Humans are not automatically strategic (2010)

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PBRWb2Em5SNeWYwwB/humans-are-not-automatically-strategic

by walterbell • 3 years ago

60 36 3 years ago

This sounds like someone who has studied a lot of math or physics but has never even heard of the humanities, art, philosophy, etc.

pringk02• 3 years ago

Well, it was posted on lesswrong.com

dang• 3 years ago

Humans are not Automatically Strategic (2010) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9948600 - July 2015 (11 comments)

Humans are not automatically strategic - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1673144 - Sept 2010 (35 comments)

sjfjsjdjwvwvc2• 3 years ago

I have enough abstract reasoning ability to understand […] that ice cream is not healthy

Ice cream might be healthy though: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/05/ice-cre...

vjerancrnjak2• 3 years ago

That sentence lacks context. It’s like saying strawberries are healthy. Makes no sense without any context. Diet and lifestyle can be healthy or unhealthy. Single ingredient, not really. There’s no measure of healthiness for a single ingredient and I’m pretty sure you could have ice cream every day and still be healthy long term.

andsoitis2• 3 years ago

Diet and lifestyle can be healthy or unhealthy. Single ingredient, not really.

That’s false.

There are many ingredients and foods that we could name that are without dispute in and of themselves unhealthy, regardless of general diet and lifestyle.

bbor3• 3 years ago

Can someone summarize the findings for those without a subscription? I can totally understand “due to some hidden dynamics, ice cream consumption is correlated with health in type 2 diabetics”, but I can absolutely not understand “ice cream is a healthy food to eat in general”.

sjfjsjdjwvwvc2• 3 years ago

From an earlier discussion on here:

the "health benefits" of ice cream are not explored because the scientists "do not believe in them"

Hence the „might be“. So there have been some positive effects, but no deeper investigation yet so we can’t know for sure.

bee_rider• 3 years ago

So what’s the deal with lesswrong? People there seem to take a generally academic-ish or intellectual-ish tone, but there aren’t any sources in this article and:

Why? Most basically, because humans are only just on the cusp of general intelligence. Perhaps 5% of the population has enough abstract reasoning skill to verbally understand that the above heuristics would be useful once these heuristics are pointed out.

Is a wild claim to make unsupported, right?

bbor3• 3 years ago

My main issue with this article, as well.

Generally they’re essays about cognitive science so they feel a little more free to pontificate than, say, biologists are, but yeah I also would like to see a lot more sources. They are in their own discourse - note that this is a response to another (anonymous) post on the forum.

When you’re having a discussion that the scientific consensus (of the 2010s, at least…) finds alarmist and non-scientific, you can see why you’d be attracted to sources in your own little ecosystem. It is quite a diverse ecosystem, despite its shared interests

klysm• 3 years ago

I mean it’s not stated as a strong claim, but a rough guess given the “perhaps”. I do agree saying an exact number with 0 basis is not a great argument though.

VoodooJuJu• 3 years ago

LessWrong is well, akshyually personified. It's where a bunch of guys with an IQ of 120 go to circle jerk each other to feel superior to people with an IQ of 110. Similar to reddit, whereas reddit is where the 110 IQ people go to feel superior to people with an IQ of 100.

mempko• 3 years ago

They are 'less wrong' in the sense that you can't tell if they are right.

sdenton4• 3 years ago

"Cos-playing academia" is not bad as a description of lesswrong...

JohnFen2• 3 years ago

It's an extremely wild claim that demands some sort of supporting evidence.

But it's pretty standard sort of fare for lesswrong. Despite the air it tries to put on, lesswrong is essentially just an opinion site.

FergusArgyll• 3 years ago

Every time I read an article from there I think, "I wish I can slap a Wikipedia 'citation needed' on this"

QuadmasterXLII• 3 years ago

Less wrong can really only be understood in context, and the context is recovering children of ferverent evangelicals. If you grew up in a reasonable household, The thought “maybe I, a mildly gifted 12 year old, am right and every trusted adult I’ve ever seen and all of the books they have and all of the people they talk to are wrong” is going to be disproven every time. If you grow up in the sort of household that produces less wrongers, you need to take that sort of thought seriously or you will end up believing the Earth is 2000 years old and hurricanes are caused by gay people.

troutwine2• 3 years ago

It is a wild claim. I think it's important to understand that LessWrong -- whatever it eventually became -- comes out of the SF Bay Area "Rationalist" community. Despite claims to generality, it's a narrow way of reasoning about the world with some odd outcomes. Personally, I think the notion of an "information hazard" is a fine story point in a Neal Stephenson story but taking the idea seriously enough to have nightmares about Roko's basilisk and to ban discussion of it[1] is pushing past the bounds of 'rationality' I think. That a chunk of the core LessWrong crowd went into Effective Altruism ends-justify-the-means think or into neo-reactionary circles -- to a less degree -- is also worth noting: despite claims with regard to general well-being both political ideologies are more than happy to cause mass suffering so long as the expected outcomes are good, eventually, maybe.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk#Reactions

theragra2• 3 years ago

This claim does not look so wild of you encounter people outside your usual educated and smart bubble. Just recently in the sauna a girl explained to me how salt is good to your soul. But not white chemical salt from the store. Only raw salt from under the ground, 10€ per small bottle. She does not sell it, just a victim herself.

joe_the_user• 3 years ago

Lesswrong is a strange and fascinating place with some elements that I find disturbing and problematic and others that are quite admirable. It's a place where "semi-crank" people can go and have their ideas taken moderately serious. Like academia, there's a lot of reference to past discussion but if anything they take ideas more seriously than academics - academics will drop ideas that seem like dead-ends or counter-productive but lesswrong won't give up on a thing 'till it's proven wrong. A lot of ideas have been developed, some rigorous and worth knowing, some I find pseudo-intellectual hogwash.

The place indeed has a set of common assumptions that have developed over time and may seem strange to the average person - some of these are quite interesting and others I'd find rather twisted (recently upvoted articles: "AI Girlfriends Won't Matter Much"[1]).

There's too much to summarize but I occurs to me that programmers generally have a certain tendency to instrumentalize human beings and human qualities, treat these as things or as control problems and a lot of lesswrong concerns (rationality, AI and AI-safety, effective altruism, "reproductive strategies", etc) come of this. If anything, Lesswrong is resisted the movement we've seen of libertarians drifting to the "alt-right" and so it's one forums for "this kind of stuff".

Overall: worth looking at and even posting but also it's various ideologies have used by people doing real harm (Sam Bankman-Fried etc). Further, it can produce a situation where it's more reasonable concerns ("AI safety") get distorted by and tarred with it's more ideological concerns.

[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pGhpav45PY5CGD2Wp/ai-girlfri...

habryka• 3 years ago

The first sentence seems fine (humans are somewhat obviously just on the cusp of general intelligence, in evolutionary terms).

The second sentence starts with a "perhaps", so isn't trying to present itself as fact, though agree is still overstated. My best guess is it's about right (I think 5% is somewhat of an underestimate, but not like massively so).

Seems like a reasonable criticism to me of the post. Standards for posts on LessWrong are mostly just like normal blog posts, though people try pretty hard to be precise in their guesses (hence the use of 5% in the above, which I think by people not used to LessWrong communication norms reads as making a reference to an established fact or scientific study or something).

bbor3• 3 years ago

I would love to hear a comment from someone who found this useful! It’s well written, well reasoned, but IMO completely misses a key fact that makes this framing less useful: just because something isn’t intuitive doesn’t mean it’s not natural —- if anyone doesn’t find that obvious I can find some Chomsky clips giving the argument. I think the word “automatic”, which is not one I’ve seen much in CogSci lit, is responsible for this loss of resolution and ultimate misunderstanding.

geniium• 3 years ago

So how can we get more strategic?

ketchupdebugger• 3 years ago

Why do even unusually numerate people fear illness, car accidents, and bogeymen, and take safety measures, but not bother to look up statistics on the relative risks?

Its all about the impact of the outcomes. No one is fearing stepping on a lego brick. Getting seriously ill or getting seriously injured in a car accident can be ruinous health wise as well as financially. They are serious implications. Some never recover from illness or car accident. You'll recover from stepping on a lego though ;)

nmca• 3 years ago

You're missing the point, all the things are very bad but have very different relative risks.

pixl97• 3 years ago

No, I don't think this is a great example...

Car accidents are something directly under your control if you're a driver and your choices dramatically affect your chances of getting in one. Fear of these events can change your behavior thereby changing the occurrence profile you fit under.

JohnFen2• 3 years ago

No one is fearing stepping on a lego brick.

No one? When my kids were little and lego bricks were hiding everywhere, I lived in overt fear of stepping on them in the middle of the night. It's why I developed a habit of wearing hard-soled slippers at home, even to this day.

andsoitis2• 3 years ago

You weren’t fearing your life, merely pain avoiding.

iraqmtpizza• 3 years ago

Require self-proclaimed economists to be rich and posters like these to be very disproportionately productive at something that is valued by at least one person that is not himself

Humans are not automatically strategic (2010)

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