Tekijä: Annika Kulovesi

In this essay series, I will write down my own thoughts about Eliezer Yudkowsky’s essays on the Rationality: Ai to Zombies –series from the point of view of a historian. My reason for writing these is primarily to organize my own thoughts regarding the use of rationality as a mental tool in my own profession, and as such, I do not presume to even attempt to appeal to a very wide audience. However, if you are reading this disclaimer and find my essays insightful or entertaining, more the power to you and I implore you to go and read the original essays, if you have not already.

 

In his essay Availability¹, Yudkowsky defines the availability heuristic as the “judging [of] the frequency or probability of an event by the ease with which examples of the event come to mind.”

This means that we are both likelier to think deaths by accident occur more frequently in relation to deaths by diseases than they actually do, and compare out own lot to the rich and famous because they are the ones everyone is talking about.

“The objective frequency of Bill Gates is 0.00000000015, but you hear about him much more often. Conversely, 19% of the planet lives on less than $1/day, and I doubt that one fifth of the blog posts you read are written by them.”

This heuristic bias does not only make us more likely to be anxious and jealous in the present, but it also affects the work of everyone who studies people, past or present. The modern man receives information through several selective filters (how likely were people to share the news, does an algorithm consider the news potentially interesting to him, etc.), and most people are not very mindful of this fact. Those that are, however, can try to work their way around forming too heavily biased heuristics by diving into the cornucopia of information available to us at all times, and formulating a more balanced view of any given issue.

Once again, this is a luxury that historians have at best in a very limited capacity. Some periods in history are a regular desert of information, and whatever new research is published tends to be about looking at the few sources available from a novel angle. Not a problem in itself, but it becomes precarious when one tries to draw too far-reaching conclusions from them in their thirst for answers about the society from whence the sources originated. For a hypothetical example, imagine trying to answer questions about how a regular farmstead wife experienced their daily lives based on a single source written by a monk in a monastery a few villages past. Mind you, I do not think that we should not touch things that we cannot make very informed analyses about, but it is good to keep that mindfulness about oneself of not being very well informed.

This is an issue that anyone who studies illiterates has to face, and it is likely the biggest contributor to why historians did not concern themselves too much with peasants before the 20^th century. The written word is a potent filter in and of itself, and the more time passes, added filters of what is considered in any given time to preserve to the future gets added. No large wonder that most historical sources concern the highborn and educated, as well as do histories. Why study the silent poor, when you could say so much more with confidence about Bill Gates?

When it is not a question of having only a handful of sources available, the issue begins to resemble the predicament of our modern lives much more. Namely that we are more likely to recall dramatic or interesting events and thus presume that they were more frequent than they were. It also relates to the temptation that I have mentioned before, of finding garden gnomes where there are none. In my opinion, this is a much bigger issue than making broad generalizations based on the writings of just a couple of monks. At least when the problem is the dearth of sources, the scientific community tends to be pretty good at taking it into account when assessing new research.

When one studies a time period where sources are too many for any single person to comb through and take into account, the intrinsic tendency of humans to give more weight to the shocking and dramatic poses a bigger threat to how any given period of time is perceived of as. Consider any common sense ideas about how violent and intolerant people used to be in any given time period, and it becomes easy to see why those ideas may have become stuck in the cultural consciousness.

Most likely the reality is more boring than our ideas of it, and as professionals it would be prudent of historians to not become one of the filters between reality and the broader audience, ending up propagating ideas of our ancestors as more ludicrous and wild than they were just because we like to remember the juicy bits.

 

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¹ Yudkowsky, Eliezer. ”Rationality: from AI to Zombies” Berkeley, MIRI (2015). 23–25.

In this essay series, I will write down my own thoughts about Eliezer Yudkowsky’s essays on the Rationality: Ai to Zombies –series from the point of view of a historian. My reason for writing these is primarily to organize my own thoughts regarding the use of rationality as a mental tool in my own profession, and as such, I do not presume to even attempt to appeal to a very wide audience. However, if you are reading this disclaimer and find my essays insightful or entertaining, more the power to you and I implore you to go and read the original essays, if you have not already.

 

“What is true of one apple may not be true of another apple; thus more can be said about a single apple than about all the apples in the world.”

This quote is can be found in Yudkowsky’s essay …What’s a Bias, Again?¹, in which he vaguely described the category of cognitive biases and why they can – to simplify – be viewed as an obstacle in the quest to find truth. It is also an excellent quote for historians – myself especially – to remember. I tend towards easy generalizations and intuitively prefer to paint with broad strokes, and I know I am not the only one to be tempted by the faulty generalization bias.

If you go to Wikipedia and look up the list of cognitive biases, the wide variety of packages they come in becomes apparent. As such, it is not useful to try to distill one unifying feature out of all of them. In reality all of them need to be acknowledged separately and deliberately, if one wishes to overcome their effects when they check the results of their reasoning. The best way to describe cognitive bias, as Yudkowsky does, is by referring to them as errors in our reasoning arising from the shape of our own mental machinery. It is not that the machine is broken or does not have enough energy; it is just that it was built to make spaghetti when all we would like now is tagliatelle.

Improving one’s reasoning capabilities helps to avoid biases by giving us a kind of a checklist to go over when we are re-checking our reasoning and conclusions to see if they actually make sense. Do we have tagliatelle, or did we just made spaghetti again because that’s what always tends to happen when you crank the lever. The first draft of our thinking cannot rid itself of bias, but when we look at the pile of spaghetti mindfully, we can remind ourselves about the differences between various types of pasta. Only then can we grab a roller and begin to reshape the outcomes of our reasoning into something that serves our original purpose. As with spaghetti and tagliatelle, usually the results of our thinking are not so far off from what we were trying to achieve as to be unsalvageable. They just need a bit of work.

There is value in trying to obtain the most truthful answer to our questions regarding history, but historians should never forget that we are most likely going to be wrong in one way or another. What always strikes me when I read news reports of events where a reporter was actually present and several witness accounts were heard is just how often they still manage to botch the representation of the events. Historians are on this task as well, only we were never really there and did not even directly talk to the people who were. How likely must it be that our attempts to report on past events would have made the actual people involved aghast at their misrepresentation?

The amount of untruths is infinite, and truth itself is a difficult target to hit even when you have the chance to go back and empirically test if your reasoning was sound. We as historians have to do without this luxury. All we have is the garden views through our selected and blotched windows, and often not even that, just pictures drawn of the views by someone else. Nothing short of a new window or a removal of a stain in an already existing one can give us a chance to check someone’s reasoning in filling in the blanks in their drawing. So our chance of being mistaken and is already far greater, without even accounting for the fact that testing for bias is trickier for us than for most other scientists.

But that’s alright, after all what’s the worst that could happen? Luckily for us, nobody’s life (at least directly) hangs on representations of history, and there’s at least a dozen of us who can give a second opinion if someone makes a particularly unfounded and egregious claim. So we should be bold to try.

Scientific truth-seeking is a recent endeavor compared to how useful cognitive biases have been to humans in our everyday lives for hundreds of thousands of years. Therefore, we will have to make do with the spaghetti-making-machine that is our brain and see to it that we do not just leave it at that if what we actually seek is some tagliatelle.

 

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¹ Yudkowsky, Eliezer. ”Rationality: from AI to Zombies.” Berkeley, MIRI (2015). 19–22.

In this essay series, I will write down my own thoughts about Eliezer Yudkowsky’s essays on the Rationality: Ai to Zombies –series from the point of view of a historian. My reason for writing these is primarily to organize my own thoughts regarding the use of rationality as a mental tool in my own profession, and as such, I do not presume to even attempt to appeal to a very wide audience. However, if you are reading this disclaimer and find my essays insightful or entertaining, more the power to you and I implore you to go and read the original essays, if you have not already.

 

Truth: 1. The quality or state of being true.

1.1 That which is true or in accordance with fact or reality.

1.2 A fact or belief that is accepted as true.

 

Accurate knowledge of scientific truths of the (1.1) kind let us manipulate the world, but no space shuttle is going to crash based on whatever we think is historically true, as historical truths all fall neatly into the (1.2) category of truths. What then drives historians to seek the truth, if it is only ever going to be our best guess with no significance in the grand scale of things?

Again I return to the analogue of gardens and windows and artists, as I will probably do in the future as well on this blog. To reiterate: Gardens are temporal realities in history, windows are pieces of sources through which we peer through at the historical events and contexts, and historians are the artists who draw what they see through the window, filling in the blanks where the view is smudged or obscured. These pictures are both for colleagues and for wider audiences.

In his essay ’Why Truth? And…’¹, Yudkowsky proposes three separate modes of motivation for truth-seeking: Curiosity, pragmatism, and morality. All of these motivations come into play when historians decide on which window to peer through and start sketching to share the view with others. However, I would argue that curiosity plays the most significant role in this process for historians.

The pragmatic motivation for historians to conduct research drives them to focus on topics that are not curious just to ourselves but others as well (especially if they are willing to pay us), so that we may keep food on our table. On a wider scope, we cannot boast much pragmatic utility. Nothing we may discover has the kind of practical use that discoveries in natural sciences yield. Even if historians discovered irrefutable evidence that Hitler was secretly a Finnish man and in cahoots with Mannerheim and the rest to build Greater Finland, it would not necessarily motivate society to change anything about where we are proceeding. Instead, often the pragmatic concerns of agenda-driven agents would often best be served if history were shrouded in mystery, as this gives more leeway for lay interpretations that can be utilized for political gain.

In countering these agents lies the morality driven motivation of historians. We should be the ones to discover and bring to light the truth of historical events and ideas, so that they could not be twisted to serve whatever narrative is trending at any given moment. The problem with morality driven research is that it seems that often the historians with a very clear sense of moral duty also have specific expectations of what they will discover. As such, they need more integrity to not become-the-monster and twist their findings to suit their own agenda, if what they find is not what they thought it would be. You should never set out to do research to prove someone wrong, and serious self-reflection should always be practiced when a historian analyzes what draws them to a specific topic.

Curiosity is the motivation that cannot be removed from the study of history, as the gardens are innumerable and the choice we make about which one to focus on almost always rests on our curiosity.  Sometimes convenience overrides curiosity, but more often than not, historians decide to tackle vistas that are trickier to interpret just because we are curious about what we will discover. The pitfall of curiosity is finding there was nothing of significance there after all. As the picture is unfolding, a historian may realize that the picture contains nothing of interest even to themselves, and certainly will not catch the attention of anyone else. Finishing the picture can become tedious in this case, and the temptation to add in garden gnomes may become overpowering.

In this case, the curious historian does well to borrow a page from the morality-driven historian’s playbook and remind themselves that history still attempts to be science rather than literature. We are here to discover the truth, even if it is only the soft (1.1) kind.

 

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¹ Yudkowsky, Eliezer. ”Rationality: from AI to Zombies.” Berkeley, MIRI (2015). 15–18.

 

 

In this essay series, I will write down my own thoughts about Eliezer Yudkowsky’s essays on the Rationality: Ai to Zombies –series from the point of view of a historian. My reason for writing these is primarily to organize my own thoughts regarding the use of rationality as a mental tool in my own profession, and as such, I do not presume to even attempt to appeal to a very wide audience. However, if you are reading this disclaimer and find my essays insightful or entertaining, more the power to you and I implore you to go and read the original essays, if you have not already.

 

“That which can be destroyed by truth should be.”

– P.C. Hodgell

 

In his essay Feeling Rational, Yudkowsky touches on the perceived dichotomy of rationality versus emotions, and concludes that they are not opposites of one another nor should they be perceived of as separate but similar entities. Emotions can rise from both factual reality as well as from our biased perceptions of it, and their role is to guide our actions. Based on how true our map (model of reality) is to the actual territory (reality), the more warranted our emotions become.

…Anyway, I was inspired to take a completely different perspective on emotions and as such, I return to the analogy of drawing pictures of gardens based on views through smudged windows.

I propose that it is important for historians especially to be mindful of our emotions, as far as scientists and scholars are concerned. This is not because emotions have no place in science, but because we cannot escape our emotions at any stage of the research process. Unlike in sciences where you can go out and roam the garden to empirically test how accurate your map is, we will only ever have the view through the distorted window. An engineer will likely be promptly slapped in the face by reality if disastrously inaccurate interpretations make their way into his or her map. Meanwhile, if a historian makes an outrageous mistake, the worst scenario is that everyone will have the wrong idea and plan actions that are not based on reality – but then again humans are quite good at ignoring even the most accurate estimates when planning for future actions.

What drives historians to draw pictures of gardens (write history) is both our curiosity at what lies behind the windows and how we feel about the limited view presented to us. The amount of these garden views (historical contexts) to choose from is abundant, and the views through the windows (sources) are so imperfect that there are two separate points where historians should be particularly mindful of their emotions and bias.

First, when deciding on the view, we are usually completely at the mercy of our own biased interests. Even though it is not a crime to study what interests you, it is good to keep in mind that everyone either chooses the window that most interests them, happens to have most novelty value, or is easiest for them to reach from their current position. This leaves many views untouched, and consequently our knowledge of gardens at large (history) is skewed.

Secondly, when we are drawing the view and filling in the blanks, what we fill in is hopefully based on our best guesses of what would fit in the picture. We base our guess either on our prior knowledge of similar garden views we have gazed at ourselves, or on pictures that we have seen by colleagues. However, we are only human, and we may want to fill in the blanks with something that would make people notice us more, or by something that would make us feel smart. We can imagine a garden gnome where there is no proof of one and the probability is not high enough for it to be our best guess. Likewise, after looking at many similar views we may start seeing patterns. Patterns are especially exciting if you discover them yourself, and after becoming attached to a particular pattern you may start want to draw it in all of your pictures to make you feel even smarter and make others notice you.

Being mindful of our own emotions when writing history is behind the paradigm shift away from trying to write history from an ‘objective’ realist point of view, and towards a more post-modernist atmosphere, where the biases of individual historians are overtly emphasized. My own issue with this concerns the possibility of historians beginning to prioritize the maps over the territory. Since there are no tangible consequences of drawing in a gnome in your picture even though you cannot be entirely sure if it is there based on the view, the only actual deterrent to embellishing our pictures is the underlying reverence towards wanting to stay true to the actual garden. In this atmosphere of reverence, we do our best as a medium in transferring that knowledge to paper, giving our best guesses when they are required to fill in the blanks. Even if a gnome would look good in a picture compared to our best guess – that the red blotch behind the smudged window is probably just another poppy – we are deterred by the possibility that we might lose face if a colleague were to look through the same window and conclude that our interpretation is likely rubbish.

It is right that we would stay reverent to the territory rather than the maps, because all that can be destroyed by the truth should be, and in the end the territory is the only thing we have to anchor our maps. Interpretations can take any which turn based on the emotions of the historian, but we cannot actually go into the garden and twist it into our own picture.

As such, we should acknowledge that it is unavoidable that there will always be bias in our interpretations of history, rather than throwing our hands in the air and concluding that because we cannot get rid of the bias, we might as well put it on a pedestal.

In this essay series, I will write down my own thoughts about rationality from the point of view of a historian based on Eliezer Yudkowsky’s essays on the Rationality: Ai to Zombies –series. Some of my essays will be based on particular essays of his, while others are more of my general thoughts or focus on a singular point made somewhere along the line. My reason for writing these is primarily to organize my own thoughts regarding the use of rationality as a mental tool in my own profession, and as such, I do not presume to even attempt to appeal to a very wide audience. However, if you are reading this disclaimer and find my essays insightful or entertaining, more the power to you and I implore you to go and read the original essays, if you have not already.

 

Truth: 1. The quality or state of being true.

1.1 That which is true or in accordance with fact or reality.

1.2 A fact or belief that is accepted as true.

 

In his first essay in the series of essays which would become the book From AI to Zombies, Eliezer Yudkowsky defines his own use of rationality as two distinct branches:

Epistemic Rationality: systematically improving the accuracy of your beliefs.

Instrumental rationality: systematically achieving your values.

 

In the following, I am navigating the realm of epistemic rationality.

 

In the field of Arts, of which History is a part of, there is a frustrating tendency to devolve into semantic arguments whenever someone brings up the concept of ‘truth’. What makes it frustrating to me is the focus on the definition (1.2) of truth found above, and especially the emphasis put on the word ‘belief’.

The basic idea behind map and territory is that the map is your beliefs about the world, and the territory is the world itself.

This concept is simple enough to understand, and it helps to remember that when a map is erroneous and does not correspond with the territory, we do not (usually) go out and change the territory to better suit the map. It is much more honest to start by working on your map, but it is also the simpler solution – even if it may seem cumbersome and you have become quite fond of the vision as shown in the map.

What about when you cannot see the territory clearly?

Garden allegory incoming.

Historians work with limited sources, which is akin to peering at a garden through a partly opaque and/or distorted window. Still, our job is to make sense of what we see and fill in the blanks so that we can present a coherent recreation of the garden to interested audiences. It might seem easy enough – after all, we all have a general idea of what a garden is like based on the various gardens our colleagues have been peering at through their own blotched windows. Not to mention that we are living in a garden at this very moment which, while having the benefit of not being behind a blotched window¹, it is so vast that no one could wish to chart it completely by themselves. Regardless, we have a general idea of a garden and many samples of what they are and have been like in different contexts. Even if we cannot draw an exact match of whichever garden is behind any particular blotched window, we have good expertise to fill in the blanks and draw a coherent map for the wider public. Somebody needs to do it after all, or any old snake-oil map maker will be quick to come in and present their own map without even taking the time to properly examine the view.

People want to know what’s in that garden and somebody’s going to have to give them answers. People will write history even if historians stop doing it.

The problem arises when we forget that the map is partly fantasy, and the presumed parts of it cannot be used as evidence of what other gardens are like. This confuses many humanists when they get too attached to their theories of human experience. The urge to obtain a map that would help us understand the territory is so great that we keep producing them despite of the fact that the view of the territory is limited at best. I am not saying that we are idiots, we know that our maps are not perfect representations of the territory, but what happens all too often is that the parts of the map which have strong supporting evidence get muddled up with the invented parts. Our pet theories and assumptions get tangled with what is stated in the sources, and in the process we become compelled to define and redefine ‘truth’ in academic conversations again and again just to be sure whoever we are talking to is not so presumptuous as to regard the whole map as being truthful to the territory. We know better than that, and usually even the most presumptuous of map-makers never forgets which parts of it were their own brainchilds.

If we could just keep in mind that within out map there are two kinds of truths –  truths (1.2) and truths (1.1) – many of these discussions could be averted. The mindful acknowledgement of the possibility of being wrong would not need to devolve into semantics, and we could veer away from the lure of post-modernism. When we go there, the discussion of  how valid the filled-in parts of the map are in relation to the parts which best correspond with the territory gets pushed aside in favour of just discussing about the map and what it says about the person who drew it.

We end up throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and I take issue with that.

 

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¹ Just unreliable eyes, but that’s a whole another topic.