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How does information affect hookups?

Posted on April 15, 2010 | 6 comments

With social networking sites enabling the romantically inclined to find out more about a potential lover before the first superficial chat than they previously would have in the first month of dating, this is an important question for the future of romance.

Lets assume that in looking for partners, people care somewhat about rank and and somewhat about match. That is, they want someone ‘good enough’ for them who also has interests and personality that they like.

First look at the rank component alone. Assume for a moment that people are happy to date anyone they believe is equal to or better than them in desirability. Then if everyone has a unique rank and perfect information, there will never be any dating at all. The less information they have the more errors in comparing, so the more chance that A will think B is above her while B thinks A is above him. Even if people are willing to date people somewhat less desirable than they, the same holds – by making more errors you trade wanting more desirable people for wanting less desirable people, who are more likely to want you back , even if they are making their own errors. So to the extent that people care about rank, more information means fewer hookups.

How about match then? Here it matters exactly what people want in a match. If they mostly care about their beloved having certain characteristics,  more information will let everyone hear about more people who meet their requirements. On the other hand if we mainly want to avoid people with certain characteristics, more information will strike more people off the list. We might also care about an overall average desirability of characteristics – then more information is as likely to help or harm assuming the average person is averagely desirable. Or perhaps we want some minimal level of commonality, in which case more information is always a good thing – it wouldn’t matter if you find out she is a cannibalistic alcoholic prostitute, as long as eventually you discover those board games you both like. There are more possibilities.

You may argue that you will get all the information you want in the end, the question is only speed – the hookups prevented by everyone knowing more initially are those that would have failed later anyway. However flaws that dissuade you from approaching one person with a barge pole are often ‘endearing’ when you discover them too late, and once they are in place loving delusions can hide or remove attention from more flaws, so the rate of information discovery matters. To the extent we care about rank then, more information should mean fewer relationships. To the extent we care about match, it’s unclear without knowing more about what we want.

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SIA on other minds

Posted on March 25, 2010 | 21 comments

Another interesting implication if the self indication assumption (SIA) is right is that solipsism is much less likely correct than you previously thought, and relatedly the problem of other minds is less problematic.

Solipsists think they are unjustified in believing in a world external to their minds, as one only ever knows one’s own mind and there is no obvious reason the patterns in it should be driven by something else (curiously, holding such a position does not entirely dissuade people from trying to convince others of it). This can then be debated on grounds of whether a single mind imagining the world is more or less complex than a world causing such a mind to imagine a world.

The problem of other minds is that even if you believe in the outside world that you can see, you can’t see other minds. Most of the evidence for them is by analogy to yourself, which is only one ambiguous data point (should I infer that all humans are probably conscious? All things? All girls? All rooms at night time?).

SIA says many minds are more likely than one, given that you exist. Imagine you are wondering whether this is World 1, with a single mind among billions of zombies, or World 2, with billions of conscious minds. If you start off roughly uncertain, updating on your own conscious existence with SIA shifts the probability of world 2 to billions of times the probability of world 1.

Similarly for solipsism. Other minds probably exist. From this you may conclude the world around them does too, or just that your vat isn’t the only one.

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SIA doomsday: The filter is ahead

Posted on March 23, 2010 | 95 comments

The great filter, as described by Robin Hanson:

Humanity seems to have a bright future, i.e., a non-trivial chance of expanding to fill the universe with lasting life. But the fact that space near us seems dead now tells us that any given piece of dead matter faces an astronomically low chance of begating such a future. There thus exists a great filter between death and expanding lasting life, and humanity faces the ominous question: how far along this filter are we?

I will argue that we are not far along at all. Even if the steps of the filter we have already passed look about as hard as those ahead of us, most of the filter is probably ahead. Our bright future is an illusion; we await filtering. This is the implication of applying the self indication assumption (SIA) to the great filter scenario, so before I explain the argument, let me briefly explain SIA.

SIA says that if you are wondering which world you are in, rather than just wondering which world exists, you should update on your own existence by weighting possible worlds as more likely the more observers they contain. For instance if you were born of an experiment where the flip of a fair coin determined whether one (tails) or two (heads) people were created, and all you know is that and that you exist, SIA says heads was twice as likely as tails. This is contentious; many people think in such a situation you should think heads and tails equally likely. A popular result of SIA is that it perfectly protects us from the doomsday argument. So now I’ll show you we are doomed anyway with SIA.

Consider the diagrams below. The first one is just an example with one possible world so you can see clearly what all the boxes mean in the second diagram which compares worlds. In a possible world there are three planets and three stages of life. Each planet starts at the bottom and moves up, usually until it reaches the filter. This is where most of the planets become dead, signified by grey boxes. In the example diagram the filter is after our stage. The small number of planets and stages and the concentration of the filter is for simplicity; in reality the filter needn’t be only one unlikely step, and there are many planets and many phases of existence between dead matter and galaxy colonizing civilization. None of these things are important to this argument.

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Diagram key

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The second diagram shows three possible worlds where the filter is in different places. In every case one planet reaches the last stage in this model – this is to signify a small chance of reaching the last step, because we don’t see anyone out there, but have no reason to think it impossible. In the diagram, we are in the middle stage, earthbound technological civilization say. Assume the various places we think the filter could be are equally likely..

SIA doom

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This is how to reason about your location using SIA:

  1. The three worlds begin equally likely.
  2. Update on your own existence using SIA by multiplying the likelihood of worlds by their their population. Now the likelihood ratio of the worlds is 3:5:7
  3. Update on knowing you are in the middle stage. New likelihood ratio: 1:1:3. Of course if we began with an accurate number of planets in each possible world, the 3 would be humungous and we would be much more likely in an unfiltered world.

Therefore we are much more likely to be in worlds where the filter is ahead than behind.

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Added: I wrote a thesis on this too.


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Addiction

Posted on March 12, 2010 | 19 comments

Imagine a strange genie offers you the opportunity to no longer crave food, drink, sleep, warmth or sex. Are you be interested? I wouldn’t be – getting things I need and crave seems to be more fun on the whole than getting things I just casually enjoy. There’s a pretty steep diminishing return to the things I listed though, and like many people I have about as much as I want of most of them. So how to make my life much better?

An obvious strategy is to acquire more such strong desires. This is an unpopular path though. If you want to enjoy life more it is common to look for new casually pleasurable activities – make new friends, try a new sport, take your partner on an unusual romantic excursion. If you become too attached to an activity, you are deemed ‘addicted’ though, which is a bad thing. There are activities that are known to make people particularly addicted, and beginning them is seen as a stupid move. But why is addiction so bad?

There is an argument that addictions don’t make you happy – they entrap you in a cycle of endless obsession with no real satisfaction. Remember enjoyment and desire don’t always coincide. But while that’s surely true for some things people become addicted to, if addiction merely entails strong ongoing craving, why should the subjects of such cravings tend to be unpleasant more so than less serious desires?

For these reasons I recently set out to acquire an addiction to coffee, a not particularly dangerous drug. It’s not very strong yet; I do alright without coffee for long periods, but feel relieved and invigorated for having it. So far this seems a great benefit, compared both to casually and unaffectedly drinking coffee and to not drinking coffee at all. However if I say to people that I’m somewhat addicted to coffee they usually express pity. If I say I think it’s a fine arrangement they seem to think I’m silly.

Why is addiction bad, beyond the few specific addictions that aren’t pleasurable or to lead to externalities such as weaponed thievery?

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Trade makes you responsible, but why?

Posted on March 10, 2010 | 14 comments

It’s supposedly bad to exploit poor people by paying them as little as you can get away with in trade.

Onlookers who don’t offer the needy anything condemn those who offer some non altruistic benefit through trade because it isn’t enough. It’s interesting that we see this as a fault with the person trading, rather than with everyone. Very few people think they themselves are morally obliged to pay the poor more. I’ve discussed before how misguided this is if we care about the wellbeing of the poor person. But why do people feel this way? Here are some reasons I’ve occasionally heard, though I doubt they are all independently responsible for this curiosity:

  1. The issue is domination more than wellbeing. A trader forces a poor person into a low value deal by offering when they can’t afford to refuse. At least the rest of us respect poor people enough to mind our own businesses.
  2. It is the role of the trader to trade fairly with the poor people. It is the role of the casual observer to have opinions, not to intervene in traders’ doings.
  3. Benefiting from another’s misfortune is evil, even if it helps them, so interactions with people who need help should be charitable. It’s not great of most people to ignore poor people, but it’s horrific to go out and benefit from their hardships.
  4. Trade is a form of social relation, and people should be nice in their relationships much more than they should be to those they are unconnected to.

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