You Are A Brain

Here is a 2-hour PowerPoint presentation I made for college students and teens:

You Are A Brain
PowerPoint presentation, 7.4mb

It's an introduction to realist thinking, a tour of all the good stuff people don't realize until they include a node for their brain's map in their brain's map. All the concepts come from Eliezer Yudkowsky's posts on Overcoming Bias.

I presented this to my old youth group while staffing one of their events. In addition to the slide show, I had a browser with various optical illusions open in tabs, and I brought in a bunch of lemons and miracle fruit tablets. They had a good time and stayed engaged.

I hope the slides will be of use to others trying to promote the public understanding of rationality.

Note: When you view the presentation in PowerPoint, make sure you can see the speaker notes. They capture the gist of what I was saying while I was showing each slide.

Close Friendship

My friend Noam is a really cool guy, but I can't say we've been close.

Animal Morality

I was happily eating meat one day and I realized that killing sentient things might be the kind of thing society takes in stride but is actually really bad, like slavery used to be. I should do something like a crisis of faith regarding whether or not it's okay.

The question at the heart of the matter is: How do we morally evaluate animal affairs? Here are my intuitions:

1. If you light a cat on fire, that's really bad. If you press a button to instantly vaporize an unsuspecting cow, that's morally neutral. If you step on a snail, no biggie.

2. If you keep a chicken in such a small cage that it can't turn around, that's bad. If you neuter a dog, that's better but still a little bad. If you make sure an un-neutered dog never gets to interact with a bitch (ensuring he can't have sex and puppies), that's morally neutral.

3. If an animal is already dead, the act of eating it is morally neutral. In fact I think the moral neutrality holds even for eating dead humans (although of course that activity will have a different context and there could be all kinds of other negative terms that go into the morality summation).

4. If you pet your dog, that's good because he likes it. (You like it too, which is another positive term in the morality summation. But the dog's enjoyment gets its own terminal value.)

5. If you wirehead an animal, it has the same moral value as any other orgasmium (orgasmium is the simplest configuration of matter which can be sentient and have the subjective experience of happiness, and whatever triggers the happiness sensation is constantly on at full blast). And I think orgasmium's existence is morally neutral.

So when an animal exists, goodness is some function of its happiness that increases while the happiness is within the animal's natural range, and subsequently drops to zero.

The point at which the animal's existence is morally neutral is around "somewhat happy". As you move left from that point, it monotonically decreases without bound. And even while you're within the animal's commonly experienced levels of pain, your trough in the graph is already deeper than the peak is high.

Here is a somewhat counterintuitive application of my tentative animal morality. Imagine there is an Animal Planet which is home to large populations of all the different animals from contemporary Earth in various ecosystems, but with no humans. It would be morally good to instantly vaporize Animal Planet, because putting all the suffering animals out of their misery will surely outweigh the cost of killing the few animals whose happiness is at the top of their natural range (and not higher).

Are Semicolons Pretentious?

I just realized it's impossible to use a semicolon when you're writing with a casual tone; it comes off as pretentious. Right?

Amazon's New Price Font

Maybe this is just me, but it seems like Amazon.com has managed a huge psychological breakthrough with the slightly altered fonts and styles on their product pages.

Somehow it seems like the larger, skinnier red price letters make it really easy to just click and buy, and even disappointing not to do so.

Overcoming Bias

Overcoming Bias is my favorite blog. I've always thought of myself as a highly rational person, but after spending about 40 hours reading the series on rationality by Eliezer Yudkowsky, I've realized that the methodology of rationality is a lot more subtle and fascinating than I thought. It's fair to say this blog has changed my life more than anything else I've read in the last year. Here is one great quote among many:

It is a corruption of curiosity to prefer the question to its answer. Yet people seem to get a tremendous emotional kick out of not knowing something. Worse, they think that the mysteriousness of a mysterious phenomena indicates a special quality of the phenomenon itself, inferring that it is surely different-in-kind from phenomena labeled "understood". If we are ignorant about a phenomenon, that is a fact about our state of mind, not a fact about the phenomenon itself.

On Undefinable Numbers

If you are asked to define the biggest number you can, and restricted to only using only 1000 characters of English text, then there are only finitely many things you can write, and only finitely many numbers you can define.

Out of all the numbers nameable with 1000 characters of English text, which is the biggest? Surely, it must be huge -- a lot bigger than "a googol to the power of (a googol to the power of a googol (...and so on, nested a googol times))".

Unfortunately, there is no such "biggest number", because there is no well-defined mapping from English phrases to numbers. In Who Can Name the Bigger Number, Scott Aaronson considers:

"One plus the biggest whole number nameable with 1,000 characters of English text."

This number takes at least 1,001 characters to name. Yet we’ve just named it with only 80 characters! Like a snake that swallows itself whole, our colossal number dissolves in a tumult of contradiction. What gives?

The paradox I’ve just described was first published by Bertrand Russell, who attributed it to a librarian named G. G. Berry. The Berry Paradox arises not from mathematics, but from the ambiguity inherent in the English language. There’s no surefire way to convert an English phrase into the number it names (or to decide whether it names a number at all).

The problem with English isn’t that it’s unsuitable for a discussion of math. On the contrary, it’s too good at discussing math. The Berry paradox shows that if phrases in a language could all be unambiguously interpreted as numbers, then the language wouldn’t be able to refer to itself with anywhere near as much expressive power as English.

The Berry paradox only applies when one attempts to define big natural numbers using natural language. But there is also a second problem when you try to define a real number using any representation: the finite-length strings you use to represent real numbers aren't able to represent them all.

The problem is that the set of real numbers is uncountably infinite, while the set of finite-length strings is countably infinite. (If you don't know what that means, then read the Infinity lesson notes from X-treme Thinking). Thus, the set of real numbers that you can define is only a countable island in the uncountable ocean of reals.

OK now imagine you're given an infinitely long piece of paper with a real number printed on it. It starts like this: 0.821480865132823066470938446095...

As far as you look, the numbers seem completely random. You don't discern any pattern at all. Let's say you have an eternity to look at this number and try to understand it, but when you're done, you have to communicate which number this is to a mortal living in a finite universe. What do you do?

In the general case, this is impossible, because we know that most real numbers are undefinable. So do you just give up? But wait, the number you were given was actually Pi, except with the first 100 decimal digits taken out. You could have just told that to the mortal!

Every real number has infinitely many decimal digits after the decimal point. And in general, it takes an infinite amount of information to communicate which real number you're talking about. But it would be overkill for me to spend my life trying to say infinitely many 3's as in 0.333333... when I could just use a finite shorthand like "one third" or "zero point three three three and so on". Certain real numbers admit to being identified by finite pieces of information. These numbers include Pi, for example, as well as the number 0.56656565556... whose 2nd, 3rd, 5th, and all other prime-numbered digits after the decimal points are 6's, with the composite-numbered digits all being 5's, and way more elaborate constructions than this.

So what kinds of real numbers can't we define? What does an undefinable real number look like? It looks like a number that you can't say what it looks like. In other words, it looks completely and truly random, more random than it's logically possible for finite creatures to understand.

So not only are we unable to talk about "the biggest whole number nameable with 1,000 characters of English text", we also can't say anything interesting about which real numbers are definable. In other words, the vast majority of real numbers are undefinable, but we can't imagine which ones they are, and we wouldn't know them when we see them!

Does it even make sense for us finite humans to talk about the existence of "undefinable real numbers" and the supposedly "infinite amount of information" that they contain? Are we talking about anything at all? It seems like the "ocean of undefinable reals" is really a make-believe ocean, and the "island of definable reals" is really all that's there to talk about.