations, we know some readers will instead hear other associations. So in addition to saying what we do mean, we sometimes have to say explicitly what we do not mean.

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Unfortunately, the problem goes way beyond dumb legal rules. Consider these common presumptions:

* If you say anything about correlates of race you must hate a race.
* If you say anything about genetic correlates of success you are a social Darwinist.
* Any general claim about human behavior is presumed an absolute law without exception unless you add qualifiers like “tends” or “often.”
* If you quote someone you agree with everything they’ve said.
* If you say you prefer option A to option B, you also prefer A to any option C.
* If you say anything nice (or critical) about anything associated with a group or person you are presumed to support (or oppose) them overall.
* If you say anything nice (or critical) about anything associated with an idea or claim you are presumed to support (or oppose) it and related ideas overall.
* If you worry that more A will cost too much of B, you don’t care about B at all.
* If you dislike a proposed solution to a certain problem, you don’t care about that problem.

Most who say such things do not intend these further claims, and their conversation could be much easier if they did not need to constantly disclaim them. But they are stuck in a signaling game; since most who say such things do add the required disclaimers, observers can infer something unusual about the few who do not.

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I know this problem very well. On the whole I find the current state sub-optimal, but functional. I must admit I do not always add all the ‘necessary’ disclaimers, causing perhaps some people to misunderstand my position on various subjects from time to time, but at the same time implicitly making me participate in gaming the system and moving the equilibrium in the ‘right’ direction. Sometimes the lack of disclaimers cause people to comment in order to question my position and figure out if I mean what they think I mean, using the sub-optimal system of language and interpretation that is currently predominant, which incidentally I find is the optimal response in case you’re in doubt – you can’t lose much by demanding clarification. But I do try, and even if I find the current state sub-optimal, I still think it’s best to take it mainly as a given. Unless Robin figures out some brilliant way to give people incentives to optimize the use of language according to his (and my) preferences, it’s not likely that the problem with excess disclaimers is to be solved any time soon.

Now, there’s always going to be a tradeoff between clarity and efficiency. In the post Robin points out a problem with inefficiency, where I’d much rather focus on clarity. “Writing is hard in part because words have many associations that vary among readers“, Robin says, and that’s correct. But that’s no excuse for not trying. It’s a very common phenomenon to see people argue that if they are misunderstood, it’s the reader’s own fault. But if people misunderstand you, you are very often the one who should take the greater part of the blame. If you fail to formulate your ideas and arguments clearly and so that others understand what you mean, in my experience the problem is far more often a problem with the ideas and arguments in your head, than it is a problem with the specific words you choose. The point being: Writing is not easy, no, but it is also not supposed to be easy, and there are conceivable adverse effects related to making it easier, as the adjustement path will usually contain some degree of loss of clarity. Readers do make logical flaws like the ones RH lists in the post all the time (incidentally, so do writers), and that is annonying. But if you don’t try to anticipate some of the logical flaws they are prone to make absent any elaboration on your part, and adjust your writing accordingly in order to help them figure out just why some of those specific lines of reasoning are faulty, nothing is likely to change.

One might here argue that even if actions undertaken in order to improve efficiency is a public good, well so are actions undertaken in order to improve clarity, following the argument above. However, I consider an effort spent to write more clearly is also an effort spent to become a better and more systematic thinker. That is, focusing on clarity has personal benefits too. So on the whole, the way things are now, I think that on the margin the primary focus object should be clarity, not efficiency. Yes, I am aware that the two covariate somewhat.

Yudkowsky on science and religion

This post had escaped my attention and is very much worth a read. A (large) excerpt:

Back in the old days, saying the local religion “could not be proven” would have gotten you burned at the stake. One of the core beliefs of Orthodox Judaism is that God appeared at Mount Sinai and said in a thundering voice, “Yeah, it’s all true.” From a Bayesian perspective that’s some darned unambiguous evidence of a superhumanly powerful entity. (Albeit it doesn’t prove that the entity is God per se, or that the entity is benevolent – it could be alien teenagers.) The vast majority of religions in human history – excepting only those invented extremely recently – tell stories of events that would constitute completely unmistakable evidence if they’d actually happened. The orthogonality of religion and factual questions is a recent and strictly Western concept. The people who wrote the original scriptures didn’t even know the difference.

[...]

Not only did religion used to make claims about factual and scientific matters, religion used to make claims about everything. Religion laid down a code of law – before legislative bodies; religion laid down history – before historians and archaeologists; religion laid down the sexual morals – before Women’s Lib; religion described the forms of government – before constitutions; and religion answered scientific questions from biological taxonomy to the formation of stars. The Old Testament doesn’t talk about a sense of wonder at the complexity of the universe – it was busy laying down the death penalty for women who wore men’s clothing, which was solid and satisfying religious content of that era. The modern concept of religion as purely ethical derives from every other area having been taken over by better institutions. Ethics is what’s left.

Or rather, people think ethics is what’s left. Take a culture dump from 2,500 years ago. Over time, humanity will progress immensely, and pieces of the ancient culture dump will become ever more glaringly obsolete. Ethics has not been immune to human progress – for example, we now frown upon such Bible-approved practices as keeping slaves. Why do people think that ethics is still fair game?

Intrinsically, there’s nothing small about the ethical problem with slaughtering thousands of innocent first-born male children to convince an unelected Pharaoh to release slaves who logically could have been teleported out of the country. It should be more glaring than the comparatively trivial scientific error of saying that grasshoppers have four legs. And yet, if you say the Earth is flat, people will look at you like you’re crazy. But if you say the Bible is your source of ethics, women will not slap you.

[...]

The idea that religion is a separate magisterium which cannot be proven or disproven is a Big Lie – a lie which is repeated over and over again, so that people will say it without thinking; yet which is, on critical examination, simply false. It is a wild distortion of how religion happened historically, of how all scriptures present their beliefs, of what children are told to persuade them, and of what the majority of religious people on Earth still believe.

UPDATE: Today Eliezer elaborates:

Absence of proof is not proof of absence. In logic, A->B, “A implies B”, is not equivalent to ~A->~B, “not-A implies not-B”.

But in probability theory, absence of evidence is always evidence of absence. If E is a binary event and P(H|E) > P(H), “seeing E increases the probability of H”; then P(H|~E) < P(H), “failure to observe E decreases the probability of H”. P(H) is a weighted mix of P(H|E) and P(H|~E), and necessarily lies between the two.

UPDATE #2: Even more here:

The rule that “absence of evidence is evidence of absence” is a special case of a more general law, which I would name Conservation of Expected Evidence: The expectation of the posterior probability, after viewing the evidence, must equal the prior probability.

P(H) = P(H)
P(H) = P(H,E) + P(H,~E)
P(H) = P(H|E)*P(E) + P(H|~E)*P(~E)

Therefore, for every expectation of evidence, there is an equal and opposite expectation of counterevidence.

If you expect a strong probability of seeing weak evidence in one direction, it must be balanced by a weak expectation of seeing strong evidence in the other direction. If you’re very confident in your theory, and therefore anticipate seeing an outcome that matches your hypothesis, this can only provide a very small increment to your belief (it is already close to 1); but the unexpected failure of your prediction would (and must) deal your confidence a huge blow. On average, you must expect to be exactly as confident as when you started out. Equivalently, the mere expectation of encountering evidence – before you’ve actually seen it – should not shift your prior beliefs.

A very interesting discussion

Here. The post itself is of very high quality as well.

I will have to add Caplan’s book to my birthday wishlist. From what I know, I would have to say that I probably will agree on his identification of the problem(s), whereas I will not agree when it comes to the solution(s) he has proposed in the book.

180 grader er i luften!

Her.

Held og lykke!

Yudkowsky on the bias-variance decomposition and philosophical majoritarianism

Eliezer Yudkowsky is usually worth reading and this post is certainly no exception. An exerpt:

The bias-variance decomposition applies to the luminosity of fireflies treated as estimates, just as much as a group of expert opinions. This tells you that you are not dealing with a causal description of how the world works – there are not necessarily any causal quantities, things-in-the-world, that correspond to “collective error” or “prediction diversity”. The bias-variance decomposition is not about modesty, communication, sharing of evidence, tolerating different opinions, humbling yourself, overconfidence, or group compromise. It’s an algebraic tautology that holds whenever its quantities are defined consistently, even if they refer to the silicon content of pebbles.

Update:

This post also got me thinking.

Quote of the day

“Can we reasonably infer that experts who do not reveal their disagreements have an unappealing track record, know less than they pretend, or treat the public like children?”

That is from Robin Hanson’s latest post. I wonder if he had any particular subject in mind when he wrote this?

Science and religion

“In modern society there is a prevalent notion that spiritual matters can’t be settled by logic or observation, and therefore you can have whatever religious beliefs you like. If a scientist falls for this, and decides to live their extralaboratorial life accordingly, then this, to me, says that they only understand the experimental principle as a social convention. They know when they are expected to do experiments and test the results for statistical significance. But put them in a context where it is socially conventional to make up wacky beliefs without looking, and they just as happily do that instead.“

“If, outside of their specialist field, some particular scientist is just as susceptible as anyone else to wacky ideas, then they probably never did understand why the scientific rules work. Maybe they can parrot back a bit of Popperian falsificationism; but they don’t understand on a deep level, the algebraic level of probability theory, the causal level of cognition-as-machinery. They’ve been trained to behave a certain way in the laboratory, but they don’t like to be constrained by evidence; when they go home, they take off the lab coat and relax with some comfortable nonsense. And yes, that does make me wonder if I can trust that scientist’s opinions even in their own field – especially when it comes to any controversial issue, any open question, anything that isn’t already nailed down by massive evidence and social convention.”

That is from a new post by Eliezer Yudkowsky over at overcomingbias. Read the whole thing here.