Monthly Archives: October 2017

Poets are intelligence assets

Aeschylus’s Oresteia is an ancient Greek tragedy about the dialectic between the natural desire for vengeance, order, and the rule of law. This is most likely what contemporaries thought the play was about, including Aeschylus himself.

It is also a play about sexual politics, and the relationship between the idea of the rule of law as actually implemented in the West, and patriarchy.

This is a good example of the well-known phenomenon in which literary criticism and other forms of textual analysis frequently get something “out of” the text that the author had no apparent intent of putting into it - and that many coherent narratives can be extracted from the same text. Far more than an author could plausibly have meant to put into the text. This is often taken as evidence that such readings are spurious.

Robin Hanson argued that one way to extract information from published studies that was comparatively uncontaminated by publication bias, was to look at the coefficients of control variables. The idea is that if your study is about, say, the effect of alcohol on life expectancy, journals may be unwilling to publish it if you get an improbable-seeming result, or no significant result. But less scrutiny is applied to the estimated effect of alcohol if you’re studying something else, and simply “control for” alcohol (i.e. include it in your model as a possible predictor).

Likewise, great literature is typically an integrated, multi-dimensional depiction. While there is a great deal of compression, the author is still trying to report how things might really have happened, to satisfy their own sense of artistic taste for plausibility or verisimilitude. Thus, we should expect that great literature is often an honest, highly informative account of everything except what the author meant to put into it. Continue reading

Defense against discourse

So, some writer named Cathy O’Neil wrote about futurists’ opinions about AI risk. This piece focused on futurists as social groups with different incentives, and didn’t really engage with the content of their arguments. Instead, she points out considerations like this:

First up: the people who believe in the singularity and are not worried about it. […] These futurists are ready and willing to install hardware in their brains because, as they are mostly young or middle-age white men, they have never been oppressed.

She doesn’t engage with the content of their arguments about the future. I used to find this sort of thing inexplicable and annoying. Now I just find it sad but reasonable. Continue reading

On the construction of beacons

I am afraid of the anglerfish. Maybe this is why the comments on my blog tend to be so consistently good.

Recently, a friend was telling me about the marketing strategy for a project of theirs. They favored growth, in a way that I was worried would destroy value. I struggled to articulate my threat model, until I hit upon the metaphor of that old haunter of my dreamscape, the anglerfish. Continue reading