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The Difference Between Rationality and Intelligence

nytimes.com

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Re: The Difference Between Rationality and Intelligence

#61

Post by mehwoot »

tbrownaw wrote: post #25
wonkaWonka wrote: post #13

The article presents the following experimental premise: “Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in antinuclear demonstrations.” Then they asked the subjects which was more probable: (A) Linda is a bank teller or (B) Linda is a bank teller and is active in the fe…

Or alternatively, the existence of (b) means that (a) is generally understood to mean "Linda is a bank teller, and is NOT active in the feminist movement ", regardless of how literally the instructions say to take it. Either way, it's more a failure of communication between the experimenters and the subjects, rather than a failure of rationality on the part of the subjects. Which is still interesting (and perhaps mor…

is generally understood to mean

Is it? I didn't interpret it that way, and that isn't what the question says. And why would it be "understood" that is what is being asked? Logically, the answers would be "she is a feminist" and "she is not a feminist", there would be no reason to construct the answers with the information that she is a bank teller if that is what was being asked.

This seems like another detail that rational thinking picks up- if you stop and think about the answer format the "generally understood" interpretation doesn't make any sense.

Re: The Difference Between Rationality and Intelligence

#62

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

charlieflowers wrote: post #9

I have known many clearly intelligent people who held irrational opinions quite strongly. For example, huge believers in specific, concrete stock market predictions based on some fibonacci sequence nonsense, to the point of actively loosing six figures through multiple failed predictions over a decade+ and still believing. So clearly, they're distinct. But the question about the bank teller doesn't seem like the stro…

>For example, huge believers in specific, concrete stock market predictions based on some fibonacci sequence nonsense, to the point of actively loosing six figures through multiple failed predictions over a decade+ and still believing.

And there's the problem. We don't know what rationality or intelligence really are, but there's an assumption that they have something to do with modelling our current and future environment accurately and reliably.

The subject is a mess of competing notions that aren't necessarily related. Does rationality mean being able to understand and manipulate abstract concepts and symbols using consistent rule sets ("market predictions", "Fibonacci") or does it mean making reliable winning predictions from limited information?

Even the original feminist bank teller example is suspect. If you assume that the set of feminist bank tellers is smaller than the set of bank tellers, then the "rational" answer makes sense.

But it's actually reasonable to read the question as "Given that one particular person is a bank teller - because both choices tell you she is - and has a history of activism, is she also likely to be a feminist?"

One reading is purely mathematical, but the other makes perfect sense in a social context if you assume that you're talking about a real bank teller with a real history.

If you were introduced to someone at a party and given that background information, which interpretation would be more likely to have predictive power?

Re: The Difference Between Rationality and Intelligence

#63

Post by davidgerard »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #44
davidgerard wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that interests you, ask for a chart of the real-world successes of LessWrong readers compared to non-LW readers. Also about the mosquito nets versus AI dialectic in Effective Altruism.

> Also about the mosquito nets versus AI dialectic in Effective Altruism. There's a reasonable debate here about short-term and long-term thinking. "How to save the most lives the most quickly" is not the only reasonable altruistic goal to optimize for. "How to save the most lives over the long-term, and save them permanently rather than just delaying a current inevitable" is worth consideration. And there are alread…

"AGI research" in practice means "give money to MIRI", whose track record of results on pretty much any measure is less than impressive.

It is really (and literally) "donate to stuff that demonstrably works" versus "donate to MIRI, with its terrible track record, to do something supported primarily by Pascalian arguments."

c.f. http://www.vox.com/2015/8/10/9124145/effective-altruism-glob...

Yudkowsky may have (probably) coined the phrase "effective altruist", but people who aren't living sci-fi dreams are in EA now, and asking rather pointed questions.

Never confuse "Effective Altruism" and "altruism that is effective". Whatever "effective" actually means in the given context.

Getting back on-topic, there's still no evidence - e.g., a track record of results - that anything within a mile of MIRI/LW is actually any good at all for real-world effectiveness, and things like mosquito nets versus AI as evidence against it. LW sells a sort of "rationalitiness": it sure feels like rationality.

Re: The Difference Between Rationality and Intelligence

#64

Post by Dylan16807 »

Artoemius wrote: post #54
nazgul17 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. I think the Linda problem is all based on the fact that when you tell people "which is more likely true ?" they hear "which one is more likely to be the exact description of reality?" Is not irrationality, just miscommunication.

The problem is that even if people hear it like this, P is still a more likely exact description of reality than P&Q.

Nope! When your goal is an exact description, omitting information is just as bad as being wrong.

Re: The Difference Between Rationality and Intelligence

#65

Post by Dylan16807 »

csallen wrote: post #51
nobrains wrote: post #41

I would argue that the test was irrational: "(A) Linda is a bank teller or (B) Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement. Eighty-five percent of the subjects chose B". Many people could have assumed that being in set (B) automatically means set (A) = NOT set (B). Set (B) being more precisely defined, it can easily be assumed that anyone in set (B) is not in set (A). The participants can easily ass…

So what you're saying is the participants went with their intuitive feeling about how the question might be structured as opposed to applying deliberate and effortful analysis/reasoning to understand what was being asked.

Such reasoning would not allow reading the question-asker's mind, so no. You can rationally arrive at either interpretation of the question.

Re: The Difference Between Rationality and Intelligence

#66

Post by Dylan16807 »

socmag wrote: post #5
bmh_ca wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The capacity to abstract thought and the decision to classify it are two different concepts, but easy to conflate. As we form classifications our mylenic sheaths form around our neurons and abstracting concepts - even if apparent to others - becomes more challenging.

> "mylenic sheaths form around our neurons and abstracting concepts" Roll me one while you are at it

That is not how that "and" works.

'Mylenic sheaths form around our neurons. -and- Abstracting concepts becomes more challenging.'

Re: The Difference Between Rationality and Intelligence

#67

Post by jdietrich »

dmfdmf wrote: post #11

> people tend to make decisions based on intuition rather than reason. I think these types of article have a too-narrow definition of rationality. I think that emotions, feelings and intuition are subconscious processes but still part of the faculty of reason. The mistake is to think that rationality = conscious-logical-deduction but anyone who has solved some complex problem knows the experience of working on a prob…

Intuition can be tuned by the tools of rationality.

Professional poker players infrequently calculate odds consciously, but they have a very strong intuitive sense of probability and game theory. Study and practice allows them to instinctively recognise the expected value of a scenario. Physicists and engineers develop an intuitive understanding of some very complex and counter-intuitive phenomena.

Re: The Difference Between Rationality and Intelligence

#68

Post by bonoboTP »

wonkaWonka wrote: post #13

The article presents the following experimental premise: “Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in antinuclear demonstrations.” Then they asked the subjects which was more probable: (A) Linda is a bank teller or (B) Linda is a bank teller and is active in the fe…

I agree that it's a very misleading experiment. People usually don't need to answer questions of pure dry mathematical probability. What most people answer here is a differently interpreted question:

"Which option, do you think, is probably more descriptive of Linda?"

Or "Do you think a bank teller usually has such a life history? How about a feminist bank teller?"

----

I hate it when experimenters ask about probability explicitly. It just test how much probability theory you've learned in school. How familiar you are with the mathematical framework. But it doesn't test everyday reasoning. Good tests for probabilistic thinking shouldn't even mention the word 'probability', but set up some physical or other task where you have to use probabilistic reasoning to solve it effectively.

For example the Wason selection task (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wason_selection_task) is also an artificial question that is hard to answer, but as soon as a practical story is built around it (alcohol and age), people can solve it much easier.

It's not that people are irrational, they are just bad at abstract thinking devoid of any practicality. We like to think in stories, situations, intentions. Abstract, "robotic" thinking is harder.

Re: The Difference Between Rationality and Intelligence

#69

Post by bonoboTP »

cJ0th wrote: post #60
mehwoot wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how either guess is generally less likely then the other one. How could A possibly be less likely than B?? The occurrences of B are a strict subset of A, there is no possible way B could happen more frequently.

Maybe I am a bit confused but I just meant to imply that A and B could be considered equally probable if you're a Bayesian who has absolute confidence that she's the kind of person who is active in the feminist movement.

100% now is 100% forever, in the Bayesian framework.

If a Bayesian agent is absolutely certain that she is active in the feminist movement, it would mean that absolutely no evidence could convince it of the contrary. Even if we learn that she was kidnapped and forced to work in, say, Saudi Arabia as a bank teller where she's forbidden from feminism, even then, the Bayesian agent would have to still stay at 100% confidence that she's active in feminism.

Re: The Difference Between Rationality and Intelligence

#70

Post by falcolas »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #35
charlieflowers wrote: post #9

I have known many clearly intelligent people who held irrational opinions quite strongly. For example, huge believers in specific, concrete stock market predictions based on some fibonacci sequence nonsense, to the point of actively loosing six figures through multiple failed predictions over a decade+ and still believing. So clearly, they're distinct. But the question about the bank teller doesn't seem like the stro…

> the question about the bank teller doesn't seem like the strongest indicator. It seems more like a parlor trick that relies on our "system 1" brain short circuiting before our "system 2" kicks in. The question about the bank teller is a parlor trick that exploits normal language processing, specifically the Gricean Maxim of Relevance ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_principle#Maxim_of... ). The maxim spe…

FWIW, all human communication is this messy, so the ability to find rational answers even when confronted by this messiness has quite a bit of value.

And if we can be trained to find rationality in the face of inexact human communication, all the better.

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