Category Archives: Uncategorized

Bye Grandma

3 Replies

My first two memories of my grandmother:

1) When I was a baby, she loved to hold me up and say "SOOO big!" She even bought a statue of this scene.

2) Up until I was 15 or so, whenever my family went out to dinner she would order a "Dewars, on the rocks, with a twist." Word for word.

Precise, elegant, complete. That was my grandmother, in a glass.

My grandmother cared about being an elegant lady. Though she never lost some Great Depression-era thrifty habits, she appreciated fine things: good art, good music, good food, the city of New York. She never really liked the suburbs she lived most of her life in; a native of Washington Heights, she missed Manhattan.

She treated me like a grownup as early as she could, and never dumbed things down for me. If she wanted to make a witty remark, but knew it would go right over my little head, she said it anyway. When I was too young to know that card games were anything other than what I played with grandma and grandpa, she told me, "I used to think that playing cards was for degenerates, but then I found out that I liked it." I get it now. Another time (she loved to tell this story), when I was little, my mother was off her feet for some reason so my grandma had to pick me up from school. She took me to the ice skating rink for my skating lesson, but I didn't know where I was supposed to go because my mom and always gotten me where I needed to be, and my grandmother didn't know because she'd never been to the place before. It was an unhappy afternoon, and I must have hated it, because the next day when I saw my grandma come by to pick me up from school, I lay down on the floor and started kicking, yelling, "I'm not going! I'm not going ice skating!" Another person might have tried to scold me into compliance, or to wait out the tantrum, or to soothe me with gentle words. My grandma knew me better than that: I had simply made an error of fact, which she immediately corrected. "Ben," she told me, "we're not going ice skating." "Oh," I replied, and got up and followed her out.

My grandfather was very different. He had a big personality, and he would be off singing and playing with me and the other children, while my grandmother sat with the other adults in conversation, because she found it more interesting. I feel like I spent the first 20 years of my life getting to know my grandfather, and wish I could have spent the next 20 getting to know my grandmother, but she would have been the first to point out the practical flaw in this plan: when I was 20, she was 83.

My grandmother was always forthcoming with advice, whether it was wanted or not. "You shouldn't eat that." "I don't like your hair that way, you should cut it shorter." "You should talk to so-and-so about a job." She loved her family and wanted us to put our best feet forward, look good, and do well, and nothing made her happier than to learn of and talk about our successes.

Her honesty made her easy to buy gifts for. A love for fine food - and in particular for excellent chocolates - is one thing we shared. One year, I found some wonderful chocolates to send her, and when she called me about them she was over the moon. The next year, those chocolates had been discontinued, so I found another brand recommended by the same source. When she called she said, "I wanted to thank you for the chocolates, but I thought you'd want to know, last year's were better."

She knew what she liked, and what she didn't, and she lived only as long as she was able to enjoy the things she liked. A few weeks before her death, she played bridge with friends. She was so physically exhausted by it that she declared it her last - but she came out ahead and took home money.

My grandmother died on the morning of Thursday, December 12th, 2013. She was 90 years old. I will miss her honesty, her elegance, and her love.

Continue reading →

Give Smart, Help More

6 Replies

This post is about helping people more effectively. I'm not going to try to pitch you on giving more. I'm going to try to convince you to give smarter.

There's a summary at the bottom if you don't feel like reading the whole thing.

Do you want to help people? At least a little bit?

Imagine that there is a switch in front of you, in the middle position. It can only be flipped once. Flip it up, and one person somewhere on the other side of the world is cured of a deadly disease. Flip it down, and ten people are cured. You don't know any of these people personally, they are randomly selected. You will never see their faces or hear their stories. And this isn't a trick questiogn - they're not all secretly Pol Pot or something.

What do you do? Do you flip it up, flip it down, or leave it as it is? Make sure you think of the answer before you look ahead.

...

...

...

...

...

...

...

...

...

...

I'm going to assume you flipped the switch down. If you didn't, this post is not for you.

If you did, then why did you do that? Not because down is easier or more pleasant. Because it helps more people, and costs you nothing more. So if you made that choice and did it for that reason, you want to help people. Even people you don't know and will never meet. This might not be a preference that is particularly salient or relevant in your life right now, but when you chose between a world where more people are helped and a world where fewer people are helped, you chose the one where more people are helped. To summarize:

We agree that it is good to help people, and better to help more people, even if they're strangers or foreigners.

You probably already donate to charity. Why?

Most Americans give at least some money to charity. In 2010, in a Pew Research Center study, 95% of Americans said that they gave to a charitable organization specifically to help with the earthquake in Haiti. So when you add people who give, but didn't give for that, you end up with nearly everyone. And if you look at tax returns, the IRS reports that in 2011, out of 46 million people who itemized deductions, 38 million listed charitable contributions. That's 82%. So either way, most people give. Which means you probably do. (I'm assuming that most of my readers are in countries sufficiently similar to America for the conclusion to transfer.)

Why do you give to charity? That's actually a complicated question. People give for lots of reasons. You might be motivated by the simple fact that people will be helped, yes. But there are lots of other valid reasons to give to charity. You could want to support a cause that someone you care about is involved in, like sponsoring someone's charitable walk. You could want to express your solidarity with and membership in an institution like a church or community center. You could just value the warm fuzzy feeling that comes along with the stories you hear about what the charity does.

So here are some reasons why we give:

  • Warm fuzzies.
  • Group affiliation
  • Supporting friends
  • The simple preference for people to be helped.

All of these things are okay reasons to give, and I'm going to repeat that later for emphasis. I'm going to say some things that sound like I'm hating on warm fuzzies, but I'm really not.  To be clear: Warm fuzzies are nice! They feel good! You should do things that feel good! They just shouldn't be confused with other things that are good for different reasons.

The Power of Smarter Giving

I'm going to make up some numbers here.

Imagine three people: Kelsey, Meade, and Shun. They have the same job, that they all enjoy, and make $50,000 per year. They each give $1,000 per year to charity, 2% of their income. But they want to help people more.

Let's say that they give to a charity that tries to save lives by providing health care to people who can't access it. Each of their $1,000 donations purchases interventions that collectively add one year to one person's life, on average. That's actually a pretty good deal already - I'd certainly buy a year of extra life for myself, for that kind of money. I'm going to call that "helping one person," though we understand that it's just an average.

But now they each want to help more people. Kelsey decides to just give more, by cutting back on other expenses. Less savings, more meals at home, shorter vacations. Kelsey's able to scrape together an extra $1,000, so Kelsey's now giving $2,000, adding a year to two people's lives on average. On the other hand, Kelsey has fewer of other enjoyable things.

Meade decides instead of cutting back on expenses, to put in extra hours to get promoted to a job that's more stressful but pays better. After six months of this, let's say Meade is successful, and gets a 10% pay bump. Then Meade gives all that extra money to charity. That's $6,000 now that Meade is giving, adding on average a year of life each to 6 people.

Now how about Shun? Shun is lazy, like me. Shun decides that they don't want to work hard to help people. But Shun is willing to do 3 hours of research online, to find the best way to save lives. Shun finds a charity where outside researchers agree that a $1,000 donation on average adds a year of life to each of 10 people. Maybe because they focus on the cheapest treatments, like vaccines. Maybe because they operate in poor countries where expenses are lower, and there's more low-hanging health care fruit. Either way, Shun spend 3 hours doing research and now Shun's $1,000 per year adds a year of life to each of 10 people.

To summarize: Kelsey is scraping by to give $2,000 to give 2 people an extra year of life. Meade put in six months' extra hours at work - and has a more stressful job - and their $6,000 gives 6 people an extra year of life. Shun spent just 3 hours doing research on the internet, stills has the job Shun loves and gets to live the way Shun likes, and their $1,000 now gives 10 people an extra year of life each.

Kelsey - 2

Meade - 6

Shun - 10

Who would you rather be?

I don't want to deprecate any of these strategies. Sometimes your situation is different. Kelsey's a great person for trying to help people. There are a lot of reasons that Meade's strategy could be better than it sounds. But Shun went for the low-hanging fruit - and was able to help the most people, but suffered the least for it.

If my numbers are realistic, then researching different charities' effectiveness is an incredibly cheap way to help more people.

Why is this the case? Because in the numbers I made up, there was an order of magnitude effectiveness difference between two charities. One charity helped ten times as many people per dollar as another did.

This is sometimes true in the real world. Some charitable activities work better than others.

GiveWell, an organization that evaluates how effectively charities produce positive outcomes, thinks that there is a difference in effectiveness between two of their top-rated charities by a factor of between 2 and 3.

To repeat: one of GiveWell's top-rated charities is 2-3 times as effective as another. GiveWell only has three top-rated charities.

Then think about how different these numbers must be, on average, from the non-top-rated charities - or unrateable ones that don't try to measure outcomes at all. So a factor of 10 isn't unrealistic - but even if it's a factor of 2, that's a better return on time invested than Meade got - they might have worked more than three extra hours every week!

How do I do the research?

Was Shun's three hours of research a realistic estimate? It wouldn't be if nobody were already out there helping you - but fortunately there are now several organizations designed to help you figure out where your money does the most good.

The most famous one is probably still Charity Navigator. Charity Navigator basically reports on charities' finances, which is helpful in figuring out whether your money is going toward the programs you think it is, or whether it is going toward executives' paychecks and fancy gala fundraisers. Charity Navigator is a good first step, if all you want to do is weed out charities that are literally scams.

But we should be more ambitious. Remember, we don't just want to be not cheated. We're happiest if people actually get helped. And to know that, we don't just need to know how much program your money buys - we need to know if that program works.

GiveWell, AidGrade, Giving What We Can, and The Life You Can Save are all organizations that try to evaluate charities not just by how much work they do, but whether they can show that their work improves outcomes in some measurable way. All three seem to have mutual respect for one another, and I know there have been some friendly debates between GWWC and GiveWell on methodology.

If you want to search for more stuff on this, a good internet search term is "Effective Altruism".

If you really, really don't feel like spending a few hours doing research, you'll do fine giving to one of GiveWell's top 3.

Existential Risk: A Special Case

I want to put in a special plug here for a category of charity that gets neglected, where I think you can get a lot of bang for your buck in terms of results, and that's charities that try to mitigate existential risk.

An existential risk is something that might be unlikely - or hard to estimate - but if it happens, it would wipe out humanity. Even a small reduction in the chance of an extinction event could help a lot of people - because you'd be saving not only people at the time, but future generations. Giving What We Can has recently acknowledged this as a promising area for high-impact giving, and GiveWell's shown some interest as well.

Examples of existential risk are:

  • Nuclear Weapons
  • Biotechnology
  • Nanotechnology
  • Asteroids
  • Artificial Intelligence

Organizations that focus on existential risk include:

  • The Future of Humanity Institute (FHI) takes an academic approach, mostly focused on raising awareness and assessing risks.
  • The Lifeboat Foundation - I actually used to give to them, but I'm not sure quite what they really do, so I put that on hold - I may pick it up later if I learn something encouraging.
  • The Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) is working on the specific problem of avoiding an unfriendly intelligence explosion - by building friendly artificial intelligence. They believe this will also help solve many other existential risks.

In particular, MIRI is holding a fundraiser where new large donors (someone who has not yet given a total of $5,000 to MIRI) who make a donation of $5,000 or more, are matched 3:1 on the whole donation. Please consider it if you think MIRI's work is important. [UPDATE: This was a success and is now over.]

But Didn't You Say Meade Had a Good Strategy Too?

Yes. If you are super serious about helping people a lot, you might want to consider making career choices partly on that basis. I don't have a lot to say about this personally, but 80,000 hours specializes in helping people with this kind of thing.

One thing I can add is that it's easy to get intimidated by the difficulty of the optimal career choice for helping and thereby avoid making a knowably better choice. Don't do that. Better is better. Don't worry about making the perfect choice - you can always change your mind later when you think things through more.

Leveraged Giving and Meta-Charity

When we talk about leverage in giving, people usually take it literally and think about matched donations. Matched donations are fine, they double effectiveness and that's great, but a factor of 5-10 from research will be more important than a factor of 2 from matched giving.

But there's another kind of leverage - giving in ways that increases the effectiveness or quality of others' giving. For example, you could give to GWWC, AidGrade, or GiveWell, and this would mean that everyone else who gives based on their recommendations makes a sligjtly more effective choice - or that they're able to convince more people to give at all. You could probably do a quick back-of-the-envelope Fermi estimate to figure out what the impact is - whether there's a multiplier effect or not. Giving What We Can actually gives some numbers themselves - and I know that if GiveWell thinks they can't use the money, they'll just pass it along to their top-rated charities.

There's also a special case of leverage, and that's the Center For Applied Rationality, or CFAR. CFAR is trying to help people think better and more clearly, and act more effectively to accomplish their goals. A large part of their motivation for this, is to create a large community of people interested in effective altruism, with the skills to recognize the high-impact causes, and the personal effectiveness to actually do something to help. If your lifetime donations just create one highly motivated person, then you've "broken even" - in other words you've helped at least as many people as you would have, giving directly. But right now it's a much more leveraged opportunity, because CFAR plans to eventually become self-sustaining, but for their next few years they'll still probably depend on donations to supplement any fees they can charge for their training.

This year I'm part of the group matching donations for CFAR's end-of-year fundraiser. If you want to spend some of my money to try to build a community of true guardians of humanity, please do! [UPDATE: This fundraiser also concluded, successfully.]

So I should give all my charity budget to the one most effective charity?

Probably not.

Now, that's not because of "diversification". The National Center for Charitable Statistics (NCCS) estimates that there are about half a million charities in the US alone. That's plenty of diversity - I don't think anything's at risk of being neglected just because you give your whole charity budget to the best one.

The reason why you don't want to give everything to the charity you think helps the most, is those four reasons people give:

  • Warm fuzzies.
  • Group affiliation
  • Supporting friends
  • The simple preference for people to be helped.

And there are probably lots of others, but for now I'll just group them all together as "warm fuzzies" for the sake of brevity.

If you force yourself to pretend that you only care about helping, you'll feel bad about missing out on your warm fuzzies, and eventually you'll find an excuse to abandon the strategy.

I want to be clear that all of these are okay reasons to give! Some people, when they hear this argument, assume that it means, "Some of my donations are motivated by my selfish desire for warm fuzzies. This is wrong! I should just give to charity to help people. I shouldn't spend any charity money on feeling good about myself."

You are a human being and you deserve to be happy. Also you probably won't stick with a strategy that reliably makes you feel bad. So unfortunately, the exact optimal helping-strategy is unlikely to work for you (though if it does, that's fine too).

Fortunately, we can get most of the way to a maximum-help strategy without giving up on your other motivations, because of:

One Weird Trick to Get Warm Fuzzies on the Cheap

The human brain has a defect called scope insensitivity (but don't click through until you read this section, there's a spoiler). It basically means that the part of us that has feelings doesn't understand about very large or very small quantities. So while you intellectually might have a preference for helping more people over fewer, you'll get the same feel-good hit from helping one person and hearing their touching story, as you would from helping a group of ten.

In a classic experiment, researchers told people, assigned randomly into three groups, about an ecological problem that was going to kill some birds, but could be fixed. They asked participants how much they would personally be willing to pay to fix the problem. The only thing they changed from group to group, was how many birds would be affected.

One group was told 2,000 birds were affected, and they were willing to pay on average $80 each. The other two groups were told 20,000 and 200,000 birds were affected, respectively. How much do you think they were willing to pay? Try to actually guess before you look at the answer.

...

...

...

...

...

...

...

...

...

...

Here's how much the average person in each group was willing to pay:

2,000 birds: $80

20,000 birds: $78

200,000 birds: $88

So, basically the same, with some random variation.

Why do we care about this? Because it suggests that you should be able to get your warm fuzzies with a very small donation. Your emotions don't care how much you helped - they care whether you helped at all.

So you should consider setting aside a small portion of your charity budget for the year, and spreading it equally between everything it seems like a good idea to give to. It probably wouldn't cost you much to literally not say no to anything - just give every cause you like a dollar! You might even get more good vibes this way, then before, when you were trying to accomplish helping and warm fuzzies with the exact same donations.

Then give the rest to charity you think is most effective.

Summary:

You probably already want to help people you don't know, and give to charity. Researching charities' effectiveness in producing outcomes is a cheap way of making your donation help more people.

These organizations can help with your research:

Because of scope insensitivity, you should try to get your warm fuzzies and your effective helping done separately: designate a small portion of your charity budget for warm fuzzies, and give a tiny bit to every cause you'll fee l good about.

You may also be interested in some higher leverage options. CFAR is trying to create more people who care about effective altruism are effective enough to make a difference, and they have a matched donations fundraiser going on right now, which I'm one of the matchers for. [UPDATE: This fundraiser was successful, and is now over.]

Existential Risk is another field where beneficial effects are underestimated and you should consider giving, especially to FHI or MIRI.

MIRI in particular has a matched donations fundraiser going on now, where new large donors (>$5,000) will be matched at a 3:1 rate. [UPDATE: This fundraiser was successful, and is now over.]

Cross-posted at the Effective Altruism Society of DC blog.

Two Tones, One Mouth

Leave a reply

One known technology for producing a musical tone with the human body is to use the vocal chords and hum or sing.

Another is to use the lips and whistle.

Since these methods are partially independent, it seemed to me as if I ought to be able to produce two-part harmony on my own.

Step one was to be able to whistle and sing, separately, which I've been able to do since I was little. (If anyone wants help learning how to whistle, feel free to ask; I can at least try to help you).

Step two was to learn how to, while making one tone with my voice, whistle. That wasn't much harder. I just sang a note, and while I was doing that, moved my lips into whistling position. It didn't take long to produce two distinct sounds at the same time - although there is some interference.

Step three was to figure out how to change the pitch of the whistle while sustaining the vocal tone. This was also pretty easy - if you can change the pitch of your whistle, you can change the pitch of your whistle while singing at a single pitch. It feels pretty much the same.

Step four was to be able to alter the vocal pitch while keeping the whistle constant. This is actually hard, because the whistle tone and the vocal tone seem to interact somehow. So I'd have to change my lip position just to keep the whistle at the same pitch as I altered my vocal pitch. Eventually I got it, after a day or two of annoying everyone around me.

Step five was to be able to alter them simultaneously, so as to sistle in two part harmony. This was really, really hard. I think what makes this the hardest step is that it's not about learning the physical positions - it's about the cognitive ability to track the two melodies simultaneously.

The way you sing or whistle of course is not by consciously consulting a giant lookup table between pitches and physical behaviors. Instead, you learn to associate a tone with a bodily behavior, so that when you think of the tone, your body prepares to produce that tone automatically. I think the same tone-memory in my mind is linked to both a whistling and singing behavior. So when I tried to keep track of two pitches, I didn't have the cognitive skill of remembering which tone went with which part of my behavior. Instead I got leakage - I'd try to move my vocal pitch and move my whistling pitch instead, or vice versa. (This is also part of what made step four a little hard.)

On top of that there are range problems - it's harder to whistle below than above your vocal pitch, and you're stuck with your maximum comfortable vocal and whistling ranges - minus a little bit since you have less room to for example help your whistle by changing your mouth shape.

However, after having a bunch of fun with that, eventually I got to the point where I could do some mediocre two-part harmony. Here are some examples I recorded today - they sound pretty terrible, but the point is that I can do it at all:

Happy Birthday

By the Waters of Babylon

Dona Nobis Pacem

Rex Coeli

I'm Sorry but I Kant Let You Do That

4 Replies

A friend linked this article in the New York Times. This passage is an idea that I had seen mentioned, but never actually explained, and it drove me bonkers - the idea that certain kinds of traditional Western ideas of rationality and freedom were sexist. This is a really clear explanation and the idea makes a lot more sense to me now:

[Most feminist philosophers] argue that, among other things, [Immanuel Kant] is committed to a conception of personhood that unfairly and inaccurately privileges our rationality and autonomy over the social, interdependent, embodied, and emotional aspects of our lives.  This misrepresentation of human nature encourages us to think about people as fundamentally independent, and this, they argue, leads to the exploitation of those people (usually women) who are responsible for caring for those people who are not independent (children, the elderly, the disabled and infirm — all of us at some point in our lives, really).

The article is about an incident David Foster Wallace described in his essay. “Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All”:

David Foster Wallace describes a visit to the Illinois State Fair. The friend who accompanies him, whom he calls Native Companion because she’s a local, gets on one of the fair’s rides. While she’s hanging upside down, the men operating the ride stop it so that her dress falls over her head and they can ogle her. After she gets off the ride, Wallace and Native Companion have a heated discussion about the incident. He thinks she’s been sexually harassed and thinks something should be done about it.

Wallace's companion replies that she doesn't think it's a big deal, she can either ignore it and feel okay, or get angry and let it ruin her day. The article points out that there are sound Kantian reasons to believe that the woman had a duty to object.

I didn't much care for the rest of the article's analysis, though, as it seems to describe every plausible response as justified on Kantian principles, including doing nothing at all:

The obligation to resist oppression is this sort of duty: there are lots of things one can to do fulfill it. Native Companion could confront the carnies directly. She could lodge a formal complaint with the fair’s management. We might even think that she actually is resisting her oppression—that by refusing to feel humiliated, refusing to let the carnies dictate when and how she can have fun, and refusing to believe that their sexually objectifying her demeans her moral status in any way—she’s actually resisting her oppression internally.

How does that provide any moral guidance at all?

My guess is that women have a Kantian duty to other women (& themselves as women), all else being equal, to discourage actions that oppress women considered as a class, whether or not the action displeases the particular woman involved. (Just a guess and I am not sure that Kantian morality is correct either; if not, then whether you have a Kantian duty to do something doesn't determine whether you ought to so it.)

There's something in Wallace's story that mucks this up a bit, though - it's not clear whether Native Companion really was totally fine with what happened or whether that's just the story she told herself. Let's turn up the contrast a bit: suppose I were walking down the street, and felt a sudden craving for chocolate. As I pass a chocolate store, an employee runs out and shoves a free sample into my mouth. What is my duty?

Even though I was not harmed (and was even benefited) by this action, as a pedestrian it is my duty to express indignation, because the salesperson could not have reasonably expected that their behavior would be welcome. To thank them would be harming pedestrians with food allergies or other strict dietary preferences, or who simply don't enjoy chocolate, and even my future pedestrian self if the next surprise sample is not to my taste. So while I have been helped as a chocolate craver, I have been harmed as a pedestrian more deeply, and must scold the salesperson.

Handshakes. What's New?

3 Replies

Handshakes

I had some recent conversational failures online, that went roughly like this:

"Hey."
"Hey."
"How are you?"
The end.

At first I got upset at the implicit rudeness of my conversation partner walking away and ignoring the question. But then I decided to get curious instead and posted the exchange on Facebook with a request for feedback. Unsurprisingly I learned more this way.

Some kind friends helped me troubleshoot this, and in the process of figuring out how online conversation differs from in-person conversation, I realized what these things do in live conversation. They act as a kind of implicit communication protocol by which two parties negotiate how much interaction they're willing to have.

Consider this live conversation:

"Hi."
"Hi."
The end.

No mystery here. Two people acknowledged one another's physical presence, and then the interaction ended. This is bare-bones maintenance of your status as persons who can relate to one another socially. There is no intimacy, but at least there is acknowledgement of someone else's existence. A day with "Hi" alone is less lonely than a day without it.

"Hi."
"Hi, how's it going?"
"Can't complain. And you?"
"Life."

This exchange establishes the parties as mutually sympathetic - the kind of people who would ask about each other's emotional state - but still doesn't get to real intimacy. It is basically just a drawn-out version of the example with just "Hi". The exact character of the third and fourth line don't matter much, as there is no real content. For this reason, it isn't particularly rude to leave the question totally unanswered if you're already rounding a corner - but if you're in each other's company for a longer period of time, you're supposed to give at least a pro forma answer.

This kind of thing drives crazy the kind of people who actually want to know how someone is, because people often assume that the question is meant insincerely. I'm one of the people driven crazy. But this kind of mutual "bidding up" is important because sometimes people don't want to have a conversation, and if you just launch into your complaint or story or whatever it is you may end up inadvertently cornering someone who doesn't feel like listening to it.

You could ask them explicitly, but people sometimes feel uncomfortable turning down that kind of request. So the way to open a substantive topic of conversation is to leave a hint and let the other person decide whether to pick it up. So here are some examples of leaving a hint:

"Hi."
"Hi."
"Anything interesting this weekend?"
"Oh, did a few errands, caught up on some reading. See you later."

This is a way to indicate interest in more than just a "Fine, how are you?" response. What happened here is that one party asked about the weekend, hoping to elicit specific information to generate a conversation. The other politely technically answered the question without any real information, declining the opportunity to talk about their life.

"Hi."
"Hi."
"Anything interesting happen over the weekend?"
"Oh, did a few errands, caught up on some reading."
"Ugh, I was going to go to a game, but my basement flooded and I had to take care of that instead."
"That's tough."
"Yeah."
"See you around."

Here, the person who first asked about the weekend didn't get an engaged response, but got enough of a pro forma response to provide cover for an otherwise out of context complaint and bid for sympathy. The other person offered perfunctory sympathy, and ended the conversation.

Here's a way for the recipient of a "How are you?" to make a bid for more conversation:

"Hi."
"Hi."
"How are you?"
"Oh, my basement flooded over the weekend."
"That's tough."
"Yeah."
"See you around."

So the person with the flooded basement provided a socially-appropriate snippet of information - enough to be a recognizable bid for sympathy, but little enough not to force the other person to choose between listening to a long complaint or rudely cutting off the conversation.

Here's what it looks like if the other person accepts the bid:

"Hi."
"Hi."
"How are you?"
"Oh, my basement flooded over the weekend."
"Wow, that's tough. Is the upstairs okay?"
"Yeah, but it's a finished basement so I'm going to have to get a bunch of it redone because of water damage."
"Ooh, that's tough. Hey, if you need a contractor, I had a good experience with mine when I had my kitchen done."
"Thanks, that would be a big help, can you email me their contact info?"

By asking a specific follow-up question the other person indicated that they wanted to hear more about the problem - which gave the person with the flooded basement permission not just to answer the question directly, but to volunteer additional information / complaints.

You can do the same thing with happy events, of course:

"Hi."
"Hi."
"How are you?"
"I'm getting excited for my big California vacation."
"Oh really, where are you going?"
"We're flying out to Los Angeles, and then we're going to spend a few days there but then drive up to San Francisco, spend a day or two in town, then go hiking in the area."
"Cool. I used to live in LA, let me know if you need any recommendations."
"Thanks, I'll come by after lunch?"

So what went wrong online? Here's the conversation again so you don't have to scroll back up:

"Hey."
"Hey."
"How are you?"
The end.

Online, there are no external circumstances that demand a "Hi," such as passing someone (especially someone you know) in the hallway or getting into an elevator.

If you import in-person conversational norms, the "Hi" is redundant - but instead online it can function as a query as to whether the other person is actually "present" and available for conversation. (You don't want to start launching into a conversation just because someone's status reads "available" only to find out they're in the  middle of something else and don't  have time to read what you wrote.)

Let's say you've mutually said "Hi." If you were conversing in person, the next thing to do would be to query for a basic status update, asking something like, "How are you?". But "Hi" already did the work of "How are you?". Somehow the norm of "How are you?" being a mostly insincere query doesn't get erased, even though "Hi" does its work - so some people think you're being bizarrely redundant. Others might actually tell you how they are.

To be safe, it's best to open with a short question apropos to what you want to talk about - or, since it's costless online and serves the same function as "Hi", just start with "How are you?" as your opener.

What's New?

I recently had occasion to explain to someone how to respond when someone asks "what's new?", and in the process, ended up explaining some stuff I hadn't realized until the moment I tried to explain it. So I figured this might be a high-value thing to explain to others here on the blog.

Of course, sometimes "what's new?" is just part of a passing handshake with no content - I covered that in the first section. But if you're already in a context where you know you're going to be having a conversation, you're supposed to answer the question, otherwise you get conversations like this:

"Hi."
"Hi."
"What's new?"
"Not much. How about you?"
"Can't complain."
Awkward silence.

So I'm talking about  cases where you actually have to answer the question.

The problem is that some people, when asked "What's New?", will try to think about when they last met the person asking, and all the events in their life since then, sorted from most to least momentous. This is understandably an overwhelming task.

The trick to responding correctly is to think of your conversational partner's likely motives for asking. They are very unlikely to want a complete list. Nor do they necessarily want to know the thing in your life that happened that's objectively most notable. Think about it - when's the last time you wanted to know those things?

Instead, what's most likely the case is that they want to have a conversation about a topic you are comfortable with, are interested in, and have something to say about. "What's New?" is an offer they are making, to let you pick the life event you most feel like discussing at that time. So for example, if the dog is sick but you'd rather talk about a new book you're reading, you get to talk about the book and you can completely fail to mention the dog. You're not lying, you're answering the question as intended.

Sacrificial Rituals

1 Reply

One way of understanding what things cost is to imagine them as sacrificial rituals.

Blood doping is a sacrificial ritual whereby a drop of blood is permanently sacrificed for a future drop of blood.

Meetings are a sacrificial ritual whereby multiple victims are simultaneously suspended in purgatory for a length of time, to summon a demon with the sum of their knowledge, but intelligence equal only to that of the average member, divided by the number of victims.

Employment is an sacrificial ritual whereby the subject is imperfectly enthralled for the bulk of their day by a demon, and in exchange receives a substance that may itself be sacrificed to enthrall lesser demons through economancy, with powers proportional to the amount of substance used. Many wizards use an even powerful spell called Full-Time Employment, in which they commit to a long period of enthrallment in exchange for a more than proportionally larger amount of the enthralling substance.

Many other economantic spells have a similar structure to this.

Can God Make a Rock So Big He Can't Pick it Up? Or, Why Does My Calculus Textbook Start With This Chapter About Unions and Intersections?

Leave a reply

Can God create a rock so big that He can't pick it up? To understand the problem, we need to understand set theory. But I don't really want to talk about Russell's paradox quite yet - a big problem with set theory as it's taught is that it doesn't respond to a felt need, it's just plopped down at the beginning of a calculus or logic textbook without explanation. Here's a bunch of self-evident stuff! Go calculate what the union of the intersections is!

I'm not going to tell you how to do set theory here. You can look that up if you want. I'm just going to try to explain a little bit about why it matters, why you should be interested in it, and how to apply some set-theory-ish rules of thumb to your own thoughts.

Think about the difference between these two arguments:

 

The king of Freedonia is Phillip III.

The husband of Mary Teller is Phillip III.

Therefore, the king of Freedonia is the husband of Mary Teller.

 

Milk is white.

Snow is white.

Therefore, milk is snow.

 

The second argument looks just like the first one - but the first one works and the second one doesn't. Why?

Well, I've deliberately made it tricky by using the verb "is" in each case. "Is" is one of those tricky verbs whose meaning is very context dependent. Here's a more precise formulation of the arguments:

 

The king of Freedonia is the same as Phillip III.

The husband of Mary Teller is the same as Phillip III.

Therefore, the king of Freedonia is the same as the husband of Mary Teller.

 

Milk is one of the things that are always white.

Snow is one of the things that are always white.

Therefore, milk ??? snow.

 

it's not even clear which spurious consequence is supposed to follow from the second argument anymore. Is this a specious proof that milk and snow are identical, or that all milk is snow, or that all snow is milk, or just that some things are both milk and snow?

Here's another paired example:

 

A shark is an aquatic animal.

An aquatic animal is a living thing.

Therefore, a shark is a living thing.

 

A knife is an item in my silverware drawer.

An item in my silverware drawer is a spoon.

Therefore, a knife is a spoon.

 

 And with more specific wording:

 

Every shark is an aquatic animal.

Every aquatic animal is a living thing.

Therefore, every shark is a living thing.

 

At least one knife is an item in my silverware drawer.

At least one item in my silverware drawer is a spoon.

Therefore, ???

 

Or better yet:

 

There exists at least one item that is both a knife and in my silverware drawer.

There exists at least one item that is both in my silverware drawer and a spoon.

Therefore, ???

 

Set theory is a way to force yourself to use statements more explicit than "X is Y", to prevent you from accidentally equivocating and "proving" that knives are spoons. Since math is all about proving possibly counterintuitive things, this is kind of important in math. But it's also important whenever you're making explicit compounded arguments of the (A, B, THEREFORE C) style.

In set theory you never say "X is Y." You instead are always talking about whether something is a member of a set. For now, think of a set as nothing more specific than a collection of things. There's a problem with this, but I'll get to it later.

You can say that something is a member of a set, or that if something is a member of one set, then it must be a member of another, or that there is at least one thing that is both a member of set A and a member of set B, etc. You can also negate these things - you can say that there are no things that are both members of set A and set B. Think about these sentences, and how to make them more precise:

  • A mouse is in this cage.
  • A mouse is an animal.
  • This mouse is Pinky.
  • Pinky is in this cage.
  • Dallas's football team is heavier than the people in China.
  • A dragon is not real.
  • WEF wrestling is fake.

Here are some formulations that are a little more set theory-ish:

  • There exists at least one thing that is both a member of the set (is a mouse) and a member of the set (things in this cage)
  • Every member of the set (is a mouse) is a member of the set (is an animal).
  • Every member of the set (this mouse) is a member of the set (Pinky). Also, every member of the set (Pinky) is a member of the set (this mouse).

(A pithier way to say that one is: Something is a member of the set (this mouse) if and only if it is a member of the set (Pinky). This is an "identity" relation.)

  • Every member of the set (Pinky) is a member of the set (in this cage).
  • The average of the weights of all the members of the set (members of Dallas's football team) is higher than the average of the weights of all the members of the set (the people in China).

(This one is tricky - the original statement is ambiguous, because it's worded as a statement about the set, but what exactly are we saying is heavier than what? Are we saying that each Dallas Cowboy is heavier than each person in China? Or that the Dallas Cowboys, weighed all together, are heavier than the people in China, weighed all together? Or that the average weight of a member of the first set is greater than that of a member of the second? It's important to be specific about things like this when talking about group characteristics.)

  • There are no members of the set (dragons) that are members of the set (real things).
  • Every member of the set (WEF wrestling matches) is a member of the set (fake things).

Do you get the pattern? You never simply talk about how something "is" or "is not" something else, only about whether a member of set A is never, sometimes, or always a member of set B, and whether an assertion is true or false.

This can be helpful in avoiding getting into stupid arguments. If someone says, "a mouse is an animal," do they mean that there is at least one mouse that is an animal, or that every mouse is an animal, or that something is a mouse if and only if it's an animal?

If they mean that there's at least one mouse that's an animal, then finding a mouse that's not an animal (like a computer mouse, or a robotic mouse) is not evidence against their point - all they have to do to prove it's true is find at least one mouse that is an animal. But if you phrase it explicitly like that, it's harder for them to equivocate and "prove" that a computer mouse is an animal.

Or maybe more realistically, if I "prove" that wiggins are thieves by showing you one wiggin who steals something (which only proves that there is at least one wiggin who is a thief), I might then pretend that you should draw the inference that some other wiggin is also a thief (which would only be valid if I had proved that every member of set "is a wiggin" is a member of set "is a thief").

If they mean that every mouse is an animal, then finding an example of a mouse that is not an animal is a counterexample, but finding an example of an animal that is not a mouse, like a dog, is a not counterexample. If they've shown to your satisfaction that all members of set "mouse" are members of set "animal", then you can go on and assume that's true for each new mouse you encounter - but it doesn't imply that all members of set "animal" are members of set "mouse".

Finally, if they show "if and only if," then you would have been able to prove them wrong just by showing them a dog. But if they convince you of this, then - and only then - you should accept the inference both ways.

It's easy to lose track of this when you say things like "mice are animals" or "wiggins are thieves", so it can be helpful to use set-theoretic language (which is almost as compact), like "MICE is a subset of ANIMALS."

OK, so what does this have to do with God's rocks? Well, sets are important, right? And we want to be correct when talking about important things - and sets help us be correct. So we want to describe sets using other sets. And talk about sets of sets!

Like you might want to talk about the properties of "sets that have no members." Or "sets that have a finite number of members." This is fine. But there are limits.

Let's walk through one of them - the rock paradox. It's usually stated as:

God is omnipotent. That means God can do any thing.

Making a rock so big that God can't pick it up is a thing.

Therefore, God can make a rock so big that God can't pick it up.

But picking up an arbitrary object that exists is also a thing.

Therefore God can pick up an arbitrary object that exists.

Now, let that arbitrary object be "a rock so big that God can't pick it up."

Then, God can pick up a rock so big that God can't pick it up.

Now, if the existence of such a rock were impossible, then this wouldn't be a problem. But we just said that God can make one.

But it's not really a rock so big that God can't pick it up, if God can pick it up.

Thus, the omnipotence of God implies a contradiction.

Therefore, there can be no omnipotent God.

The problem here seems to be using omnipotence in the definition of one of the powers. If you don't allow that, then there's no way to get the contradiction.

This brings up another set-theoretic principle: the "things" a set can be a collection of have to be well-defined, before we define any of the sets. So if we're talking about puppies, and we already know what puppies are, without using sets of puppies in the definition, then we can talk about sets of puppies. But we can't just define a collection of "puppies and sets of puppies," before we know what the sets of puppies are. And the sets of puppies can't themselves be defined until the puppies are defined.

So does the rock paradox follow this rule? No.

"God is omnipotent" can be rephrased as:

For every ability X, let there be a set (entities that have ability X).

Every omnipotent being is a member of every such set.

God is an omnipotent being.

Therefore, for every ability X, God is a member of the set (entities that have ability X.)

Now, this works for abilities like "walk on water" or "use set-theoretic notation" or "make ten commands". Because those things are well-defined even if we don't know about God.

How about "make a rock so big that God can't pick it up." Is this well-defined before we start talking about sets of abilities? No, because the ability is defined by a reference to what God can do, and what God can do is defined by a particular set of abilities. So a collection of abilities that includes "make a rock so big that God can't pick it up" is simply not a well-defined collection that we can take sets of.

In fact, "make a rock so big that [someone] is not a member of set (entities that have the ability to pick up a rock of that size)" is never a first-order ability.

A set-theoretically valid definition of omnipotence would be something more like this:

Define some collection of "abilities," none of which reference other powers or omnipotence directly.

Define omnipotence as the set of all these abilities.

Now, maybe "make an arbitrarily large rock" is one of the powers. And maybe "pick up an arbitrarily large rock" is a power. But none of the powers refer to each other, or to sets of powers, no matter how indirectly. So "make a rock so big that God can't pick it up" isn't an ability.

We can then think of sets of abilities, like the set of rock-making and rock-picking-up. Omnipotence is the ability-set that is contains all abilities.

Now we need to use a concept called a "subset." A X is a subset of Y if every member of set X is also a member of set Y. For example, "Puppies" is a subset of "Animals," and "Animals" is also a subset of "Animals, but "Animals is not a subset of "Puppies."

So every ability-set is a subset of omnipotence.

Of course, that doesn't mean that no one can make a rock so big that someone else can't pick it up. Or even a rock so big that they themselves can't pick it up. But that's a statement about combinations of abilities and inabilities.

So what if you wanted to describe all the collections of abilities that don't include certain abilities? Well, that's a second-order set. Call it a schmet. So you might have a schmet of ability-sets that include walking on water, but not swimming. Or making a 32kg rock, but not picking it up.

Now let's get back to that paradox. Can God make a rock so big that He can't pick it up? How does that cash out when thinking about sets of abilities?

If someone can make a rock so big they can't pick it up, that means that their ability-set is a member of a certain schmet. In particular, it's the schmet that includes ability-sets where for some size X, they include the ability "can make a rock of size X", and also do not include any ability "can pick up a rock of up to size Y", for any Y>=X.

So the question is, is God's ability set (omnipotence) a member of that schmet? The answer is no: omnipotence is not a member of the schmet "can make a rock so big you can't pick it up."

There's no paradox, because a schmet is not an ability. Remember, we had to define all the abilities before defining any of the ability-sets, and we had to define the ability-sets before defining the schmets. So there can't be an ability that refers to a schmet! And omnipotence is an ability-set, so its definition can't refer to schmets either - it's just the ability set that includes all abilities.

If you look up Russell's paradox explained, you will find a similar exposition, except it's less fun because it isn't about God and rocks.

Rationality Cocktails

Leave a reply

Sphex on the Beach

1) Assemble bottles of vodka, peach schnapps, creme de cassis, orange juice, and cranberry juice, and an orange slice and a maraschino cherry.

2) Rinse glass.

3) Put ingredients aside to make another cocktail.

4) Go to step 1.

 

Bayesian Update Martini

1) Start with 2 ounces of the last Bayesian update Martini. If this is your first Bayesian Update Martini, start with one ounce of gin and one ounce of Vermouth.

2) Ask the customer for their preferred gin:vermouth ratio.

3) Add 2 ounces of gin and vermouth, in the requested ratio.

4) Pour out 2 ounces into a vessel with ice, and shake our stir, then serve. Reserve the other 2 ounces for the next Bayesian Update Martini.

Words and Techniques

Leave a reply

How do you learn a behavior? How do you teach it?

Well, let's say you want someone to, when in potentially dangerous situations, scan their environment for threats. You could just tell them that. But what happens? If you tell them once, it's just thing someone told them. If you tell them many times, they'll get a little voice in their head that says, occasionally, "when you're in a potentially dangerous situation, scan your environment for likely threats." That's the behavior you've taught - to rehearse the admonition. At most, if "potentially dangerous" is really understood, they might remember your admonition when they're already scared, and look around one more time.

So the problem with general verbal admonitions is that they aren't very good at producing helpful behavior. What you really need to do is tell them, "before you cross the street, look both ways."

Why is that better? Because it prescribes a specific action, and a specific situational cue to execute the behavior. That's how people actually learn to do things. Concepts like "potentially dangerous" are too abstract to trigger a stereotyped response, though maybe "feeling scared" is specific enough. But even in that case, it's not actually the same thing - if I'm scared of the dark, should I look around my dark hallway at night for threats? No.

Here are some more examples:

Too general: My car is broken -> fix it

Better: A light on the dashboard turned on -> go to the mechanic

Too general: Eat healthier

Better: It it's not mealtime, I don't eat anything but fresh vegetables. At mealtime, I always start with a small amount protein-heavy and some vegetables, and then wait a few minutes to determine whether I'm still hungry.

Notice that the first example obviously doesn't cover all cases, and the second one has a very specific behavior that won't be appropriate for everyone. So you might want to think about how to teach more generalized good behaviors.

I can think of two ways to train more generalized behavior. You can teach a behavior-generating behavior or an explicit diagnostic tool.

What's a behavior-generating behavior? Well, you could teach someone how to use a map when they need to figure out how to get somewhere. Then every time they have the situational cue "I don't know how to get there," they can pull out their map and design a new route that they've never done before.

What's a diagnostic tool? You could learn to recognize feeling frustrated, and train the habit of asking what you can do in the future to fix the problem instead of trying to assign blame.

This has helped me understand a lot of the changes in the curriculum at CFAR since the 2011 Minicamp.

Rationality is often divided up into "epistemic" and "instrumental" rationality, where epistemic rationality is about having explicit verbal beliefs that are accurate, and instrumental rationality is about taking actions that accomplish your goals.

At Minicamp, we spent a lot of time on "epistemic rationality," but most of it didn't really rise above the level of verbal admonitions. I spent a while figuring out how to put these into Anki cards so I'd at least have the cached thoughts in my head. Here are a few of them (I've omitted the cloze-deletion):

  • When I notice defensiveness/pride/positive affect about a belief, I reward myself for noticing, and ask myself what new evidence would change my mind.
  • When I notice that I am considering changing my mind, I reward myself for noticing, and write it down.
  • Once I have decided whether to change my mind, I write down the outcome.
  • When I avoid thinking about what happens if I am wrong, I might be overconfident.
  • If I am not asking experts what they think, I might not be curious enough.
  • My beliefs should predict some outcomes and prohibit others.
  • When I think of or ask for an example, I reward myself.
  • When I can't think of any examples, I consider changing my mind.
  • When I keep finding different reasons to avoid thinking about or doing something, but do not feel a salient negative affect, I notice that I have a strong aversion.
  • When I notice an opportunity to make a prediction in advance, I make a prediction and reward myself for noticing.
  • When someone whose opinion I respect disagrees with me , I consider changing my mind.

I now have these cached thoughts, but I'm not sure they've affected my behavior much. There were also some things that were so general I didn't even know how to write an Anki card that I expected might work.

There was basically none of this at this past weekend's CFAR workshop. Instead, we had techniques that applied some of these principles, in specific well-described situation.

For example, a big part of epistemic rationality is the idea that beliefs should cash out to anticipated experiences, and you should test your beliefs. We didn't cover this at a high level anywhere, but we did talk about using the "inner simulator" to troubleshoot plans in advance. Basically, imagine that someone tells you your plan failed, after the fact. How surprised do you feel? That's just a special case of noticing your subjective anticipation beforehand, to give you the opportunity to reconcile it with your explicit belief.

"Inner simulator" also gives you an opportunity to make excuses in advance, by asking your imagined future self why the plan failed.

The sad thing about this technique is that my brain didn't connect it automatically with the admonition "test your beliefs!" The nice thing about this technique is:

I might actually use it.

In my "first impression" review of the CFAR workshop I spent a lot of time talking about the things that were missing. Well, aside from the fact that it was less than half the length of the Minicamp, the workshop had another good reason to drop that stuff: the actually existing epistemic rationality training just didn't work yet. The folks at CFAR did a lot of testing, and it turned out that people basically don't change their lives in response to high-level epistemic rationality admonitions. So they had to choose between two options:

1) Do what works

2) Fix the broken thing

This is a pretty common decision to have to make, and it's often not obvious which is the right one. The advantage to "Do what works" is it doesn't take much extra effort once you've identified where the problems are - you just stay away from them!

The upside to "Fix the broken thing" is that it is often the only way to get extraordinary results. Chances are, someone else has already tried "do what works," though that's not so likely that it's not worth testing. It's an uphill climb to fix something that doesn't work, you'll have to try a lot of things, most of them won't work, you'll be really frustrated and want to pull your hair out, and then you'll stumble on something so obvious in hindsight that you'll feel like an idiot. You'll have to give up a whole bunch of beautiful ideas that all seemed like just the insight you needed, because they didn't actually work.

So why put up with all that? It depends on what you think the world needs. If the world needs a bunch of people who are all just a little more effective, then by all means stick with the things that work.

But it the world has big important problems that must be solved, but can only be solved by going against the grain, by reaching into solution space for something far away from our local maximum - then only the hard way can save the world. Not just making people who have power over their own emotions, habits, and behaviors, which makes them more effective, but people whose explicit verbal reasoning is correct as well, so they can notice the alternative that's 10 or 1,000 times as good as the default action.

What Nietzsche Said to Me

1 Reply

Nietzsche famously wrote that he was writing to be understood only by his friends, which raises the obvious question of why so many people who don't like what they think he says claim to understand him. This weekend I listened to a few conversations that seemed to get him totally wrong. I resisted the urge to correct them at the time since it wasn't completely material to the conversation, so I'm dominating that urge into a blog post to get writing practice.

Note that Nietzsche didn't write this way, presumably for a good reason. You may superficially understand what I'm saying but fail to internalize it, unless you follow up by reading the original until you understand how this is the same thing as that.

According to Nietzsche, in the beginning, there were people and power relations.

Words are Powerful

Words are one of the main ways people interpret, keep track of, and interact with their world. Words like "one" and "two" and "tree" and "sheep are important tools of agriculture, trade, etc. But words like "good," "wicked," "proud," "sinful," "man," "woman," "justice," and "sexism" also affect people's behavior in profound ways. One simple example of this is that in standard English the default pronoun for one person it's always either male or female. This makes it much more natural to make statements about men or women rather than humans, and it cuts against the grain to make sex-neutral statements. For another consider the Christian sin - but Aristotelian virtue - of pride. For more on this, read 1984 by George Orwell.

But they're Made Up

The framework of ideas we use to understand our world is not an attribute of the things themselves. It is a behavior of our minds. It's made up! And someone made it up. Whoever made up the thoughts you use determined not which propositions you affirm or deny, but which ones are thinkable in the first place.

The ancients seem alien and incomprehensible because their basic ideas are so different from ours that only a truly deep thinker can understand them. The Greek "soul" is not necessarily separable from the body, or entirely rational in nature - Aristotle thought a soul was something a body did, even an animal's or plant's body - but the moderns think either that there are no souls ("Huh? Do the bodies just lie there motionless our something?" - Aristotle) or that only humans have them and they go to heaven or hell after we die.

Now Everyone is a Wizard

Modernity (the legacy of Hobbes, Machiavelli, Locke, Descartes, Hume, etc.) is not that it's the first time anyone said that the people should rule. That's old. These are the features of modern ideas:

Baconian science means that you can add to our stock of true attributes we know about nature without understanding your tools.

Algebra means you can perform lots of calculations without understanding math.

Liberalism means that lots of people are allowed to talk about different "moralities" and choose a god, ethos, and role in society as one might choose a shirt. We don't have a unified cultural elite controlling how we're allowed to talk about things. Instead, our elite believe in and endorse total freedom of speech. Which means that anyone can playing around with the lens through which humans are able to think about their world and decide right from wrong.

You can't get arrested for killing the gods, because after all, it's only words. Not that it makes the gods any less dead.

With no unified control over language, controversy over what to call things is a power struggle more akin to war than to politics, because the goal is not to enact a set of preferred practical policies, but to permanently destroy the enemy's ability to fight, by ripping out their tongues. At the same time, seeing that all values are questionable, people lose faith in words about rightness and wrongness, the just and the true and the good, so nothing holds them back from this return to the war of all against all.

The Nietzschean Hero

You can't fix this with arguments about what the good should be. Arguments are just another piece in the Game of Words. Which set of ideas you use determines which combinations of words you evaluate as true propositions. Aristotle is correct when he says that animals have souls, but Descartes is correct when he says they don't.

Is there a way out? Not an easy our a likely one. We're probably doomed to this forever. But if someone were to make up - and popularize, at least among the elite - a new set ideas, one with a new set of values appropriate for out times and circumstances, who would that person have to be?

They would need a sufficiently deep understanding to know that the words they have received are not the only words that can be, that to make a new thing you have to destroy, distort, or forget the post.

And they would have to be profoundly creative. Creative enough to be able to come up with a totally new set of ideas adequate to give modern people the power they need, while taking away the curse of infinitely malleable values.

That is the Nietzschean superman.