Black Belt Bayesian

On an old thread at RealClimate, Onar Åm proposed pumping ocean water onto Antarctica to counteract sea level rise, and roughly calculated an energy cost of 35 GW to offset a 30cm rise over 100 years. (World energy usage is estimated at 1500 GW.) I have not seen this idea anywhere else. It sounds too good to be true. Is it reasonable? How far could we push it if we had cheap futuristic energy? As just one example, apparently it would take only about a 30m sea level drop to liberate Doggerland from its fascist oppressor of several millennia. By that time, I guess one worry is where you put all the extra ice.

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Here are some academic writings arguing AI (or “robots“, a word that I feel misses the point and creates an atmosphere of bad sci-fi) isn’t as big a threat as you might think:

• Just Another Artifact
• How to Avoid a Robot Takeover
• Why Robots Won’t Rule the World

I might try a serious rebuttal later. In the mean time I’ll say this.

Earth is a little village. Time after time, the villagers have looked into the forest of the future and cried “wolf”. Sometimes it was a hamster. Sometimes it was an old shoe. Sometimes it was a piece of celery. Sometimes it was even an actual wolf.

Now, on the horizon, we can see things that are to wolves what MechaGodzilla is to a 5cm lizard. And the villagers are crying, “Lol, free farming equipment”. It would be one of funny and tragic if it weren’t the other.

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Neven Sesardic, a philosopher, critiques the movie Gattaca:

Imagine that you are on an intercontinental flight and that immediately after take‐off
the pilot makes the following announcement: ‘Dear passengers, I hope you will join me in
celebrating a wonderful achievement of one of our navigators. His name is Vincent.
Vincent’s childhood dream was to become an airplane navigator but unfortunately he was
declared unfit for the job because of his serious heart condition. True, he does occasionally
have symptoms of heart disease like shortness of breath and chest pain, yet he is certainly
not the kind of person to be deterred from pursuing his dream so easily. Being quite
convinced that he is up to the task and that everything would be fine Vincent decided to
falsify his medical records. And indeed, with the clean bill of health readily forged and
attached to his application, he smoothly managed to get the plum job and is very proud to
take care of your safety today. Can we please get some applause for Vincent’s
accomplishment and perseverance in the face of adversity? And, by the way, keep your seat
belts tightly fastened during the entire flight.’

I somehow doubt that in such a situation you would clap enthusiastically, or that you
would vote for Vincent as the airline employee of the month. I bet that, on the contrary, you
would be outraged that he used deception and irresponsibly put other people’ lives at risk
in order to achieve his selfish goal. But why then do we react so differently when we are
confronted with that other Vincent, the main character in the movie Gattaca (1997), who
basically does the same thing. Why do we admire him? I will try to show that this is all the
work of silver screen magic.

(via Online Papers in Philosophy)

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Nick Bostrom has a book chapter on the future of humanity online. There’s probably nothing new in it for readers of this blog, just a bunch of obvious claims that should be conventional wisdom but aren’t. I would probably identify as a transhumanist even if I became convinced human enhancement and related technologies were the spawn of the devil and should be suppressed wherever possible, simply because transhumanists seem to me like pretty much the only people that don’t consider it taboo to think seriously about the very-long-term future (and remember, nearly all of the future is very-long-term), the place of humans and technology in it, and how we could affect it positively.

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Just passing this on for humor value:

But he fears we won’t invent the necessary technologies in time, and expects “about 80%” of the world’s population to be wiped out by 2100. Prophets have been foretelling Armageddon since time began, he says. “But this is the real thing.”

Interviewers often remark upon the discrepancy between Lovelock’s predictions of doom, and his good humour. “Well I’m cheerful!” he says, smiling. “I’m an optimist. It’s going to happen.”

Humanity is in a period exactly like 1938-9, he explains, when “we all knew something terrible was going to happen, but didn’t know what to do about it”. But once the second world war was under way, “everyone got excited, they loved the things they could do, it was one long holiday … so when I think of the impending crisis now, I think in those terms. A sense of purpose - that’s what people want.”

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This Marginal Revolution post discusses carbon taxes, people who are for or against “a carbon tax”, whether “a carbon tax” is a good thing, and so on. But even though both are “a carbon tax”, the difference between a $100 carbon tax and a $10 carbon tax is much bigger than the difference between a $10 carbon tax and no carbon tax. It’s as if people think dollars come in two amounts, “none” and “some”. I doubt that this is true of Tyler Cowen, so maybe there’s something going on that I’m missing.

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If you look into things like religion and parapsychology and UFOs, you will notice people argue about a lot of circumstantial, dubious pieces of evidence. One approach here is to just try to judge each piece of evidence individually, then weigh them all. It’s important for there to be people looking at the details. But this approach leaves you open to systematic errors. A faster, more sloppy approach is to take a step back and compare the spectrum of evidence you see to the characteristic spectrum of evidence that you might expect.

• The characteristic spectrum of a real class of phenomena includes a lot of evidence that’s too ambiguous to be of much use, plus some evidence that looks reasonably convincing, plus a little bit (or a lot) of flaming-letters-on-the-moon type undeniable evidence.
• The characteristic spectrum of something that’s not real but that has had a lot of intellectual energy put into its defense includes a lot of ambiguous evidence and maybe a little bit of reasonably-convincing-looking evidence.
• The characteristic spectrum of something real that’s half-heartedly or incompetently trying to hide itself might be a lot like that, too.
• The characteristic spectrum of something real that’s actively and competently trying to hide itself is flat.

In most cases you can just look at the far end of the spectrum, where evidence is incontrovertible. I would say that this tactic is not perfect, but is quick and often works.

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(Follow-up to Evolution and God are Incompatible)

Paul Grice claimed that in conversations we assume a “cooperative principle“: when we try to figure out what people mean, we assume they are working together to make the exchange as useful as possible. He also stated some more specific maxims, such as “avoid ambiguity” and “make your contribution as informative as is required for the current purposes of the exchange”.

There are many parts of the Bible, like the creation story in Genesis, that the last few centuries of science have shown to be literally false. Some Christians are Biblical literalists and just deny the evidence. Other Christians think things like the creation story in Genesis should be taken metaphorically.

Strangely enough I have less respect for the latter view than the former. Being flat wrong is one thing, being confused about subtle philosophical points is often more dangerous.

The default presumption for any statement is that it’s a literal truth claim. If I say my aunt lives in Ireland, then unless context, background information, tone of voice, and so on suggest otherwise, I am trying to make you believe that my aunt literally lives in Ireland. It’s not as if saying my aunt lives in Ireland helps you understand a philosophical point or moves your spirit.

Saying God made the world in a week is like that. That the creation story contradicts scientific evidence is something that hasn’t been widely known until the 19th or 20th century. If 1) God exists, and 2) we can hold God to higher conversational standards than the average internet troll, and 3) Genesis is not literally true, then it follows God would have inserted some sort of warning to guard against misinterpretation. If you want to keep 3) — as you should — then you have to throw away 1) or 2).

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Many of you know the drill. Others, see previous iterations. Tell me if you know of a more inspired way to generate standard questions.

Claims after the fold.

Continue Reading »

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Did Shakespeare (the Stratford guy) write his own work? At various times it’s been suggested that “Shakespeare” was secretly someone else, like Francis Bacon, Edward de Vere, or Christopher Marlowe. Conspiracies are always implausible, and the experts mostly seem to be what they call “Stratfordians”. So as someone who knows nothing about this stuff, normally I’d say, that’s that.

Peter Farey has a web page claiming that the text on the monument near Shakespeare’s grave, if properly deciphered, says that Marlowe wrote Shakespeare’s works after faking his own death. It’s worth the read, even if only as an ingenious and creative misinterpretation. It begins:

So many ludicrous cryptograms have been offered as an alleged proof that someone other than William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon wrote the works attributed to him, that anyone attempting to suggest something even remotely along these lines is bound to receive a fairly cool reception. I would, therefore, have much preferred to be writing about some quite different discovery, but that which follows was what I actually found. Unfortunately, if one is looking for the truth, the evidence that crops up is not always of the type that one would have ideally picked.

The article has some probability calculations that purport to show it can’t be chance. I find these calculations naive, but they look like they could be loosened to something less naive and still work. So on the one hand, intuitively it seems like strong evidence. On the other hand, human brains are really good at finding secret messages where there aren’t any. And there’s a low prior for the evidence to overcome. (Though not for Farey himself, who already believed the faked death theory before the whole monument business).

So I’m not quite sure what and how to think here (perhaps some sort of Bayesian analysis would help, but it’s tricky.) Other than for amusement value, I’ve never been into conspiracy theories. But I’m not sure I’d dismiss this one easily. (And yes, I know that none of this has any real implications, but it’s interesting and perhaps a good case study.)

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